My Wife Finally Found Something Interesting About Collecting

A newsletter published to accompany new arrivals at Downtown Brown Books

Jul 15, 2024

But first, new arrivals from Downtown Brown Books

I just posted a new list of fifty-some items to my website, including maps of China, real estate auction maps of New York City, and the odd Ray Bradbury item. It’s a pretty eclectic list, if you care to check it out.

The Tree Collectors

In early 2001, when my wife’s first book came out, we both quit our stable jobs to pursue our side hustles full time, she as a writer and me as a bookseller. Six years later, we bought a bricks-and-mortar bookstore.

That was the year Amazon released the Kindle, which was so popular that the first model sold out within hours.

My brother-in-law sized up the prospects of a bookseller and a writer in an ebook world with the comment, “I guess you’ve gone all-in with paper.” I think he was a bit flabbergasted that we were doubling down on books when the whole business seems to be headed for obsolescence.

The bookstore we bought was in building that dated to 1879. In the early 20th century, exactly 100 years before we bought the store, it housed a newly opened horse-and-buggy supply business. We had a photograph of the interior of the shop from those days hanging on the bookstore wall, and I often thought about the owner’s profound miscalculation. Horses had been pulling carts for thousands of years. It must have seemed inconceivable at the time that Mr. Ford’s Model-T could really challenge that history. Yet within little more than a decade, the entire industry supplying and servicing workhorses vanished from our cities, and our predecessor in the building disappeared along with it.

Looking back, I have to agree with my brother-in-law that going all in with books was objectively foolhardy. It was a decision driven by passion and idealism, I suppose. Those are traits that motivate most book collectors and book dealers: a passion for the worlds we invent inside our heads when we read, and the idealism that books have changed the world and will continue to do so.

Against all odds, for Amy and me, putting all of our eggs in a paper carton, so to speak, turned out pretty well. I’m still in the old-book trade, where I’ve wanted to be since college, and Amy Stewart has fourteen books to her name, including one that that will officially be published tomorrow, July 16, 2024. You can get her new book on a Kindle, but it’s designed to be read on paper.

Her new book is about collecting. I’ve read a lot of books on the subject and while I am not an impartial observer, I don’t know of a better one. Amy’s book is not as philosophical as Walter Benjamin’s essay “Unpacking My Library” but it is more heartfelt. Amy skips over the acquisitive aspect of collecting that make so many books on the subject seem the same, “First I bought this and then I bought that,” is the typical plot. Dealer memoirs are the opposite: “First I sold this for a lot, and then I sold that for more”

The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession by Amy Stewart

Instead, Amy’s book explores the deeply personal connections people have with their collections. Her subject, right there in the title, The Tree Collectors, sounds improbable but there are a lot of universal truths in the book that I think will ring true for book collectors. As Amy wrote in her introduction, “When you ask people to tell you about the one activity they do not for money, not out of necessity, but to indulge their deepest passions and their wildest curiosities, well, you’re in for an intimate conversation.”

[You can order a signed copy from Broadway Books in Portland. Orders placed by July 16 will be for first editions, signed before Amy leaves on her booktour.]

I pulled a few strings and convinced Amy to squeeze a short interview into her schedule.

SCOTT: You’ve been living with an antiquarian bookseller for thirty-odd years. Did that have anything to do with your decision to write a book called The Tree Collectors?

AMY: Oh, completely! I’m not at all a collector of books or anything else. I think people either have a personality for collecting or they don’t, and I just don’t. I do have one very small book collection that I’m proud of, and that’s a collection of the gardening and homesteading books Annie Proulx wrote before she became Annie Proulx. But even there, I don’t have pristine first editions. I spent tens of dollars buying ex-library copies and whatever I could find, and once I’d gathered them all up and had a look at them, I was satisfied. [Amy wrote an essay about her Annie Proulx collection.]

But of course I’m interested in collectors, because I’m married to one, and we have a lot of conversations about collectors and collecting in this house. So when I met a guy, Len Eiserer, at one of my book tour events who told me he was a tree collector, I was immediately intrigued. Trees are a weird thing to collect! They’re very large, and hard to move. And I know enough about collectors to know that you have to have some basis for your collection. Nobody just collects books, generally. You have to apply some level of discernment to it. Also, a book collection is different from a personal library.

So when he told me he was a tree collector, I already had some questions to ask. What makes this a tree collection and not just a lavishly landscaped estate? He had an answer: he plants his trees in rows, like books on a shelf. And his goal is to plant as many different species of trees as he can find that will grow in Pennsylvania where he lives. I’ve since learned that some tree collectors are much more discerning and focused about what they collect, but I understood his approach. One of everything, as many different trees as he can find, until he runs out of space, which he has.

Len was a good first tree collector for me to meet, because he also “collects” in another way that will be familiar to book collectors: he catalogs trees. He created a website called Tree Treasures of Lancaster County where he catalogs individual trees in his county that are noteworthy for some reason. Anyone can nominate a tree. You could think of it as a kind of tree bibliography—and ultimately, I found many more tree bibliographers. This is a way to “collect” trees even when you don’t have a lot of land.

