April 4, 2012 • 32 mins
How did advice from his great uncle inspire tobacco businessman George Arents to become one of the great contemporary bibliophiles? Listen in as Sarah and Deblina interview Michael Inman, the curator of the New York Public Library Rare Books Division.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm to blame a charcoal boarding and I'm fair, and
it's probably no secret if you listen to the podcast
a lot, that we're both really big book lovers. But
(00:22):
thus far, at least, I haven't been much of a
book collector. I don't know about you, Sarah. I know
I would definitely like to at some point, and we've
talked about this ever since I got my kindle last year.
I've been dreaming about only buying books that I want
to collect, first edition exactly, but that hasn't started yet.
So while I've amasked quite a few paperbacks and some
random hardback books over the years, you could hardly call
(00:45):
it a collection. So that's one of the biggest things
that I learned from researching today's podcasts. Though about George Aaron's,
a bunch of books, no matter how valuable they are,
does not a collection, mate, and no matter how much
you love them, if you only went out and chose
favorite authors in your favorite books, it wouldn't really make
a collection, and errants would really know what a collection was.
(01:07):
He's been called quote one of the greatest contemporary bibliophiles,
and over his lifetime he created two separate book collections,
which are now major collections at the New York Public Library.
One is the Errant's Tobacco Collection, which opened to the
public in January of nineteen forty four. The other is
the Arrant's Collection of Books and Parts and Associated Literature,
(01:28):
which opened in February of nineteen fifty seven. At this point,
some of you out there, especially if you're not a
bibliophile yourself, maybe thinking, Okay, so what why do I
care about this guy who collected books and old books too.
But what really makes Aaron's interesting, we think, at least
besides the fact that he was also a businessman and
(01:50):
an inventor, is the extremely focused approach that he took
to his collections. He wasn't just collecting first editions, like
Sarah mentioned before, His initial focus was simply tobacco, and
we're gonna talk about that a little bit more in
a bit, of course. The other thing that really fascinated
us was the process of hardcore book collecting that we
(02:10):
learned about from researching this. Errands made book collecting into
kind of an adventure sometimes taking off across the pond
at a moment's notice to pursue a volume that he
really wanted. He often compared it to a hunt even
or a sport. And of course then there's the history
of the books and the other items, and the collections themselves.
They have pretty cool stories behind them. Some have even
(02:32):
come from the hands of the likes of Queen Elizabeth
the First So we're going to cover all of these aspects. Yeah,
And to cover all of these aspects, we've decided to
take kind of an atypical approach to this episode. We're
going to give you some background on Errand's first and
how he got into collecting in the first place, and
some of the stories behind items in the collection. But
we also had a terrific interview with Michael Inman, who
(02:55):
is the curator of the Rare Books Division at the
New York Public Library where the Errant's collection is held,
and he was a really great resource on the topic
of Errants, on his life, and on book collecting and
rare books in general. So we're including parts of that
interview in this podcast today as well. But of course
before we get into all that, we need to tell
you a little bit about Errands and not only how
(03:16):
he got the collecting bug, but also how tobacco became
part of the equation, because it seems like a strange
thing to have a collection centered around it does, but
it won't in a couple of minutes. George Errands, who
was technically George Erons Jr. Was born in New York
City on May seven, five. In a discussion of his family,
you might find that the names can actually get kind
of confusing, and it might be confusing if you try
(03:37):
to look him up on your own, because obviously his
father was also named George Errands, and later on his
son was as well. But we'll try to specify if
we mentioned one of the other Georges in this podcast
that we're doing so. So Aaron's family business was the
Alan and Ginter Tobacco Company, which was established by his
great uncle, Major Lewis Ginter, and this company was known
for creating the first cigarette trading cards, which were slipped
(04:01):
into cigarette packs to give them kind of that stiff quality,
and they also served as a form of advertising. And
this was even before kids trading cards came around, so
it was kind of venturing into new territory of a
sort so because of the family business, Aaron spent a
lot of time of visiting Richmond, Virginia as a kid
because that was where the company was based. And in
eighteen ninety Allen and Ginter became part of the American
(04:23):
Tobacco Company. I'm sure many of you have heard of that,
but Aaron's family was still very much involved in that
new company, and he started working there himself in eighteen
ninety six between his junior and senior years studying at
Columbia University. Then in eighteen ninety seven he graduated from
Columbia and he went on to earn his master's to
create Syracuse University. But he didn't just rest on getting
(04:45):
a great education and settling into a comfortable job at
the family business. He was enterprising and he made his
own name in that business as well. Around the turn
of the century, he helped to establish the American Machine
and Foundry Company and served as a director there. But
he also got into some inventor he did, and I
think we mentioned that in the intro of this podcast,
(05:05):
and one of his inventions in particular was a device
that made it possible to make cigars with machines. And
this was widely adopted in the industry. Later it was
developed into a machine that rolled cigarettes. I mean before
those cigarettes had to be rolled by hand, so you
can imagine how it would make mass production possible and
really kind of revolutionize things. And these patents ended up
(05:27):
being a great source of wealth for him. So in
a lot of our podcast we would probably stop with
this sort of stuff, this business life of his, and
in truth, a lot of podcast subjects stop there too,
after all, I mean, if you're that accomplished, if you've
made a name for yourself in business, if you're an inventor,
why do you really need to do too much all?
