Food for collecting thought

From John Pearson's *The Life of Ian Fleming* (NY, 1966), pp.71-72:

"[Fleming's collecting] began with his friend Percy Muir, whom Fleming had
met in the Kitzbuehel days. Muir was then a partner in Dulau's bookshop in
Bond Street and Fleming, on vacation from the Tennerhof, had walked in to
buy a book of D.H. Lawrence's poems. They discussed first editions
generally and their friendship began. They went on vacation together; and
when Fleming was in Geneva he asked Muir to send him regular parcels of the
latest books. Then when Muir became a partner of Elkin Mathews, the
rare-book dealers (Fleming himself became a partner later on), the young
stockbroker had a chance to observe some of the spectacular increases in the
value of contemporary first editions. It was a lesson hardly likely to be
lost on his keen and money-conscious mind, but it was not until he had left
Reuters that he had enough money of his own to take much advantage of it.
When he did, he was to show a flash of typical Fleming originality which was
to pay off handsomely.

"At the beginning of 1935, just after he had joined Rowe and Pitman, Fleming
wrote to Muir saying that he wanted to spend ?250 on starting a collection
of books marking what he called the 'milestones of human progress,' or, as
he put it on another occasion, 'books that have started something.' There
was to be none of the triviality of subject matter which annoyed him in most
collections; his was to be concerned with social and scientific and medical
significance--books on motorcars and miners' lamps and zippers and
tuberculosis and the theory of relativity.

"He was not worried about appearance or readability. The only criteria he
laid down were that the subjects must be important and the books themselves
first editions--any work published after 1800 would qualify. He made one
other condition, and that, too, was typical; as Muir puts it, 'He was not
prepared to do any research. That was for me to do.'

"Even in the mid-thirties ?250 was a modest sum on which to found an
ambitious collection, and Muir decided to limit it to the great scientific
discoveries of the nineteenth century and other historically important
pronouncements. But once he began looking for the books which this
unconventional client had broadly specified the true originality of the idea
was revealed. Muir found that none of the recognized rare-book dealers were
interested in such works; and when he approached booksellers specializing in
medical and scientific books he discovered that to them 'first editions were
largely out-of-date textbooks to be thrown away. Their clients wanted
up-to-date editions.'

"Fleming the amateur had done what every serious collector dreams of doing:
he had hit on a genuine collector's blind spot. For the next four years he
and Muir proceeded to exploit it. For four pounds they picked up one of the
remaining copies of Madame Curie's historic doctorate thesis of 1903 which
told the world that she had isolated radium. They bought a copy of Koch's
paper on the tubercle bacillus for five pounds. Another unusual rarity they
picked up for next to nothing was Freud on the interpretation of dreams.

"By the beginning of 1939 Fleming's total expenditure was not much over
?2,000, while his collection was already an important one. By now he was
beginning to refer to it with offhand pride as 'one of the foremost
collections of scientific and political thought in the world,' and after the
war, when asked by an American rare-book dealer how much he would take for
it, he gave the arbitrary figure of ?100,000."



William M. Klimon
http://www.gateofbliss.com