Should We Judge Our Books By Their Covers?
The Priceless Journey and Responsibility Journey of Collecting and Preserving Rare Books
The Priceless Journey and Responsibility Journey of Collecting and Preserving Rare Books
Tucked away in a hidden corner of a nearby shopping center was a rare bookshop where my mom used to take me. It was a quiet little shop called Overtones that felt like the bookshop in my favorite movie The Neverending Story. My mom always stopped by for cheap hardcovers. They had an antique section, and the memory of that first sniff of an antique book I ever picked up massaging my nostrils was burned into my memory for life.
It smelled soooo good!
That might have been the first glimpse into my future, back when I was 9.
For years I saturated myself with Stephen King, Peter Benchley, Michael Crichton, Dean Koontz, and other pretty generic supermarket stuff.
My fascination for the weird and mysterious definitely traces it’s roots to reading those books though. The topics found in horror led to a curiosity in all things esoteric and arcane. Alchemy, Magic, Religion, Superstition, Strange Phenomena, etc.
I’ve been collecting rare books since 2003, approximately.
My real obsession began when living with 4 friends in a townhome in Plano Texas. I ordered my first book on ebay, “The Way to Godhood, Temple of the Illuminati” by R.S. Clymer, written in 1912. It was about $400 at the time and cost about half of my bi-weekly paycheck.
It was a fascinating read and an interesting peek into the inner workings of an entirely different world. I was hooked and had to find more.
Before the end of the year, 3 more old rare books had made their way into my hands, which was all I could really afford at the time. Rare books can be very expensive. Especially rare occult works.
One of these new treasures was a book by A.E. Waite titled Brotherhood of The Rosy Cross, a beautiful red clothbound gold-stamped volume from 1923. One of the most sought after editions of this work, though not the first edition.
The other, a book by the same binder from around the same year, equally sought after — Eliphas Levi’s The History of Magic in beautiful blue gold stamped cloth very similar to the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross. Like they were made to be on a shelf together.
With hardcover and archival quality books, we have a wonderful opportunity to love and cherish the cover every bit as much as the content. These books are amazing works, and the wealth of information and perspective they contain is immeasurably valuable to both historians and esotericists alike.
I kept collecting for 2 more years, barely able to manage to afford 3–4 truly rare books per year, then something almost supernatural happened.
Death Brings Me Flowers
Towards the end of the year, perhaps fate, or a little strange occult circumstance, brought three full boxes of occult works into my life.
I had no idea, but the gentleman living right across from me in my apartment in Plano Texas, was an occult book collector too. He passed away and I came home while people were clearing the stuff out of his apartment. A woman standing outside asked if I knew him, and I didn’t — I had only said hello in passing to him. She introduced herself as his mom and I gave my condolences. She asked if I liked books. I said yes. She said she didn’t know what to do with his book collection, but didnt want them, and wanted to know if I wanted to look at them.
I looked in the first box.
Gasp.
Original Aliester Crowley’s from the early 1900s! Thelemic books, OTO books, an original signed 1867 copy of The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire, and all sorts of magic and witchcraft titles. Some were old and rare, most were just normal hardcovers and various softcovers. I couldn’t hide my excitement.
There were at least 30 or so rare editions that sold for $200+ when I looked them up on ebay.
There were 3 boxes for me to take, and I asked if she was sure she wanted me to take them — I told her I knew some of the books inside were quite valuable, and she told me to take all three and I thanked her.
She smirked too, I think she knew they were occult books and just wanted to get them off her hands and didn’t want them in her house. What amazing luck for me!
My collection had grown from a single bookshelf, to four nearly full bookshelves, almost overnight.
This was my opportunity to really get started, instead of waiting for a better job to pay for more books. I decided I wanted to read all the softcovers and if I liked them, I would sell them and seek quality hardcovers.
I also knew that after reading some of these rarer more valuable works, I didn’t want to keep all of them. Only those that resonated with me, or would somehow align with my own esoteric explorations. The other books, I could easily sell and raise money for books that I was hunting for.
Bookstore Officially Launched
I opened my online bookshop in 2008, called Gaze Beyond the Veil.
