Questions about collecting

In a couple of weeks I’ll be giving a talk at the Library of Congress on book collecting. The audience will consist largely of young college students who are being honored for their own collections. I’ve just started to think about what I might say, but it struck me that I should use the fabled Power of the Internet to help me prepare. In particular, I figure most of the posters here are, in some sense, collectors and can probably offer me some useful ideas. May I—in that most grotesque of phrases—pick your brains?

Do you think of your books as a collection? What makes a collection, as opposed to an accumulation or a gentleman’s (or lady’s) library? Does a serious collection need a theme, no matter how silly seeming (e.g., all books authored by people named Smith)? If you do have a collecting focus, how do you find the material you want? Do you use a bibliography or maintain a want list, or do you simply wait until you run across something that fits your particular criterion? How do you prevent yourself from straying too far from your main area? That is, if you collect books about goats, would you buy a scientific study of pasture land or a copy of “Heidi”? How do you draw the line? Do you ever cull your collection or collections? Using what guidelines?

To continue: If you want to collect Scott Fitzgerald, and can’t afford a first in jacket of “The Great Gatsby,” should you find a different author? Or is there a way around this? How did you zero in on whatever it is you do collect? If you were going after John Updike material, would you buy the issues of the New Yorker in which he first published his stories? Again, where is the line? Pynchon collectors have been known to acquire the books he’s blurbed. Have you ever done that for a favorite author? I have a friend who owns hundreds of editions of the same novel (“The Hound of the Baskervilles”). The great textual scholar G. Thomas Tanselle once tried to gather all the hardcover printings of, I think, Sinclair Lewis’s “Babbitt.” He said it was easy to find the first printing, but try locating the 13th or 17th.

What is the pleasure of collecting for you? Why not just use the library? What advice would you give a new collector?

Well, I’d better stop. This is obviously an area with many dimensions. Please share some of your own thoughts, convictions and anecdotes about collecting. Many thanks for the help.

— Michael Dirda