Collecting Books: The Endgame

Transcription

1 Collecting Books: The Endgame A talk by Roger Baskes Society of Collectors December 6, 2016

2 M ario Max Witt (right) died in England in 1994, at age 68. His widow was Fiammetta Olschki Witt. Both were scions of important European intellectual families. Mario s father was Rudolf Wittkower, a renowned historian of Italian Renaissance and Baroque art, who fled to London from Nazi Germany in 1933, taught at the Warburg Institute and University College, and then in 1956 in the US at Columbia University, where he was for 14 years Chairman of the Department of Art History. Fiammetta s grandfather was a printer and antiquarian bookseller and the founder in Italy in 1886 of the publisher Leo S. Olschki Editore. That press is today among the oldest Italian publishers of critical work in the humanities, still run by Olschki descendants into the fifth generation. The late Mario Max Witt Fiammetta had written a history of the Olschki firm, and after Mario s death, donated it to the Stanford University Library s Department of Special Collections with other papers she and Mario had possessed on the Olschki and Wittkower families. Mario had been a collector of books on Maritime History, and Fiammetta sold his collection, about 500 books, by auction in October, She wrote this preface to the catalogue: The collection described and offered with this catalogue was the pride and delight of my late husband, Mario Witt: not because of the blue chips it contains but for the number of unknown, rare, invaluable works of no vast commercial value, yet of scholarly importance, which he accumulated during his lifetime. To see it dispersed grieves me for two reasons: his cruel illness forbade him to progress further than the letter A of the catalogue raisonee he was planning and, while seven million pounds were found not so long ago to acquire Canova's polished, simpering Three Graces, the comparatively modest sum needed to keep this unique collection intact could not be found, East or West. We all know that books are the poor relations of the figurative arts, the - 1 -

3 reason being that in order to appreciate and enjoy them one must be able to read-at least the titles! Friends, colleagues, countrymen will object that I should have kept the books myself. Where? In a three-room London flat? Now all I can hope for is that once auctioned, these books will give as much pleasure to their new owners as they did to Mario. I not only identified with their collecting criteria, but was taken by the name Fiammetta, literally little flame, and which one contemporary site translates as little hottie. The Olschkis certainly knew that the most famous Fiammettas were courtesans. Fiammetta was the pseudonym of Boccaccio s lover and muse in the Decameron and Cesare Borgia s paramour called herself Fiammetta, but in 1921 it was a formidable name for a newborn girl. I could find only one picture of Fiammetta Witt online, at a cocktail party in Florence in the 1970s: she is in profile, pudgy, about 5 feet tall, and wearing a mink coat. I decided not to show it. It didn t fit my image of her; how many of us would want to be remembered solely by an unflattering photo? Instead I ll show one of the title pages from their catalogue, with a beautiful woodcut (right). I ve spoken twice before in this room about my own bookcollecting. I wish this evening to speak about what one can end up doing with the books. Many writers about collecting, and presumably most dealers and all auctioneers, have urged the merits of giving another round of collectors the opportunities to have such pleasures, as Fiammetta said she hoped would occur. Some significant percentage of collectors, perhaps Lot 3 of catalogue for the sale of Mario Witt s collection

4 like the Witts, simply can t afford not to sell their collections. But often the decision is not made until after a collector s death, and the heirs have no knowledge about or interest in the collection, in keeping it together, or giving it to a research library, especially compared to selling it. Collections like the Scheide Library at Princeton, of great importance and maintained and enhanced by three generations, must be very rare. At least Fiammetta was a book-person and knew Mario s collection. I will return to this subject of a dead collector. As most of you know, I have been giving my book collection to the Newberry Library (left). I wanted one of these pictures, among these first I have ever taken with a cellphone, to be of the The Newberry Library Newberry. Almost every week, I remember Charlie Haffner with affection for causing this beautiful building to be turned from soot black to pink beige. When I began to collect books, in mid-1984, I of course had no plan to dispose of them. I didn t in fact have much of a plan at all, and didn t yet think of myself as a collector. I had always been interested in history and political geography. I became very interested in the subject matter of atlases and books with maps, and collecting the physical books soon became very much more fun for me than practicing law had become. I certainly became obsessed: I bought 35 atlases by the end of 1985, more than 100 in each of the next two years, more than 200 in each of 1990 and 1991, 365 in 1992, and more than 500 in 1993 and each year thereafter. (I realize that sounds like the number progression of Leporello s catalog of Don Giovanni s conquests, but it really has no relationship.) Julie and I went to London during the bookweek of book fairs and auctions in June of 1989 and 18 subsequent Junes, through I missed very few book fairs in New York, Boston, or California. Many of my dealer friends were primarily map-sellers, but most of them also dealt in atlases and many came to book fairs