This bookshop served a dual purpose — a vehicle which I could purchase rare books tax-free, and a way for me to fill my own shelf with quality books while networking with other book collectors so I could actually find those editions I might want and making books available that others might want, instead of just hoarding everything I get my hands on.
Shortly after I moved to Washington state, in 2014 I changed the name of my bookshop to Scholomance to more adequately reflect the interests and tone that my bookstore had taken.
I launched a YouTube channel for my new store and this propelled me into an entirely new price range of book collecting and altered my attitude about what I was doing. Now I was collecting books as old as works from the 1500s, with the oldest I have ever had in my collection being a work by Govanni Battista della Porta called De Humana Physiognomonia (seen in the following video).
I wasn’t just collecting rare books now, I was now preserving them, archiving them.
This was also my first experience seeing how effective YouTube can be at building an audience and finding your crowd.
I believe a quality book deserves a quality shell. And many other book collectors resonate with this. Which is why, for the most part, hardcovers are the desired form for collectors unless a valuable work was just never published in hardcover. The more fancy the cover, the more lengths collectors go to protect and preserve the work.
And this is where the responsibility comes into play that conflicts with the old adage “Don’t judge a book by it’s cover”. But, we do! Maybe not the content itself, but beautiful hardcovers and leather bound hand-tooled works inspire many collectors to preserve and care for the books like their life depends on it.
We dust our books regularly so that nasty dust does not bake itself into the leathers. We keep our books away from direct sunlight that can fade and damage our books. The rarest editions, we don’t touch them with our hands or our fingers which contain oils that trigger negative breakdown processes. (a lesson I learned collecting comic books which naturally follows for rare books)
Softcovers rarely get this kind of treatment, outside of comic books and archival parchments, papers, scrolls, etc.
In essence, every rare book collector who takes their collection seriously is a professional archivist, whether or not consider themselves that. We are preserving rare books, diligently caring for them and ensuring they survive to be of value and appreciation to future generations.
To that effect, I have bucked the tradition of collector markets who put a novelty and currency on “unaltered original conditions”.
Yes yes, I get it — and this is all well and good for many collectors and will remain an absolute, nothing I will say will change that. Any alterations will tend to devalue a work if there are existing identical works that are unaltered, so in a collector sense, rather than be seen as a useful preservation, it can damage value. I stop short at scolding people over rebinds that are not restorations.
Here is a book set I am on the fence about re-binding. It is not the best shape, but it is bound in vellum, not really in need of restoration. However, it is one of the more important works in western esoterica because it was waaaaay ahead of it’s time with it’s assertions on equality.
Originally published in 1529, his Declamation on the Preeminence and Nobility of the Female Sex was a practically heretical work that could get you hurt in some communities in Europe.
I’m in this for preservation of rare books as much as anything else.
I have paid to have softcovers rebound as hardcovers, specifically because the book in question simply did not have a hardcover made. I viewed it as my duty to preserve the work in a proper hardcover binding, and if I am going to finance it, I might as well make them as beautiful as I can so they stand a better chance at being preserved.
I have paid to have what I viewed as a cheaply leather-bound limited edition set, into a fully hand-tooled gorgeous masterpiece of a multivolume set. There was nothing wrong with them really, I was not restoring these books, I just felt the set and it’s content was important and needed a cover that would inspire all future owners to care for it like it was a work of art. Because… that is what it is, now.
That book set above sold for $7,500 in 2015. I had paid about $1800 for the original works, and paid about $2500 to have them rebound.
I can guarantee that, absent some catastrophe or natural disaster, whoever owns that set will take damn good care of them and they will survive for generations to come, which was my intent.
I personally hold this to be the responsibility and duty of every rare book collector, and fortunately after speaking to many over the years, I think it’s a responsibility that many book lovers turned into collectors automatically embody without trying. Collectors care for their collections. And this inclination to preserve great works is partly empowered by …. judging a book by it’s beautiful covers.
Thank you for reading!
Until next time….
Onward and Upward Everybody!
-Chris
Automated Income Lifesyle w/ C.W. Morton
I'm just a regular guy who automates everything I possibly can. A few years ago I automated my primary business to the…www.youtube.com
ScholomanceRareBooks
Scholomance Rare Books - Rare, Antiquarian, Limited Editions, and Fine Bindings. Scholomance specializes in the…www.youtube.com
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