Space, the Final Frontier for Book Collectors
Plus new arrivals from Downtown Brown Books
My last New Arrivals list for 2024 includes two dozen modern first editions, from Peter Pan to Cormoran Strike (J. K. Rowling’s private detective). This Dispatch is the first announcement that the list is live on my website, and such alerts are one of the benefits of subscribing. You might take a look.
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Space, the Final Frontier
Book collections, like nature, abhor a vacuum.
On a recent week-long trip visiting collectors and colleagues, I saw firsthand how their libraries had gradually spread from bookcases to closets, tables, and even that bit of empty space between the couch and the wall.
The collections I saw were all built by men (the class of people who still—unfortunately for those selling books to only half the population—predominate). They all had very understanding spouses.
One wife gestured to the books that had recently piled up in drifts in the dining room and joked that her husband’s book collection was in their pre-nuptial agreement. “I knew what I was getting into,” she told me.
At another house, I packed up enough books and created sufficient empty shelf space that the books that had overflowed into the living room could “finally” be moved back into the library.
It’s pretty much the same everywhere.
Just over a decade ago, I acquired the bulk of the library of the character actor and Hollywood dialect coach Robert Easton. I estimated that when he died he had somewhere between 90,000 and 100,000 books. The collection started in a room of the main house, then expanded to a two-story library addition and then to the double-car garage.
As with most collections, every new acquisition opened avenues for further purchases. The Los Angeles booksellers all know Easton because he constantly asked for books with phonetic dialog. These books are not well regarded, particularly those (supposedly) written in Black English, but in them Easton saw the raw materials needed to craft authentic accents for actors. Stereotypical dialog may be all we have left of the way, say, Czech immigrants in Chicago spoke at the turn of the 20th century. If Easton found one novel that employed dialect, he needed to check all the other books by that author. Every book led to ten more, which over a lifetime and many sub-collections became 100,000.
Easton’s wife successfully held back the tide of books while she was alive, but after her passing the books flooded back into the house and onto rows of shelves built like library stacks in the living room.
I never met Robert Easton, but I got a sense from being in his house that filling rooms with books was really an attempt to fill a hole in his heart. It made me sad and made me rethink my personal collection. When my wife and I moved to Portland from Eureka in 2018, I downsized from a small bedroom library to a single deep bookcase allowing for double shelving.
I jettisoned periodical appearances, secondary works, lots of miscellaneous titles, and stacks of duplicates. My collection is much smaller now, but every book is there for a very good reason. This process, I’ll admit, was easier for me that it would be for most collectors because I can feed the book-buying itch by acquiring stock for my shop.1
My recent trip got me thinking again about how people could collect and keep peace in the home while still placing an order with me now and again. Most collectors have an arrangement with their families about the confines of their collection, agreements that we all tend to break.
With New Year’s almost here, now may be the time to make a resolution to build a better airlock between your books and the rest of the house. Your spouse will definitely appreciate it.
Here are a few suggestions for how you might amend your collecting rules to save on space.2
Cultivate quality. Practice retraining your acquisitive instinct. so that the thrill of acquisition—that dopamine hit from finding something new— can be redirected toward better purchases. With some effort, one can learn to get more satisfaction from an exceptional copy than from several more ordinary books. This is true at every price point—all that changes is the definitions of exceptional and ordinary.
Curate. Hone your core interests and resist the temptation to buy related items, even if they seem like good deals.3 In most collections, it’s the adjacent titles and the duplicates—not the central collection—that typically create space problems. Consider letting go of books with abundant copies available online, keeping only your finest copy and the best signed edition of each work. True upgrading means replacement, not accumulation.
Think thin. Ephemera and letters take up very little space, and they are in general many times scarcer than books.
Distract yourself. Cataloging or rearranging your existing holdings is almost as good as buying new items, and it will slow your acquisitions, at least for a while.
Collecting for Investment Update
A few months ago, I wrote:
The market value of any collection comes down to a small number of key books, not from adding up hundreds or thousands of modest sales of more common or less-sought-after titles.
I then analyzed single-owner book auctions and showed that in most cases, just 5% to 10% of books produce half the value. One of the collections I looked at was William Strutz’s collection of modern first editions. In the first auction from his library, the top 17 of 226 items (or 7.5% of the lots) accounted for half of the $5.7 million gross sales. Two weeks ago, another group of Strutz’s books were sold for $1.3 million. When the two sales are combined, with a gross of almost $7 million from 617 lots, just 31, or 5% accounted for half the total.
The same principle holds true for most collections, even if you move the decimal a few places to the left. A handful of books will account for most of the value of your library.
If you undertake a project to thin your collection in 2025, you can do it confident in the knowledge that finding new homes for your lower value books will have almost no impact on the total financial worth of your collection.
That’s it for 2024. Thank you for reading my Dispatches this year, and for patronizing Downtown Brown Books. I really appreciate it.
Scott Brown
I can also shelve my reference books and books about books at the shop, rather than at home. This makes my personal collection seem deceptively small.
The fundamental difference between collecting and accumulating is that collections are bounded by rules: I collect this and not that. A collection is a work of creativity, the ability to imagine the Platonic ideal of the collection, and one of execution, the ability to find the books that fit the ideal plan. Collectors usually know immediately if something fits within their collection or not, even if they can’t immediately say why. It’s either part of the puzzle they are assembling or it’s not. These rules are entirely personal. They are influenced by what other collectors are doing (uncorrected proofs, for example, seem to be getting a second look from collectors these days), but they are ultimately unique to the collector, and they can be changed, which is what I am suggesting here.
Or, if it really is a good deal, sell it quickly.