The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Ob

Sack’s areas of interest appeared broad: modern literature and lesbian literature on the left-hand wall, which extended to the next wall and then gave way to Edward Gorey, World War I, natural history, cookbooks, the Pan Pacific Exposition, and how-to books for retailers. Admiring so many lovely and artfully arranged books, I was covetous. I would love to own a library like this—so what was stopping me? Many of the books Sack showed me were not expensive. I buy shoes that cost more. Way more. I suppose that more than anything, I am daunted by the enormity of the endeavor: how much research is necessary to understand what is valuable, along with how much scouting I’d need to do. And once you get into the very valuable books, which I realize not all collectors do, I would have trouble justifying the expense to myself, even though I deem such books worthy and respect others who make the investment. Still, even collectors with little money find ways to buy collectible books. The difference between me and them was that while I desire books, they are compelled to get them. Nothing stops them.

Not all Sack’s books were very valuable, monetarily, but all had special meaning to her. Intermingled among inscribed first editions were some that are simply appealing to her. She showed me several of her favorite how-to books, The Whole Art of Curing, Pickling and Smoking Meat and Fish both in the British and Foreign Modes, published in 1847, and Roadside Marketing: A Complete Advisor for the Everyday Use of Gardeners, Fruit Growers, Poultrymen, and Farmers, on the Marketing of their Products to the Consumer Direct, a Depression-era guide to roadside stands. They were snapshots of history that few people today have ever seen.

Before I left, Sack showed me examples of her favorite type of book, the association copy. Several of them were by lesbian authors, with author-to-lover inscriptions. She held a copy of No Letters to the Dead, by Gale Wilhelm, 1936. Inscribing the book to her girlfriend, Helen Hope Rudolph, Wilhelm had written: “Dear Helen—Someone once said this edition looked like a box of chocolates. So—with my love—a box of chocolates worth 6 shillings, Gale.”

Looking up, Sack said, “It’s like being a witness to an intimate moment in the author’s life.”

Being a woman and under forty set Sack apart from most book collectors, but I had come across others who didn’t fit the mold, either. When I first brought the Krautterbuch to John Windle Books in San Francisco, I noticed a young Hispanic man walking into the store. Windle addressed him by name; he was a regular. It occurred to me how unusual it is to see a person of color at a rare book fair or store. This has been an old-white-man’s game for a long time, but it appeared, at that moment, that perhaps things were changing.

Joseph Serrano, thirty-five, grew up in San Francisco with a mother who had read Latin American literature to him when he was a boy. He is a heavyset, amiable man with long-lashed brown eyes behind rectangular wire glasses, who described himself to me thus: “I’m different. I don’t have a higher education. I’m not a scholar or anything. I’m just an oddball about books.” At the time we met, on his nightstand were Sartre’s No Exit and Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (paperbacks, he assured me, never first editions for reading).

As a child, Serrano’s aunt, who had worked as a book-binder in El Salvador, gave him a set of leather-bound books, and he recognized how special they were. At sixteen, he worked as a delivery boy for a florist in posh Pacific Heights. “Almost every house I went into had a big wall of books,” he said. To own such a wall became a dream. At twenty-three, while working as a tow-truck driver, he bought his first valuable book, Franny and Zooey, by J. D. Salinger, for $100. “Catcher in the Rye is one of my favorites,” he said, “but I couldn’t afford it.” After that first find, he began scouring estate sales, Goodwill and Salvation Army stores. He didn’t like driving the tow truck, but the advantage of the job was that between pickups he could study dealers’ catalogs, memorize the information, and go on searching expeditions. “I’d walk into a thrift store and I’d know what was valuable,” he said. He wanted to make a living out of it, so at first he would spend $2 or $3 for a book and turn it around for $20, $100. He was also assembling his own collection, so he would buy books by obscure authors whose value he recognized, and later trade them for books in the categories he was collecting: Californian, Latin American, and twentieth-century literature. One of his favorite possessions is the first printed description of the Bear Flag Revolt, the 1846 American revolt against the authorities of the Mexican province of California, which later became the state of the same name. “It used to be,” said Serrano, “I was happy finding books worth a hundred dollars and paying only a couple bucks for them, but as I learned about books that have changed people, controversial books like Orwell’s 1984, important books—that’s what I really want to collect. It’s the hunt that keeps it alive. I go to these estate sales where people walk right by the books; they’re only interested in furniture or art. Once I sat on the floor and started pulling titles off the shelf: first- edition Hemingways, Faulkners. It was amazing.” Like adventurers who still trawl the sea for centuries-old shipwrecks’ loot, book hunters’ hope and determination is fed by stories like Serrano’s. He still visits thrift shops, but he also likes going to fairs and rare book shops, where he can test his knowledge against the dealers’. He has taken what he has learned as an amateur book appraiser and is now building his own rare book business online. He explains the draw like this: “You see something you can’t afford, but you buy it anyway,” he said. “My wife calls it an addiction, but finding those books is such a good feeling.”