So I came home and told you about this, and you were of course fascinated. A few years later, we were in Graham Arader’s shop in New York and he mentioned, out of the blue, that he’s a tree collector. Although he ultimately decided he didn’t want to be in the book, he did talk to me at length about his family’s history with trees and horticulture, and about the various tree collections he’s established. If you know him only as a dealer of prints and maps, you might be surprised to learn that he’s deeply interested in trees and botany.

So now we knew two tree collectors. The third came along when W. S. Merwin died, and we read in his obituary that he’d spent the last thirty years planting palms on his land in Hawaii. When I talked to the staff at the Merwin Conservancy, they said that he wouldn’t have considered himself a collector, because he saw trees as timeless, as belonging to the earth and not to us, and he wasn’t interested in the idea of ownership. But, because I’m married to a book collector, I spotted the signs of a collector regardless. He left behind a vast archive of correspondence with rare tree dealers from around the world. He saved every plant tag from every tree he planted—and he basically planted a tree a day for thirty years. Sorry, Mr. Merwin, but that’s how a collector behaves.

When I was casting about for a book idea a few years ago, looking to do something different, I was sort of thumbing through all the book ideas I’d considered and rejected over the years. You said, “What about tree collectors?” I’d kind of forgotten about that one. It hadn’t even made to the stage of being an “official” book idea. I never started a file or talked about it with my agent. But that’s what brought it to the top of the list. So yeah, you get a lot of credit for this book!

SCOTT: That’s sweet of you to give me credit for saying four words (“What about tree collectors?”). Like you, I was disappointed that Graham Arader dropped out. Who knew he had a family history in horticulture? I guess he traded one kind of leaves for another. [Groan.]

As a bookseller, I’m always interested in the commercial side of collecting and since we’re on the subject of dealers, what did you find out about the buying and selling of trees? They are a lot harder to ship than books!

AMY: The world of tree dealers is actually kind of similar to book dealers. I think it breaks down like this:

People might start by buying commonplace, everyday trees from garden centers. These are the general bookstores of the tree world.

Once you start to narrow down your interests, you might go to a specialized tree nursery or engage in a little mail order commerce—sounds familiar, right?

Then there are more specialized, high-end tree dealers who might have a very limited supply of very rare trees that are only going to their best customers. Some high-end dealers will sell you a very large, mature specimen that you’ll pay a lot of money for, and need special equipment to transport and plant. Some dealers even broker these transactions—like they find out that some wealthy person in the Hamptons is putting in a pool house and has a very impressive tree that will have to be taken out, so the dealer goes and finds a customer for that tree and arranges for it to be dug up and moved—for a price.

And there are tree dealers who handle estates. Imagine if you have a massive collection of rare tropical trees, or bonsai, or whatever. You’re getting older, you know the next owners of your house won’t want the trees. But you can’t stand to think of them getting cut down. What do you do? You make sure that a specialized tree dealer is in the mix to pass your trees along to another generation.

Some trees are just not interesting to the general public, maybe because they don't look great or they take twenty or thirty years to bloom. So those aren’t grown for widespread distribution. But a tree dealer might have a few in stock—kind of like the limited editions of the tree world.

Also, sometimes an incredibly rare specimen is discovered in the wild. With any luck, the botanists at someplace like Kew are called in to help identify and safeguard the tree. One thing they might do to raise funds to protect the tree—and also to create backup copies of the tree in case it doesn’t live—is to collect seeds or cuttings, grow them out, and sell them on a very limited basis to collectors at a fairly high price. (This is called ex-situ conservation—growing the tree outside of its habitat to preserve the genes.)

One barrier to selling trees is that trees are difficult to get across borders, because of agricultural restrictions. There are also laws in place to prevent poaching or profiteering off the horticultural resources of another country. But although it’s frowned upon, people do smuggle plants and seeds, and of course they trade informally with one another.

And in fact, there are tree societies all over the world where like-minded collectors get together to swap plants, go on trips together, do fundraising to help pay for preservation or cataloging efforts, and so on. The International Camellia Society, for instance, maintains a registry of every known camellia cultivar going back to the 1600s. They’ve documented over 52,000 cultivars.

Amy Stewart, the author of The Tree Collectors

SCOTT: Some of your previous books have been illustrated—I’m particularly thinking of the wonderful copperplate engravings that Briony Morrow-Cribbs did for Wicked Plants and Wicked Bugs. You are also an artist, and there’s hardly been a day in the last 20 years when you didn’t draw or paint. The Tree Collectors is illustrated on almost every page with paintings you did for the book. For years, your agent and your publishers asked to do an illustrated book, and you always said no. You said you didn’t want art, a thing you did for fun, to become a job. What changed with The Tree Collectors?

AMY: Yeah, I still don’t want it to become a job! That’s an easy way to kill the things you enjoy, in my opinion. But one reason I always resisted the suggestion before was that I really only knew how to paint in oil, and oil paintings don’t make great book illustrations. Recently I’ve been painting more in watercolor and gouache, which are classic illustration mediums. I also thought that if I illustrated Tree Collectors with portraits of the collectors and their trees, it would sort of give the book a sense of lightness, a little breathing room. I also thought it would make the book feel more personal and intimate. And I did enjoy it—it never became a chore. I might do it again. But I’m still wary of the whole idea. I don't want to burn out.

Dispatches from the Rare Book Trade

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