A Mad World, My Masters!' Book Collecting in America, 1890-1930

The years from about 1890 to around 1930 have been characterized the "Golden Years" of book collecting in America by various writers who have usually focused primarily upon the great contribution that collectors made to the nation's libraries and research institutions. However, a characterization of book collectors as so-called "saviors of scholarship" seems one-dimensional and flawed. Their collecting activities provided for them the means which allowed them to cope with a modernizing world in which the older Victorian cultural hegemony was under assault by the rise of mass culture and the consolidation of industrial corporate capitalism.

Collectors depicted themselves as mighty book hunters, aggressively searching for and capturing desired treasures. When their prizes were safely ensconced within their private study-libraries, the pleasures of the hunt yielded to the pleasures of contemplation, creation, and possession. The book-hunter became the bookman-collector who enjoyed his collections sentimentally and sensually. In fact, many bookmen-collectors were anti-institutional and hated libraries and librarians because they believed their collections would not be treasured as much in institutions as they treasured them. By 1930, because of the activities of the "great" collectors, millionaires such as Huntington, Morgan and Folger, and reforms within the institution, much of the anti-library sentiment changed and collections increasingly became institutionalized.

This study accomplishes two goals. First, the history of book collecting in America is interpreted from the point of view of the book collectors who were collecting during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Second, the study incorporates an analysis of the "world of the bookman-collector" with larger cultural occurrences related to the decline of Victorianism, modernization, the reaction by the American gentry, and the rise of mass, consumer culture in the United States. The period from about 1890 to 1930 bounds the study because the years represent a "Golden Age" in book collecting in America and a period of great cultural change and turmoil. The study indicates that the created "world of the bookman-collector" was a reflection and a reaction to the cultural changes of the period and provides how some Americans coped with those changes.