Rare Book Monthly
Articles - September - 2009 Issue
The Case for Collecting
Seibert copy of Bevier's The Indians
As to when and how a collecting impulse takes hold I suspect it is early and random. The collection may not be seriously pursued for decades but I believe its possibility is often established in youth. These days most people learn about themselves and life online. They spend hours rummaging sites and are exposed to millions of possibilities. Some subjects may become pursuits although they do not know it for years.
What's different today is the number of possibilities. When I was a kid my school held a hobby fair and anyone, kids or parents, could bring their postcards, period clothes, bottle tops, baseball cards or whatever for everyone to admire and ask about. No one collected history and I remember thinking it was an odd omission. That led my mother to contact Mr. Heidgerd who spent a few hours with a kid to introduce him to book collecting. Today, were I starting again, there would be a million possibilities. Books would be one of them. How I would then move from interest to information to commitment is unclear. Five decades ago there were hundreds of possibilities, today so many more. Because there is no one right answer there must be many right answers.
Recently, in researching a story on the Gleeson Library at the University of San Francisco I ran across some gruesome statistics. Their rare book room is hardly visited. When I checked with other institutions the story was the same. The traffic that did come by was mostly researchers who are going to be equally, perhaps better served with the emerging online full text access. Then these collections will have almost no traffic.
Perhaps the answer to the question "where is the new collector" simply lies in this statement: Collectors are not born. They are nurtured and encouraged. They become collectors through exposure.
If so, then the community that is concerned that new collectors enter the field must be willing to invest their energy in introducing the next generation to the field. This is far more complex than staging a booth at a trade show and hoping new prospects come by. Such shows hope that someone else has made the crucial contribution Bill Heidgerd did for me so they can cash in on it today. That's wishful thinking.
Across the United States and around the world the field probably needs ombudsman who, in the venues available, seek to unlock the mysteries of books, manuscripts and ephemera to audiences young and old. It's a marvelous subject and skilled speakers can do this. I know. Bill Heidgerd did it for me.