Some people might wonder. Of course, Erin's did have a
(05:50):
personal life. He was married and he had two kids,
a son and a daughter. We already mentioned the son.
But along the way he really went beyond his family
life and his this this life and took on a
few hobbies too, mainly because of some advice he had
gotten from his great uncle, Major Ginter pretty early on.
And there's an article by Sue Dickinson and Commonwealth Magazine
(06:11):
where Aaron's actually recounted this advice and a talk he
gave at the College William and Mary in nineteen thirty nine. Yeah,
he said, on one of my many visits, and he's
referring there to the visits to Virginia to visit his family,
Major Ginter gave me some advice which I have never forgotten.
It has added greatly to my happiness and I think
(06:32):
maybe a value to many of you here. He said,
when you were young, have many hobbies, but let your
business or profession come first. As you grow older, you
will have to abandon some of them. The more you have,
the less you will miss those that you have to
give up. So Aaron's really took this advice to heart,
and he started taking on different hobbies, trying to collect
(06:52):
as many early on as he could. One was race
car driving, but that didn't laugh very long for him.
He drove a Mercedes which was car number five in
the first Vanderbilt Cup Race, which took place on Long
Island in October of nineteen o four. He was twenty
nine years old at the time. It was his first race,
but he got into an accident that left him pretty
(07:13):
badly injured and actually killed his mechanics. So that was
the end of that, perhaps kind of proving his uncle's
point that you're going to have to abandon hobbies along
the way. One of his other hobbies, though, book collecting,
of course, proved to be far safer than race car driving,
and he did stick with that throughout his life. A bookseller,
William Everts, warned Errants early on that he should specialize
(07:34):
when he came to book collecting. According to an article
that Arrants prepared for Syracuse University students called book collecting
as I have found It, Everts said, do not buy
some sixteenth and seventeenth century plays and poems, some nineteenth
and twentieth century novels. That is not a collection. It
is just a lot of books. Decide on a subject
(07:55):
which interests you, and stick to it. Someday you may
find that you have formed a great collection, or at
least one which will always interest you. So Aaron's didn't
have to think long and hard about what that focus
of his collection would be. Obviously, in that same William
and Mary talk we mentioned earlier, Aaron said, quote, what
could be more natural for me, with the background of
(08:17):
tobacco and my family than to specialize on books relating
to the divine herb? So once he chose tobacco, he
really went for it. But there's a bit of discrepancy
regarding what work he started with and when exactly he started.
Over the course of his life he gave all sorts
of ages, all pretty much on the younger side. But
(08:37):
we wanted to talk to Michael Inman, what's the deal
with us? What was his first book he bought? Here's
what he had to say. Aaron's was in his early
twenties when he bought his first book on tobacco. He
bought his first book in h and there is a
discrepancy as to which work was the first book that
he published. By most accounts, it was Selections for Original
(09:00):
Contributions by James Thompson to Coax's Tobacco Plant, which had
been published in nine But there are other works, actually,
a couple of other works, which at one time or
another he said that he had bought first. The discrepancy
probably lies partly in his memory, and then also it
lies in the fact that in his accession ledger, which
(09:22):
he kept fairly careful notes in as to what he bought, uh,
he did list the Selections from Original Contributions by James
Thompson to have been the first book that he bought.
When he began collecting. So UM, that's the book that
I've always thought was probably Um was the first, or
at least the first one of which we can be,
you know, relatively certain. So once Aaron's collection, his tobacco collection,
(09:46):
got underway, he started out with the types of books
you'd expect, things with tobacco in the title or as
the main subject. But even these focused works covered a
broad range of takes on tobacco. There are history books,
their le egal documents, books about the chemistry of tobacco,
even medical texts. The oldest book in this collection is
(10:06):
the first Latin edition of an account of Americo Vespucci's travels,
which also contains the first reference to the New World
as America. While tobacco isn't mentioned by name in this work,
the book describes native people off of what is now
Venezuela chewing green leaves, so the assumption is that they
were chewing tobacco. Another early piece from the collection includes
(10:29):
the first mention of the Aztec read cigarette and the
first reference to tobacco smoking. And it even includes the
first youth of the word tobacco, which I think would
have made a good good find for our Oxford English
Dictionary episode. But there are all sorts of items, Like
you said, other items focused on herbals. For instance, one
(10:49):
is a four book that doesn't actually mention tobacco by name,
but it contains the earliest illustration of it. So Arrants
really was willing to look broadly at this. In his
essay Tobacco leaves Eron's also talks about how he tried
to collect books or documents that contain source material about
the history of tobacco, like notes from the English Privy
(11:10):
Council meetings, which I think is really interesting. It's through
these documents that historians can trace the interlocking histories of tobacco,
whether you're talking about the economic, history, social, or political.