5 The Baskeses' home library - 4 -

6 Julie and I always had a library at home (previous page), and since about 1989, I have been allocated about half its shelf-space for my collection. But this was a spatial challenge for elephant-folio atlases (below) and also for some very little books (top left image, lower shelves). In all events, I could never accommodate at home more than 900 books from what was becoming a collection of ten times that number. In 1992, I rented the office I now have on Michigan Avenue, and built bookshelves all over it, including (left) library stacks like the Newberry s, although of course many fewer. The books in this picture are mostly cartographic reference books. Cartographic reference books in the Baskes Office stacks. I realized soon after the beginning of my collecting that I needed reference materials, but was becoming such an obsessed collector that I began collecting reference books

7 Examples (right) are both the British and American editions of Ken Nebenzahl s 1990 Atlas of Columbus, identical except for the cover and the title page. I still have 90 percent of these reference books in my possession largely because they were duplicates of books the Newberry already has in its very comprehensive cartographical reference library. At a very early stage, my collecting was fundamentally affected by the Newberry Library. In 1986, I took a course at the Newberry in the History of Cartography, taught by David Buisseret. I looked at many of the Newberry s atlases. I went to lunch with Bob Karrow and Jim Akerman to discuss collecting atlases, and read Jim s doctoral dissertation on atlases. In the early 1990s, I went through the entire Newberry catalogue (below), then mostly on millions of cards, and made a list of its atlases and books which were said to have, or were likely to An aisle of the Newberry's card catalog, which remains available, but has been replaced by the library s online catalog

8 have, maps. I had kept a list of my own map books on a Lotus spreadsheet and added the Newberry s to it. I printed this and for years carried a heavy three-ring binder of this combined list to book fairs and book dealers. About 1992, I decided that I would try to collect only books of which at least that edition was not in the Newberry. Essentially I was also deciding that at least at some point I would probably give my collection to the Newberry Library. This joint list took on a life of its own. I took pride in our atlases instead of only mine. Travel guides in the Baskes Collection That atlas list today consists of 16,000 books, of which 10,000 are books I purchased. But the Newberry does have atlases not on this list, more than 1,300 in the Rand McNally collection alone, and hundreds of other books with five or more maps, the criterion for making my atlas list. I have other short-title lists of books I ve collected: a list of about 6,000 travel guides (above), almost all of which have maps, and a separate list of 1,200 Baedeker Guidebooks. Most of these travel guides have detailed street maps of 19 th and early 20 th century towns, often available nowhere else, and as many as 100 pages of advertising

9 Roger Baskes' personal collection of Baedekers Guidebooks I have now given most of my guidebooks to the Newberry, but not yet (above) the Baedekers. Guidebooks are not only a wonderful reference for maps and topography, but also for social history and genealogy. I have one other list of my collection, 6,000 books which have in common mostly that they don t have five or more maps. In 1998, I first bought a few books on ebay, and in 1999, quite a few. Since then I have bought more than 7,500, about one-third of my collection, at an average cost of about $60 per book. This would have been less possible if my collection was one of high-spots or treasures, in which the physical condition of the books was a more significant part of their value. To be fair, the six or eight high-definition pictures of a book displayed in an average ebay auction are usually better information about condition than a printed auction catalogue, and in any event neither I nor the Newberry acquire books to resell. My mission in acquiring books is essentially the same today as the Newberry s, to add to the Library s already extraordinary collection available for research in the humanities. Today a majority of ebay booksellers are at least part-time dealers, and include - 8 -

