Styles of collecting

There are at least as many types of book collectors as there are kinds of books. Traditional approaches tended to fall within three genres: the author collection, the subject collection, and the cabinet collection.

In the first approach, the collector set out to gather the works of a chosen author. Such a collection could include all the forms in which the works have appeared before the public, or it might concentrate on only one phase of the author’s career, or even on one or two of the author’s works.

The subject collection could range from fields as sweeping as classics or American literature to books on chess, coffee, prizefighting, detective fiction, or the development of nuclear energy. Two collections formed by tobacco businessman George Arents and now in the New York Public Library illustrate the variety possible in subject collecting: one includes books on tobacco, the other books that were issued in daily, weekly, or monthly parts. Each has its special points of interest, each marshals facts of significance in the history of society and human endeavour, and the published catalogs of each represent additional use beyond the limitations each subject might suggest.

The third kind of collection was intentionally limited to a small group, or cabinet, of choice specimens—each the best obtainable of its type, although a particular author or subject might have formed the basis of this collection. Illuminated manuscripts, bookbindings, publishing styles, fine printing, book illustration, and many other topics have lent themselves to this approach. British collector Henry Yates Thompson established the goal of gathering exactly 100 illuminated manuscripts (now part of the British Library), each the best of its type that he could find and afford; further manuscripts were to be added only upon the elimination of other manuscripts that they surpassed. This is a stern ideal, and one which Thompson himself could not follow to the letter, but the principle of cabinet collecting remains attractive for those whose resources or space are limited.

Contemporary collecting takes place at all economic levels and can focus on physical form (illuminated manuscripts, miniature books, pop-up books, atlases, fine bindings, comic books, livres d’artistes [art books]), subject matter (chess, gardening, architecture), or genre (fiction, biography, children’s books). Much of the attraction of book collecting lies in the search and pursuit of rare copies. Yet rarity is not necessarily reflected in price. Many books are far more uncommon than Gutenberg Bibles or first folios of William Shakespeare, but, when they can be found at all, they may sell for a small fraction of the price of the famous rarities.

The books in a collector’s library will generally have been chosen for their fine condition, rarity, and desirability. Condition is an important consideration in all types of collecting: a very great difference in value separates a superlative copy of a book from a poor or even an average one. Nonetheless, condition is a relative, not an absolute, quality, and a collector of fragile 18th-century chapbooks may cheerfully accept condition flaws, such as soiled, missing or damaged leaves—unacceptable to the collector of modern first editions, where the goal is a copy that appears never to have been read. Rarity, or scarcity, must also be considered in the context of the material collected, and these qualities must be balanced against the degree of desirability. The balance differs from book to book, and from copy to copy of the same book. The Liber chronicarum (1493; popularly known as “The Nürnberg Chronicle”) by German scholar Hartmann Schedel is a fairly common book, yet it is very desirable. Victorian sermons in print are quite common also, but they generally excite little competition among collectors. An obscure 17th-century religious tract, while scarce or even unique, may be of no interest to anyone; contrast that with the extreme desirability of the 1594 quarto edition of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus or the Diamond Sutra, printed in China from woodblocks in c. ad 868—each known to survive in only a single copy. Worn copies without dust jackets of the first English edition of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1953) are fairly common, but they are of limited interest to the serious collector; however, a fine copy in dust jacket signed by the author is both scarce and desirable. Association is another important factor contributing to desirability. A book annotated or otherwise inscribed by its author, or containing the markings of some other prominent or interesting person who has owned and used it, will be particularly desirable to the collector. Entire collections have been built around these so-called association copies.

Many of the books that are objects of a collector’s efforts fall into the class of first editions or first printing. While the pursuit of first editions has at times been dismissed as a kind of foolish sentimentalism, there are good reasons why the earliest appearance of a book should be the most desirable. The first edition frequently is the only one overseen by the author, thus presenting the truest version of his or her work. In later editions the author’s intentions can be obscured by careless errors or misinterpretations. Furthermore, if later editions contain authorial revisions, the first is still necessary for identifying and analyzing changes.