To Catalog is Human

While perusing Paper Cuts, The New York Times Book Blog a few days ago, I came across a post by Rachel Donadio entitled "The Great Bruccoli."

Ms. Donadio recalled the recently-deceased Matthew J. Bruccoli as "a scholar of 20th-century American literature, rare book dealer and one of the most vivid characters in the literary marketplace." That certainly got my attention.

She continued, "I thought of him as a kind of Sydney Greenstreet character, someone who knew where to find precious literary gems -- and knew who might want to buy them." I'm hooked -- tell me more.

Here's the paragraph that really got my attention: "Although a life-long academic, Bruccoli had a collector's skepticism about what universities could actually teach you about literature, about the overt and covert conversations between writers, their echoes and influences. "Before the Web became the principal venue for bookselling, dealers sold their books through catalogs," Bruccoli said. "And I learned more through book dealers' catalogs than I learned at Yale, at U.V.A., than I learned in class. I got my education through reading book dealers' catalogs."

Even in the digital age, catalogs remain an invaluable tool for book collectors and dealers -- never underestimate the difference between information and knowledge. In the ever-expanding absence of second-hand bookstores, catalogs provide historical documentation, impeccable research and prices realized; I would be hard-pressed to last a week without access to my catalog collection. According to Det. Shakima Greggs from THE WIRE, "Police only as good as their CIs." Same thing for book collectors and dealers -- we're only as good as our catalogs.



I am very fortunate to have an extensive catalog collection issued by Ex-Libris, Arthur and Elaine Lustig Cohen's legendary bookstore. She was a graphic designer of no small renown, and he was a theologian, novelist, art and literary critic, who wrote extensively on Modern Art. The couple dealt in important and rare printed material and graphic documentation of International 20th-Century art, covering all the bases: Bauhaus, Futurism, Dada & Surrealism, Avant-Garde, Graphic Design, Architecture, Theater, Poster Design, Expressionism, Modern American and European Art Movements, and any other ISM that might tickle your fancy. Their catalogs remain exceptional research tools overflowing with important objects and information, include scholarly listings, descriptions, photographs and (1980s) prices of all kinds of early 20th-Century ephemera including posters, letterheads, magazines, reviews, brochures, books, stationery, correspondence, posters, advertisements and much more.

As a specialist in Design Books, I place great emphasis on faithful color reproduction and obsessive historical context for the books I sell. I knew from the outset that it would be problematic for me to issue catalogs of recent acquisitions. The costs of carefully-proofed 4-color presswork, postal charges and address database management were all challenges I chose to ignore by designing my website to function as a virtual catalog.

I truly regret I never had the opportunity to show Matthew J. Bruccoli my website. No doubt his critique would have been worth its weight in gold.

I Saw the Scroll

I started collecting books a long time ago. At the time, I thought it would be cool to collect the books (in the first editions) that had made the biggest impression on me up to that date -- the books that had forged my self-identity, for better or worse. Ten was a good number, so I spent some time whittling down my list to ten titles, the ten titles that would form my Book Collection: On the Road, One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, Sometimes a Great Notion, Naked Lunch, Slaughterhouse Five, Lolita, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Hell's Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Thankfully, I had absolutely no idea what I was getting into.


Just like real life, my Book Collection quickly became defined by compromise. I discovered that the true first editions of both Naked Lunch and Lolita were published in the Olympia Press Travelers Companion Series and were prohibitively expensive. My friend Richard Dorsett helped guide my collecting from his perch behind the counter of Olympia Books, where he convinced me there was no shame in pursuing the Grove Press Naked Lunch over the Olympia Press edition, and I eventually stumbled upon a later Olympia edition of Lolita, thus displacing the Putnam hardcover acting as my placeholder.

Stumble is the key word here -- I have always had a knack for finding bargains, and my nascent Book Collection was strongly assisted by luck, pluck and just plain weird happenstance. The story of how I acquired my first edition of On The Road is a perfect example of what Hunter S. Thompson called "the pull of the great magnet."



Like many American males, I cannot overstate the importance On the Road played in my life. I was very fortunate to read it at the absolute perfect point in my development: seventeen years old stuck in Abilene, Texas. Kerouac's sorrowful love letter to Neal Cassady and America helped me through my years in the twilight wilderness between adolescence and adulthood. Other books helped me appreciate the joys of earthly delights such as motorcycles and alternative belief systems, but Kerouac really infused me with Life itself, manifested by a burning desire to see the obscured mysteries hidden over the flat horizons of West Texas.

The years passed and my 10-volume Book collection grew from a shelf to a household, always acting as an imperfect, fun-house of mirrors reflecting distorted splinters and fragments of my life. Seasons and fashions have changed, and Burroughs gave way to the Bauhaus, Mailer to Moholy, Bukowski to Berlewi, etc., but Kerouac always abides. On the Road has remained one of the few constants in my life, one of the only things that has never been outgrown, outsourced, understated or undervalued. That's why I was thrilled and humbled to hear the Scroll was coming to Austin.

I never dreamed I would have the opportunity to view Kerouac's legendary 120-foot long first draft of his Road book. But that too came to pass this Spring, and it felt like I was in the presence of the Shroud of Turin. The first 45 feet of the scroll were unrolled and displayed in a lengthy glass case as the centerpiece on an exhibition on the Beat Generation. As I started reading the displayed manuscript, the great magnet hummed to life and I was overwhelmed by visions.

Savoring the real names long substituted for aliases in the published version, I read the passage concerning Neal's imminent arrival in Manhattan; the image in my mind was from Robert Frank's The Americans -- the rodeo cowboy displaced in Manhattan. As my eyes worked their way down the scroll, beatific grainy gravure images from Frank's series flooded my mind, forming a perfect minds-eye visual tableau to the text in front of me: fragments of bus depots, lunch counters, strip developments, empty spaces, cars, and unknowable faces. Very unexpected, but not the least bit unpleasant.



As I left the Ransom Center, I realized that Robert Frank's book had joined On The Road as an integral, intertwined part of my life (read: collection). In his introduction to the Grove Press American edition, Kerouac wrote that Frank "sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world." As my collecting interests moved from the literary to visual culture, I have found myself shambling after those tragic poets, endlessly debating whether a jukebox is sadder than a coffin. And whether a book club edition is better than no edition at all.