And things aren't always positive either or pro tobacco, as
he might expect from somebody who had made his career
in the tobacco industry right and one of Aaron's most
(11:31):
prized works was actually King James, the first counterblast to tobacco. Apparently,
while Elizabeth, the first James predecessor and kinswoman, enjoyed tobacco
after Sir Walter Rawley helped popularize it in her court,
James was not a very big fan himself no, and interestingly,
Aaron's own copy was one James must have been pretty
proud of because it's part of a specially bound set
(11:53):
that he had made for his wife, Queen Anne. Although
Aaron's believed that the works were in such press dean condition,
he had a hunch Queen Anne must have never actually
read her husband's works. Another major tobacco opponent was John Smith,
who was the author of a General History of Virginia.
In it, he called tobacco quote the heathenish weed, since
(12:15):
it would drive settlers to waste their time planting that
finicky crop instead of food that they actually needed to survive.
And we've talked about that connection between tobacco and Virginia
before in an earlier episode. The episode on the shipwreck
that Saved Jamestown really one of my favorites, where John Role,
famous for being Pocahontas's husband, managed to smuggle some Central
(12:36):
American variety of tobacco seeds into Virginia and started producing
the more popular crop there where it really thrived and
completely changed the economy of Virginia, and it really changed
economies across the globe. To tobacco became kind of like
an international currency of sort. Eventually, Aaron's began to expand
(12:57):
his collection to include titles that dealt with tobacco in
a more tangential way too. For example, he collected baseball
cards from cigarette advertising, including a Honus Wagner from These
are considered the most expensive baseball or honest Wagner apparently
was not into having baseball cards made of him. But
there are also things that I think would appeal to
(13:18):
a lot of you guys. Alice in Wonderland that's included
because there's a caterpillar who smokes a hookah and Aaron's
collected a first edition of it. Moby Dick, The Wonderful
Wizard of Oz, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn all included
in that collection just because they have some scene or
some mention of tobacco that he thought was important enough.
So of course this made us really think of I mean,
(13:40):
you mentioned that Oxford English Dictionary the William C. Minor
podcast earlier, and that made us wonder, how did he
find these reference system of which aren't really that obvious,
And so we asked Michael Inman that very question, and
here's what he had to say. Well, some of them
he came across um quite likely just in the course
of his reading and in the course of collecting, he
would find references to other works related to the subject um.
(14:04):
But I think it's safe to say that a great
many of these works came to his attention through the
the advice or um, through information that was related to
him by various book collectors and auction houses and so forth.
And he had people out there in the antiquarium book
world who were on the lookout for items which had
a tobacco connection, however slight, and as those items came
(14:26):
into their stock, they would then contact him and ask
if it was something that he was interested in acquiring,
and and then the transaction would take place. So it
sort of went in both directions in terms of his
own research on the subject and then also people on
the lookout for things for him. One of the most
notably missing figures though, of this more tangential type of
(14:46):
collection is William Shakespeare, and it's kind of strange because
of that opposition from King James. There was apparently a
lot of references done during Jackman drama. You know, people
like to talk about what was considered taboo, and Errant's
even compared this to the multitude of alcohol references during prohibition.
But William Shakespeare is missing from Elizabethan from jack Bin
(15:10):
Drama entirely, and there's a good reason for that. It's
because he never wrote about tobacco. And Arrants at one
point related a pretty funny story about Shakespeare and the
lack of tobacco connections by talking about how he agreed
to buy a Shakespeare first folio at one point if
and only if a mention of tobacco could be found,
(15:30):
and he got a little nervous about that promise afterwards
because he was expecting there wouldn't be any mentions, and
he knew that even for him, buying a Shakespeare first
folio would be kind of a hurt, put a hurt
on his bank act expire, certainly. But the best anybody
could find was a passage from A Midsummer Night's Dream
about pipes. Unfortunately for Errants, it turned out to be
(15:51):
about Oberon playing pipes of corn, different pipes, different kind
of pipe. But I think it's so fascinating that Errant's
familiarity with all of these tangential references allowed him to
actually draw some literary inferences from it. That total lack
of tobacco references in Shakespeare's work contrasted with the frequent
(16:11):
mentions of tobacco in Roger Bacon's work and ended up
being proof enough for errants that Bacon did not write Shakespeare.
So finally, one of the most interesting lines of study
in the collection is not just the history of tobacco,
but the history of how tobacco was used. For example,
a book by Christopher Columbus's Natural Son contains stories from
(16:33):
Columbus's travels, including one describing Cuban Indians smoking cigars. Apparently,
the sailors didn't know what was going on and thought
perhaps the Indians were perfuming themselves with these cigars. But
it wasn't long, obviously, before the sailors took up smoking
and started to take it back to the old world.
Even though folks back at home were pretty puzzled at first,
(16:53):
you know what was really going on, and one of
the interesting items Arrant's collection includes as a record of
a Spanish sailor being arrested during the Inquisition for smoke
coming out of his mouth because he was having a
smoke and folks thought that he must be possessed by
the devil for something so horrifying to to be happening.
But by the time he got out of prison, he
(17:14):
found that everybody around him was smoking. It had become
commonplace during just that that time he was put away.
The first sailors seen smoking in London created a riot.