10 many rare-book dealers. In earlier years, I bought a lot of books on ebay from young people, often in Britain and Germany, who had simply found them in their grandparents attics, knew how to sell them, but didn t know how to describe them. The advent of cellphone cameras has changed that: at least now they can hope that the buyers will find value in pictures they post even when they themselves know little about the books. In 2001, I asked the Newberry to enter into a written contract, for me to give them my collection and for them to accept it as a Special Collection. It was already large enough for me to insist that it be catalogued separately and physically kept on separate shelves, which allows me the frequent pleasure of (above) visiting my collection in the stacks. Today any donor of even a very small number of books or manuscripts to the Newberry can at least visit from home a separate virtual catalogue of them by searching under his or her own name as the donor. On a number of occasions, including the wonderful current Creating Shakepeare, the Newberry has included Baskes Collection books or maps in exhibits, and regularly on their now terrific website. A few years ago, I began to find very few atlases that neither the Newberry nor I already own, at least at a price I was willing to pay. I still can find great travel guides: they were published in large quantities and many revised editions. Over this past three-day Labor Day weekend I uncontrollably bought 250 travel guides online, on Abe Books, from 80 different dealers, mostly European

11 And, as David mentioned earlier, I also have been buying rare books (top right) for the Newberry, usually without maps. Apart from the wonderful friends I have made here, that for which I have been most grateful to the Newberry is a semblance of a liberal education I never had as a university student. I ve learned here for the first time something about the counter-reformation and the Enlightenment at least from reading about books about them. As Fiammetta wrote, one has to at least be able to read the title-page. I have bought a lot of rare books for the Newberry, if that is defined as old books for which there are few extant copies known. But I have found that the universe of rare books is very large, and many extremely rare books can be bought, at least on ebay, for hardly any money, often less than $100 each. The Newberry s extraordinary Wing Collection on the History of Printing can be made very happy by finding them a book they don t have from a tiny edition printed in a tiny French or German town in the 16 th or 17 th century, when many such tiny towns had printing presses. In these last few months I have bought over 100 different 16th-18 th century titles (above) put on ebay by Better World Books on behalf of the library of a Catholic seminary in Philadelphia; my average cost of these was $89. (One of the benefits of using an Excel spreadsheet as a database, is one can get continuous statistical information)

12 These are both humanist and religious books (right) and seem to be a great fit with the Newberry s other wonderful seminary library collections. Jessica Grzegorski and Megan Kelly recently confirmed my own research that quite a few of these books are the only known examples in the United States in OCLC WorldCat libraries. Essentially, another end-game of my collection of books with maps has been collecting other kinds of books. A significant benefit to be had from giving a collection to the Newberry, is the quality of its cataloguing. Mario Witt didn t survive to create his own catalogue raisonée, but many thousands of the books I have given the Newberry now have full pages of metadata online. Each map in a large number of the atlases in the Baskes Collection is separately listed and separately searchable. I almost always learn much more about my books than I had known. By searching on my own name as a donor, I can find thousands of pages of detailed descriptions of my books in the Newberry s online catalogue, often with extensive bibliographical references. These records, each with a reference to the Roger Baskes Collection, then become easily accessible all over the world by being part of OCLC WorldCat. With respect to many of my atlases, the Newberry has separately catalogued and described each map. It seems pretty clear that Mario s maritime books would have been welcome in many research libraries. I looked at random in their Bloomsbury catalogue at six of them and none of those editions is in the great library of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, probably less than ten miles from Fiammetta s three-room flat. Incidentally, if 100 percent of the Witts 500 books sold, at hammer prices midway between the catalogue estimates, she would have netted a total of about 50,000 after premium. In 1991, an atlas collector s widow, less sophisticated than Fiammetta, sold her husband s wonderful collection at Sotheby s in New York. The house placed in each lot of the auction as many as eight important, but unrelated 18 Century English

13 and 19th Century American atlases. We collectors could not be expected to bid seriously on these lots when we already had several of the books in each of them. Dealers who might buy them for stock could only pay a fraction of their individual value. Jointly with my friend David Rumsey, who has Oversize atlases in the Baskes Collection in the stacks of the Newberry Library since then enormously benefitted the research world by high-definition digitizing of thousands of his own old maps, we bought 55 atlases in fewer than ten lots, agreeing in advance who would own what. That sale would certainly have been more successful had the collector been alive to manage it. It strongly speaks for planning the endgame while alert and alive. David Rumsey himself has recently donated his physical collection to the Stanford Library, where it will presumably be catalogued and carefully protected, along with Fiammetta s family papers. At the Newberry last month, in the International Map Collectors Society international Seminar held together with the Nebenzahl Lectures, Julie Sweetkind- Singer, who used to work for David Rumsey and has moved to Stanford along with his collection, invited map collectors to consider lending their collections to Stanford with a view to their being digitized and physically returned to them. This is of course an expensive process which collectors should expect to subsidize, but it is, at least for map collectors, and perhaps also manuscript collectors, a form of provisional end-game, and invaluable to researchers and publishers. The central attractions of donating a collection to a library like the Newberry are of course keeping the collection intact and in safe condition and making it as accessible as possible for researchers from all over the world. My largest shelves have not been ideal for the bindings of many oversize folio atlases, whereas the Newberry is laying them flat (above). To date I have given the Newberry over 16,000 books, and I now have many empty shelves (next page)

