SOURCE: Sotheby’s
A major Sotheby’s auction reveals the enduring significance of collecting publications fit for an impressive library, writes Anne Wallentine
After collecting books for six decades, the businessman T. Kimball Brooker offers two explanations for the behavior in a recent essay: being a “hopeless…bibliomaniac bent on self-destruction,” or understanding that “in the world of books the rules of finance and maximizing returns do not apply because there are deeper forces and purer motives at work.”
Brooker inclines toward the latter explanation, as do the experts at Sotheby’s responsible for the second of three sales of his Bibliotheca Brookeriana: A Renaissance Library, which is held in New York on October 18. “This is a collecting field that’s really defined by curiosity,” says Ella Hall, Sotheby’s Books & Manuscripts specialist, “and a certain kind of historical mindedness.”
Brooker assembled the largest collection of works published by famed Renaissance Venetian printer Aldus Manutius to come to auction in a century. The “magnificent collection,” Hall says, “demonstrates the depth of [Brooker’s] focus…on capturing this publisher’s legacy.” Manutius revolutionized printing in the 15th and 16th centuries, producing many of the first, influential printed editions of Greek and Latin classics. He introduced smaller format books that could fit in a pocket, the first italic typeface, and other “stylistic innovations that helped to define and codify the modern book,” Hall explains.
While this kind of historic primacy makes books more covetable, there are a host of reasons to collect. Books “are interdisciplinary objects,” Hall says, which can have aesthetic, historic, literary, intellectual, religious, and personal significance. “A lot of collectors find that compelling, to have these various ways to think about the objects in their collection,” she says. The Brooker collection, for instance, includes numerous elaborate and distinctive bindings that add to each volume’s historic significance and beauty with intricate gilt and polychrome designs.
The aesthetic qualities of book collections also lend themselves to display in the form of home libraries. “Bookshelf wealth” was in fashion long before the phrase trended on TikTok; 18th- and 19th-century manor homes were not complete without a dedicated and grandly decorated library. While modern collectors often use specialized storage and archival boxes for significant books in their collections, being surrounded by shelves of books that reflect both personal tastes and literary history retains its evergreen appeal.
Most book collectors, Hall notes, are “curious, detail-oriented, [and] generous” with their collections and scholarship. But each collection is uniquely defined by the collector’s interests and tastes: “Collections are very much a reflection of the people who put them together,” she says. The field is “filled with a tremendous variety of objects, subjects, temperaments and manners of collecting.”
With its wide-ranging appeal, book collecting is “an incredibly dynamic market” that has “put forward some really tremendous results over the last few years,” Hall says. Last year, an early, nearly complete Hebrew Bible was sold at auction for $38.1 million and a first printing of the U.S. Constitution set a new sale record for books and documents when it was auctioned for $43.2 million in 2021. While these sales represent the peak of collecting, there are appealing volumes at all levels of the market and situated within myriad historic moments, such as Brooker’s collection. “I think more people are book collectors than they realize,” Hall muses. “They just need to find their way in.”
SOURCE: Sotheby’s