People thought that they were actually drinking smoke. But a
smoking caught on in England. Some elegant men felt that
they actually needed smoking teachers, people who would teach you
how to look good. Not that it was okay at
(17:37):
the time to walk around and smoke. Men would actually
have to duck into apothecary shop, have a smoke, and
then hit the streets again. So it made sense that
tobacco was still considered medicinal by many, and that's why
connection there exactly. So it was like you had an
excuse to be smoking. Obviously, tobacco and smoking can be
(17:57):
a really controversial topic today for health related reasons. Because
of health related concerns, some of Aaron's inclusions reflect how
it was controversial even throughout history. His collection contained critiques
of tobacco through the ages, the earliest of which criticized
the non medicinal use of what was believed to be
and that's when you think about today. It reminded me
(18:19):
a lot of the Radium Girls podcast that we did
last fall, and how people would thought that radium was
medicinal and they would use it even to treat cancer
and things like that, and then later they figured out, oh,
it's actually causing cancer, and uh, it's similar sort of
thing here with tobacco. One of the items that is
in the collection, Tobacco Tortured from sixteen sixteen, focuses on
(18:41):
a degenerate family man who's ruined his life through tobacco.
His wife pleads, quote, Oh, my husband, my husband, why
dost thou so vainly preferred a vanishing, filthy fume before
my permanent virtues? Have I not here brought forth an
army of children into they And the descript and of
just this ragged man who's been destroyed by tobacco kind
(19:04):
of reminds me of the classic After School special almost
except that it's from sixteen sixteen. But thinking about all
the controversies that have surrounded tobacco throughout the years and
even up to today, made us really wonder about how
a collection of the sort is perceived. So we asked
Michael about that. We asked Michael Inman, and he noted
(19:25):
that they haven't really received a lot of flak for
the tobacco collection, but that's probably because it's mostly historical.
He said, most of the volumes are actually pre nineteen
hundred well, and he also shared because of the huge
number of items that aren't really about tobacco, they just
have that mention of it. About fifty percent of the
(19:45):
people who use the collection, who consulted for their research,
aren't really interested in the tobacco content at all. You know,
they're interested in that Alice in Wonderland copy or the
Wizard of Oz or whatever it may be, something completely
apart from tobacco. But tobacco wasn't all that Errants was
interested in. As we mentioned in the intro to this podcast,
in he started his second book collection, Books and Parts,
(20:10):
So it was about a quarter of a century after
he started that initial tobacco collection, and it just made
us really curious. I mean, we had a sense of
what Books and Parts are, but we wanted to talk
to Michael a little bit about what that entails. The
Books and Parts collection is, to my knowledge, is a
unique collection. I mean, there are other rare book collections
(20:30):
out there that have books and parts material material and parts,
I should say, but what makes the Errants collection of
Books and Parts so special is that, so far as
I know, it's the only collection of its kind that's
solely predicated on collecting material in parts. And by parts,
I mean these are original works of literature and a
great many genres which are still in their original serialized form,
(20:54):
and the individual paper wrappers that they came in. The
practice would usually have been to those individual parts bound
up into one binding, but in fact these actually remain
in their original serialized form. I think that that probably
was part of the appeal for Arrans. That here, just
as had been the case with the tobacco part of
(21:16):
the collection, which also I believe is fairly unique in
the sense that it's solely predicated along those lines of
just dealing with tobacco, here was another aspect of book
collecting that Arrants could could focus upon that really was
something that was the other people weren't collecting at that
time at any rate. Michael also went on to theorize
(21:36):
that starting the second collection really allowed Errants a great
avenue for a perfectionist to take. I mean, he was
a perfectionist, and if you collect books and parts, you
can gradually assemble not just a complete set, but a
perfect set, something that was really appealing to Arrants. But
another another reason why he might have started the second
(21:57):
collection is that it allowed him to pursue the chase,
you know, like we talked about earlier, the hunt behind
book collecting. It allowed him to maintain the paith of
book collecting he'd gotten used to. It was really an
adventure for him. As we mentioned, I mean, Sarah and
I were really taken with one part of an essay
we read where it said that Aaron's would learn of
(22:19):
a book that he wanted to get in London and
he would just decide on the spur of the mount
on a boat, take off, get on a boat, and
go get it. And that really excited us. So we
wanted to talk to Michael a little bit about that
thrill of the chase and ask him what his favorite
story or what are some of the most interesting stories
of how Aaron's obtained a volume, And here's what he
(22:40):
had to say. One that comes to mind is that
for a great many years he had had a nearly
complete set of hackle It's voyages and not only was
this is this isn't terribly important work in terms of
North American history, in terms of voyages and travels, uh,
and in terms of printing history, but also the particular
set that he had acquired had belonged to Queen Elizabeth
(23:03):
the first It bears her coat of arms on the binding.
He had a complete set of that work. It's a
multi volume set except for one volume that he was missing,
and finally persistence paid off. He had been searching for
it for years and years and it finally turned up
at at auction and he was able to acquire that
missing volume. But this is something that transpired over a
(23:24):
great many years that he doggedly pursued this one missing
volume out of a multi volume set. Uh. He he
was sort of like a dog with a bone. He
wouldn't let go of something, and he always tried to
to acquire the complete work, as I mentioned earlier. So
that's one example. Uh, he went to great lenks to
(23:46):
acquire all sorts of items. Another example, it's something that
he tried to come by over a period of years.