14 In the rare instances where my own books have been totally out of the Newberry s collecting scope or true duplicates of books in the Newberry and not in better condition than the Newberry s, I have arranged to donate them to other research libraries. I have given the University of Chicago over 250 of these and they have created a Special Collection for me and even designed a bookplate for the collection, based on the Newberry s. I have given about 65 books which were duplicated both in the Newberry and the U of C to the University of Illinois in Urbana. But these are among the largest research libraries in the world, and so I do have some books which are already in all three of them. Since Dean Sarah Pritchard was kind enough to come tonight, I will resolve also to search the Northwestern Library s catalogue. On several occasions, I have also given books to the Library of Congress and the British Library; in the latter case they were books which especially belonged there. American collectors have many advantages not available in other countries, especially tax advantages, when they donate their collections to a research library. The greater tax advantage has been to a collector who does this in his or her

15 lifetime. Under present law, the donor of a gift of books, maps or papers to the Newberry is eligible to deduct 100 percent of their fair market value against the donor s income for Federal income tax purposes, up to a maximum of 30 percent of adjusted gross income in each year. To the extent that the value of the gift exceeds the 30 percent ceiling, the excess is carried over as a potential deduction to as many as five subsequent years. The donor must have the gift appraised by a reputable appraiser, and the appraisal included with the tax return. Charitable contributions do not reduce Illinois income taxes. A collector with a substantial net worth who donates books during lifetime to a taxexempt library receives in effect a double deduction by its exclusion also from his or her estate for Federal estate tax purposes. That exclusion would also be the case if the collector leaves the collection to a library upon death, but without having had any income tax benefits. There is no limit on the amount of the estate tax charitable deduction. For me, there has been a wonderful advantage of donating books to the Newberry during my lifetime, far exceeding tax advantages. I have been able to do this a few books, or even a few boxes of books, at a time. It has enabled and encouraged me to individually reexamine and reconsider these books, or even category of books, when often I had not done so for a generation. It has had many of the pleasures of collecting them all over again. Three papers were presented in 2001 to a Library of Congress Rare Book Forum entitled Collectors & Special Collections, which the LC published the following year (right). One was by the dealer, Bill Reese, and another by a collector, our fellow trustee Bob Jackson. Much the most substantial was by the then Director of the Special Collections Research Center at the University of Chicago, Alice Schreyer, now the Newberry s Vice President for Collections and Library

16 Services. Alice argues convincingly that collectors and special collections libraries are natural and necessary allies that a library like the Newberry has all of the curatorial, bibliographical, and collection resources to inform and encourage a serious collector of rare books or manuscripts which are within the library s scope of collecting. I believe that the Newberry itself has a special responsibility to reach out actively to support such collections, and that reciprocally such collectors will want to support the Newberry, both with resources which advance the study, care of, and access to the Newberry s materials which are comparable to their own collections and the general health of the Newberry and its mission. If a collector then decides at some point to give the Newberry some or all of his or her collection, both parties to the engagement will be better informed and better equipped to consummate the marriage. In many ways, an independent research library, like the Newberry, is institutionally even better equipped to honor and support a typical book or manuscript collection of materials within the library s scope than a university special collections library, the primary mission of which, properly, must necessarily comport with the entire university s mission. The Newberry Library has provided me with the intellectual and bibliographical support for my collecting which has made it in every way more rewarding to me and important for its own sake. The Newberry has also provided me with the pleasure of the friendship of most of you here tonight, and I am very grateful for that. I would be very pleased to hear any comments or questions any of you have about what I have said