Sometimes that good feeling is experienced also by those who help collectors with their searching. Several times, Sanders had mentioned a London man, David Hosein, who travels the world for business and, while doing so, stops by shops for books written by vagabonds and other outsiders. In an e-mail to me, Hosein described his collection:

My collection is focused on people (iconoclasts, cults and groups) and activities (legal and illegal) outside norms of society. For instance: prison, outlaw bikers, hobos, pimps, druggies, con men, environmental activism, training shoe (sneaker) collectors, pre hip hop culture and Japanese protest books. At the heart of the collection is a large number of works by prisoners.

I have been buying avidly both 20th century first-hand account nonfiction titles and photographic monographs in these areas for more than 10 years. I am only interested in books in fine condition. In this regard I am as nerdy as your regular Stephen King freaks.

Sanders is enamored of this collection’s originality—and so am I. In truth, such collections keep the business fresh for collectors and dealers like Sanders, who now keeps an eye out for books by hoboes, vagabonds, and the like, to put aside for him.

“Someone like Hosein,” said Sanders, “he’s ahead of the curve, pioneering a new collection, and people pay attention to it.”

According to Sanders, finding a buyer for a collection as original as Hosein’s requires as much ingenuity as building it, and it’s more likely that a visionary dealer or institution would purchase it than an individual collector. “After all,” Sanders said, “from a collecting point of view, the finding and the acquiring are what fuel the collector and the collection. Often, collectors burn out or let go of collections when they have been so narrowly defined as to preclude the acquisition of any new material. The collection reaches a level of stasis and the collector becomes burned out.” A collector like Hosein probably doesn’t spend a lot of time worrying about who will buy his books. Amassing a collection like this seems to be a personal quest. But when he decides to sell it, like any collection, the effort put into bringing the books together will pay off; its value will be greater than the sum of its parts.

Even when a book is not part of a collection, if it carries the cachet of being a “classic,” its value climbs. A friend gave me an article she came across in Worth magazine that said that literary classics have outpaced the stock and bond markets in the past twenty years. A graph boasted an almost cartoon- like upward-reaching line demonstrating what a good investment such a collection can be. Naively, I assumed that this was good news for dealers: if people learned that collecting rare books was a smart investment, business would increase. I wrote to Sanders about it, and he responded in character:

I actually don’t think that this is necessarily a good thing. Books should always be acquired for the sheer love and joy of it. Thinking of them as investment objects first turns them into mere widgets and commodities. It reduces their cultural heritage and diminishes not only the books, but their authors and readers as well. Let’s leave the pork belly future to Wall Street.

Without Wall Street many forms of books, incunables, high spots of modern literature, are already unobtainable by the average collector or even fairly well-to-do collectors. Think Great Gatsby at over a $100k. . . . Look what happened in the art market, where paintings that used to cost thousands are now hundreds of thousands, and paintings that used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars are now millions of dollars. . . .