Were very lucky in the Errant's collection to have the
original manuscript, the original four act manuscript of us. For
wild it's the importance of being earnest and that's something
that again he had to search for the complete set
(24:07):
for a number of years, or the multi volumes because
it's written in several notebooks and he had to search
for several years until he was able to assemble uh
that those two works. I think another thing that surprised
us during our research was that this is not a
static collection. It's something that's grown, and it's something that
has been added to even after Aaron's's death, and the
(24:30):
library still I don't know. Michael talked a little bit
about what acquiring books is like today and he said, well,
he hasn't jetted to London to to obtain materials. There
is still that kind of thrill of the chase element
to pursuing a book that is just perfect for the collection,
something that has high research value but is also incredibly unique.
(24:51):
And he said that they need to always, of course
focus on things that have a link to tobacco. That
is the prime quality vacation for anything that's going to
be in the collection. But it really does need to
be important. It can't just mention tobacco. It has to
almost live up to all the items that are already
in the collection. Right he mentioned research value in particular,
(25:12):
the items that they get must have some sort of
research value, must have some sort of research value to them,
I should say. And so, of course talking about all
of these volumes and their value made us really wonder
what are Michael's favorite things in this collection as the curator,
And so we posed a kind of interesting scenario to
him with nightmare scenario, probably a nightmare actually for a
(25:36):
curator like him. We asked, if the building were burning down,
what would he take with him? The importance of being
earnest is one of my favorites, certainly. There is a
handwritten letter from Queen Elizabeth the First to Charles the
ninth of France, in which she writes in French, uh well,
in response to charles offer he had offered his brother's
(25:57):
hand in marriage to Elizabeth in order to forge alliance
between France and England. And so she wrote back to
him in this very sort of flowery circumlocutionary pros, oh,
I love France and I adore you, and I think
your brother is great. And she goes on and at
the very end of the letter she says rather tersely
sort of thanks but no thanks. That's a good example
(26:18):
again of arrances, very broad mindedness in terms of collecting.
For years I wondered why that letter was in the
collection because there's no connection to tobacco that I can
discern at all. And finally, after a number of years,
I was able to find some notes that Errans had
written where he explained that he had acquired that item
(26:39):
simply because Elizabeth was the first modern female monarch who
was known to smoke. So the connection there even was
somewhat tenuous. But I suspect he saw that letter at
auction or someone offered it to him and it was
just too tempting to pass up. So that's how he
was probably able to justify acquiring it after the fact.
So that letter, I think there are several others um
(27:02):
from Sir Walter Rawleigh and several other individuals from that
period that are quite magnificent. There is another item that
I really love is the first edition of the Wizard
of Oz that Frank Baum inscribed to his mother. Very
touching little inscription there where he writes a note to
his mother. So that's that's certainly wonderful. It's really hard
(27:24):
to sort of draw the line just two or three.
I think we're you know, Goodness forbid, the building I
were on fire, I would probably be in the building
much longer than it was probably safe to be, trying
to grab as many things as I could. But certainly
those would be a few of the top picks that
come to mind. Um, he would ask me the same
question tomorrow, I probably would give you a completely different list,
(27:47):
and you know, to keep going on for the next
several months. So that drastic scenario, you know, the building
burning down, what are you going to save? Kind of
led us to a less drastic scenario one of how
how are these material is preserved? How do people use them?
And it was interesting to hear that because this is
a library a lot of these museum where the items
(28:08):
are available to the public. You know, you can apply
to to consult with these materials and look at them yourself.
Something I think, touch them, we have touch them, something
that I think really sets rare book libraries like this apart. Yeah,
and Michael told us a little bit about the preservation
and how meticulous they have to be to make sure
(28:29):
that these volumes do stay intact so that people can
use them. In the future as well. And so that's
a big aspect of keeping the collections there. It's not
just curating them and finding the right volumes and the
thrill of the chase. It's making sure that they're they're around,
that they're around for a while. And uh, to that point,
(28:50):
we also talked to him about the future of these collections,
thinking about you guys especially, I mean, will these ever
be available for people to see even if you can't
make a trip all the way to the main building
of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. And
he mentioned that there is a digitization project going on
at the New York Public Library, as I'm sure there
(29:11):
are in many libraries around the world, and they're slowly,
i think, converting all these volumes or as many as
they can, to digital versions. So someday you may be
able to look us up from the comfort of your home. Yeah,
And that really does have to two values to it.
One that if you have these high quality reproductions digital reproductions,
(29:33):
not as many people need to touch that first manuscript
of importance of being earnest if they're researching it. But also, yeah,
people who can't make it to New York can can
take a look at some of this stuff, take a
look at that baseball card or the counter blast or
whatever it may be. Obviously that holds a lot of
allure for us. We always need more materials for research,
(29:55):
and so this was kind of a little bit of
a vanity podcast for us, I guess in that sense
because or maybe that question in particular was because we
we really would love to have access to these. But
that's about all we have for this episode on George
Arrants and his collection. Um, I would love to know
if any listeners out there have their own collections books
(30:16):
or otherwise that they've started as hobbies, side projects and
have seen grown throughout the years. I mean, I would
really I have hobbies, but my hobbies are like playing
soccer or have been playing music or whatever. I haven't
really collected anything ever, and that has always held a
lot of fascination for me. Well, and I really liked
(30:36):
the idea of a focused book collection because it meant
that Arrants, even even when he was young, even when
he didn't have a lot of money to spend on
some of these more magnificent items or money to go
off to London and collect a huge amount of work.
