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I come from a family where in my childhood, books were regarded as almost sacred! My Mother and her four sisters, and her mother my grandmother and HER sister, were all readaholics. Their choice of books and reading took place in the period, the very long period of about 1854 for the oldest family member to about 1930 when I was able to read and understand books.

The titles that were dear to them were Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, and the personal writings of Jefferson, Washington, Lincoln. They later read Willa Cather, early Earnest Hemingway,James Joyce, Thomas Hardy and many,many other early writers.

Growing up in that atmosphere, and having a cousin who was a famous contemporary writer ( James Branch Cabell) I read all of these people even too early sometimes to understand what they were saying.

About 1958, I worked for a motion picture company in New York city, and had occasion to walk about the city. Near me was a thin building, about 12 feet wide, and perhaps seven stories high. For a long long time, it had belonged and all of its contents belonged to a branch of the Rothschild family, and the entire building was filled with rare books.

REALLY rare books! They even at that date had a worn copy of the Gutenberg Bible, the rarest printed book of all time! They also had many manuscript books, that is those made by hand in gold and crimson and on fine parchment or so old as to be on thin scraped stomachs of goats. They had copies of first editions of nearly every searched for author in the world.

They let me browse and look, and I made my first purchase which was a diary of William Byrd of Virginia of the seventeen hundreds and which cost me(gulp!) $1500!
(Today it would reach the hundreds of thousands).

What is a rare book?

It is a book of some kind of merit, numerically rare, hopefully a first edition, and very hard to find.

The "kinds of merit" may very from sublime to ridiculous. As a matter of fact, there are m any monied collectors of pornographic books, for which I would not give a cent.

After retiring from most of my professional writing, and then having thirty-five years of searching for, finding, and collecting rare books, REALLY rare books, I went into the 'business" of finding, buying, and selling my idea of rare books, which was anything exotic.

I knew that my own collection of perhaps 300 rare books would serve for a starting nut, but I also knew getting a reputation as someone who knew what he was doing, and a belief in ones honesty would

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