He had a collection even with just a few items,
and that was the appeal. You know, if you have
(30:59):
this fox gus to your collection, even a few books
are a collection that you don't need an entire library. Well,
I think that's a more hopeful way to look at it.
So if you do have, if you've started, even if
it's with just a few books, book collection, or any
sort of collection, and you want to share that with us,
please write us wre History Podcast at Discovery dot com.
(31:20):
You can also look us up on Facebook or on
Twitter ATMs in history. And we also have a great
article out there for all of you guys who are
trying to choose the prime things you'll be adding to
your future collection. It's called top ten rare Book. Then
you can find it by searching on our homepage at
www dot house stepp works dot com. Be sure to
(31:45):
check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future.
Join how stepp Work staff as we explore the most
promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The Houstuff Works iPhone
app has a ride. Download it today on iTunes. Do
We Do? Do We
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm to blame a charcoal boarding and I'm fair, and
it's probably no secret if you listen to the podcast
a lot, that we're both really big book lovers. But
(00:22):
thus far, at least, I haven't been much of a
book collector. I don't know about you, Sarah. I know
I would definitely like to at some point, and we've
talked about this ever since I got my kindle last year.
I've been dreaming about only buying books that I want
to collect, first edition exactly, but that hasn't started yet.
So while I've amasked quite a few paperbacks and some
random hardback books over the years, you could hardly call
(00:45):
it a collection. So that's one of the biggest things
that I learned from researching today's podcasts. Though about George Aaron's,
a bunch of books, no matter how valuable they are,
does not a collection, mate, and no matter how much
you love them, if you only went out and chose
favorite authors in your favorite books, it wouldn't really make
a collection, and errants would really know what a collection was.
(01:07):
He's been called quote one of the greatest contemporary bibliophiles,
and over his lifetime he created two separate book collections,
which are now major collections at the New York Public Library.
One is the Errant's Tobacco Collection, which opened to the
public in January of nineteen forty four. The other is
the Arrant's Collection of Books and Parts and Associated Literature,
(01:28):
which opened in February of nineteen fifty seven. At this point,
some of you out there, especially if you're not a
bibliophile yourself, maybe thinking, Okay, so what why do I
care about this guy who collected books and old books too.
But what really makes Aaron's interesting, we think, at least
besides the fact that he was also a businessman and
(01:50):
an inventor, is the extremely focused approach that he took
to his collections. He wasn't just collecting first editions, like
Sarah mentioned before, His initial focus was simply tobacco, and
we're gonna talk about that a little bit more in
a bit, of course. The other thing that really fascinated
us was the process of hardcore book collecting that we
(02:10):
learned about from researching this. Errands made book collecting into
kind of an adventure sometimes taking off across the pond
at a moment's notice to pursue a volume that he
really wanted. He often compared it to a hunt even
or a sport. And of course then there's the history
of the books and the other items, and the collections themselves.
They have pretty cool stories behind them. Some have even
(02:32):
come from the hands of the likes of Queen Elizabeth
the First So we're going to cover all of these aspects. Yeah,
And to cover all of these aspects, we've decided to
take kind of an atypical approach to this episode. We're
going to give you some background on Errand's first and
how he got into collecting in the first place, and
some of the stories behind items in the collection. But
we also had a terrific interview with Michael Inman, who
(02:55):
is the curator of the Rare Books Division at the
New York Public Library where the Errant's collection is held,
and he was a really great resource on the topic
of Errants, on his life, and on book collecting and
rare books in general. So we're including parts of that
interview in this podcast today as well. But of course
before we get into all that, we need to tell
you a little bit about Errands and not only how
(03:16):
he got the collecting bug, but also how tobacco became
part of the equation, because it seems like a strange
thing to have a collection centered around it does, but
it won't in a couple of minutes. George Errands, who
was technically George Erons Jr. Was born in New York
City on May seven, five. In a discussion of his family,
you might find that the names can actually get kind
of confusing, and it might be confusing if you try
(03:37):
to look him up on your own, because obviously his
father was also named George Errands, and later on his
son was as well. But we'll try to specify if
we mentioned one of the other Georges in this podcast
that we're doing so. So Aaron's family business was the
Alan and Ginter Tobacco Company, which was established by his
great uncle, Major Lewis Ginter, and this company was known
for creating the first cigarette trading cards, which were slipped
(04:01):
into cigarette packs to give them kind of that stiff quality,
and they also served as a form of advertising. And
this was even before kids trading cards came around, so
it was kind of venturing into new territory of a
sort so because of the family business, Aaron spent a
lot of time of visiting Richmond, Virginia as a kid
because that was where the company was based. And in
eighteen ninety Allen and Ginter became part of the American
(04:23):
Tobacco Company. I'm sure many of you have heard of that,
but Aaron's family was still very much involved in that
new company, and he started working there himself in eighteen
ninety six between his junior and senior years studying at
Columbia University. Then in eighteen ninety seven he graduated from
Columbia and he went on to earn his master's to
create Syracuse University. But he didn't just rest on getting
(04:45):
a great education and settling into a comfortable job at
the family business. He was enterprising and he made his
own name in that business as well. Around the turn
of the century, he helped to establish the American Machine
and Foundry Company and served as a director there. But
he also got into some inventor he did, and I
think we mentioned that in the intro of this podcast,
(05:05):
and one of his inventions in particular was a device
that made it possible to make cigars with machines. And
this was widely adopted in the industry. Later it was
developed into a machine that rolled cigarettes. I mean before
those cigarettes had to be rolled by hand, so you
can imagine how it would make mass production possible and
really kind of revolutionize things. And these patents ended up
(05:27):
being a great source of wealth for him. So in
a lot of our podcast we would probably stop with
this sort of stuff, this business life of his, and
in truth, a lot of podcast subjects stop there too,
after all, I mean, if you're that accomplished, if you've
made a name for yourself in business, if you're an inventor,
why do you really need to do too much all?
Some people might wonder. Of course, Erin's did have a
(05:50):
personal life. He was married and he had two kids,
a son and a daughter. We already mentioned the son.
But along the way he really went beyond his family
life and his this this life and took on a
few hobbies too, mainly because of some advice he had
gotten from his great uncle, Major Ginter pretty early on.
And there's an article by Sue Dickinson and Commonwealth Magazine
(06:11):
where Aaron's actually recounted this advice and a talk he
gave at the College William and Mary in nineteen thirty nine. Yeah,
he said, on one of my many visits, and he's
referring there to the visits to Virginia to visit his family,
Major Ginter gave me some advice which I have never forgotten.
It has added greatly to my happiness and I think
(06:32):
maybe a value to many of you here. He said,
when you were young, have many hobbies, but let your
business or profession come first. As you grow older, you
will have to abandon some of them. The more you have,
the less you will miss those that you have to
give up. So Aaron's really took this advice to heart,
and he started taking on different hobbies, trying to collect
(06:52):
as many early on as he could. One was race
car driving, but that didn't laugh very long for him.
He drove a Mercedes which was car number five in
the first Vanderbilt Cup Race, which took place on Long
Island in October of nineteen o four. He was twenty
nine years old at the time. It was his first race,
but he got into an accident that left him pretty
(07:13):
badly injured and actually killed his mechanics. So that was
the end of that, perhaps kind of proving his uncle's
point that you're going to have to abandon hobbies along
the way. One of his other hobbies, though, book collecting,
of course, proved to be far safer than race car driving,
and he did stick with that throughout his life. A bookseller,
William Everts, warned Errants early on that he should specialize
(07:34):
when he came to book collecting. According to an article
that Arrants prepared for Syracuse University students called book collecting
as I have found It, Everts said, do not buy
some sixteenth and seventeenth century plays and poems, some nineteenth
and twentieth century novels. That is not a collection. It
is just a lot of books. Decide on a subject
(07:55):
which interests you, and stick to it. Someday you may
find that you have formed a great collection, or at
least one which will always interest you. So Aaron's didn't
have to think long and hard about what that focus
of his collection would be. Obviously, in that same William
and Mary talk we mentioned earlier, Aaron said, quote, what
could be more natural for me, with the background of
(08:17):
tobacco and my family than to specialize on books relating
to the divine herb? So once he chose tobacco, he
really went for it. But there's a bit of discrepancy
regarding what work he started with and when exactly he started.
Over the course of his life he gave all sorts
of ages, all pretty much on the younger side. But
(08:37):
we wanted to talk to Michael Inman, what's the deal
with us? What was his first book he bought? Here's
what he had to say. Aaron's was in his early
twenties when he bought his first book on tobacco. He
bought his first book in h and there is a
discrepancy as to which work was the first book that
he published. By most accounts, it was Selections for Original
(09:00):
Contributions by James Thompson to Coax's Tobacco Plant, which had
been published in nine But there are other works, actually,
a couple of other works, which at one time or
another he said that he had bought first. The discrepancy
probably lies partly in his memory, and then also it
lies in the fact that in his accession ledger, which
(09:22):
he kept fairly careful notes in as to what he bought, uh,
he did list the Selections from Original Contributions by James
Thompson to have been the first book that he bought.
When he began collecting. So UM, that's the book that
I've always thought was probably Um was the first, or
at least the first one of which we can be,
you know, relatively certain. So once Aaron's collection, his tobacco collection,
(09:46):
got underway, he started out with the types of books
you'd expect, things with tobacco in the title or as
the main subject. But even these focused works covered a
broad range of takes on tobacco. There are history books,
their le egal documents, books about the chemistry of tobacco,
even medical texts. The oldest book in this collection is
(10:06):
the first Latin edition of an account of Americo Vespucci's travels,
which also contains the first reference to the New World
as America. While tobacco isn't mentioned by name in this work,
the book describes native people off of what is now
Venezuela chewing green leaves, so the assumption is that they
were chewing tobacco. Another early piece from the collection includes
(10:29):
the first mention of the Aztec read cigarette and the
first reference to tobacco smoking. And it even includes the
first youth of the word tobacco, which I think would
have made a good good find for our Oxford English
Dictionary episode. But there are all sorts of items, Like
you said, other items focused on herbals. For instance, one
(10:49):
is a four book that doesn't actually mention tobacco by name,
but it contains the earliest illustration of it. So Arrants
really was willing to look broadly at this. In his
essay Tobacco leaves Eron's also talks about how he tried
to collect books or documents that contain source material about
the history of tobacco, like notes from the English Privy
(11:10):
Council meetings, which I think is really interesting. It's through
these documents that historians can trace the interlocking histories of tobacco,
whether you're talking about the economic, history, social, or political.
And things aren't always positive either or pro tobacco, as
he might expect from somebody who had made his career
in the tobacco industry right and one of Aaron's most
(11:31):
prized works was actually King James, the first counterblast to tobacco. Apparently,
while Elizabeth, the first James predecessor and kinswoman, enjoyed tobacco
after Sir Walter Rawley helped popularize it in her court,
James was not a very big fan himself no, and interestingly,
Aaron's own copy was one James must have been pretty
proud of because it's part of a specially bound set
(11:53):
that he had made for his wife, Queen Anne. Although
Aaron's believed that the works were in such press dean condition,
he had a hunch Queen Anne must have never actually
read her husband's works. Another major tobacco opponent was John Smith,
who was the author of a General History of Virginia.
In it, he called tobacco quote the heathenish weed, since
(12:15):
it would drive settlers to waste their time planting that
finicky crop instead of food that they actually needed to survive.
And we've talked about that connection between tobacco and Virginia
before in an earlier episode. The episode on the shipwreck
that Saved Jamestown really one of my favorites, where John Role,
famous for being Pocahontas's husband, managed to smuggle some Central
(12:36):
American variety of tobacco seeds into Virginia and started producing
the more popular crop there where it really thrived and
completely changed the economy of Virginia, and it really changed
economies across the globe. To tobacco became kind of like
an international currency of sort. Eventually, Aaron's began to expand
(12:57):
his collection to include titles that dealt with tobacco in
a more tangential way too. For example, he collected baseball
cards from cigarette advertising, including a Honus Wagner from These
are considered the most expensive baseball or honest Wagner apparently
was not into having baseball cards made of him. But
there are also things that I think would appeal to
(13:18):
a lot of you guys. Alice in Wonderland that's included
because there's a caterpillar who smokes a hookah and Aaron's
collected a first edition of it. Moby Dick, The Wonderful
Wizard of Oz, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn all included
in that collection just because they have some scene or
some mention of tobacco that he thought was important enough.
So of course this made us really think of I mean,
(13:40):
you mentioned that Oxford English Dictionary the William C. Minor
podcast earlier, and that made us wonder, how did he
find these reference system of which aren't really that obvious,
And so we asked Michael Inman that very question, and
here's what he had to say. Well, some of them
he came across um quite likely just in the course
of his reading and in the course of collecting, he
would find references to other works related to the subject um.
(14:04):
But I think it's safe to say that a great
many of these works came to his attention through the
the advice or um, through information that was related to
him by various book collectors and auction houses and so forth.
And he had people out there in the antiquarium book
world who were on the lookout for items which had
a tobacco connection, however slight, and as those items came
(14:26):
into their stock, they would then contact him and ask
if it was something that he was interested in acquiring,
and and then the transaction would take place. So it
sort of went in both directions in terms of his
own research on the subject and then also people on
the lookout for things for him. One of the most
notably missing figures though, of this more tangential type of
(14:46):
collection is William Shakespeare, and it's kind of strange because
of that opposition from King James. There was apparently a
lot of references done during Jackman drama. You know, people
like to talk about what was considered taboo, and Errant's
even compared this to the multitude of alcohol references during prohibition.
But William Shakespeare is missing from Elizabethan from jack Bin
(15:10):
Drama entirely, and there's a good reason for that. It's
because he never wrote about tobacco. And Arrants at one
point related a pretty funny story about Shakespeare and the
lack of tobacco connections by talking about how he agreed
to buy a Shakespeare first folio at one point if
and only if a mention of tobacco could be found,
(15:30):
and he got a little nervous about that promise afterwards
because he was expecting there wouldn't be any mentions, and
he knew that even for him, buying a Shakespeare first
folio would be kind of a hurt, put a hurt
on his bank act expire, certainly. But the best anybody
could find was a passage from A Midsummer Night's Dream
about pipes. Unfortunately for Errants, it turned out to be
(15:51):
about Oberon playing pipes of corn, different pipes, different kind
of pipe. But I think it's so fascinating that Errant's
familiarity with all of these tangential references allowed him to
actually draw some literary inferences from it. That total lack
of tobacco references in Shakespeare's work contrasted with the frequent
(16:11):
mentions of tobacco in Roger Bacon's work and ended up
being proof enough for errants that Bacon did not write Shakespeare.
So finally, one of the most interesting lines of study
in the collection is not just the history of tobacco,
but the history of how tobacco was used. For example,
a book by Christopher Columbus's Natural Son contains stories from
(16:33):
Columbus's travels, including one describing Cuban Indians smoking cigars. Apparently,
the sailors didn't know what was going on and thought
perhaps the Indians were perfuming themselves with these cigars. But
it wasn't long, obviously, before the sailors took up smoking
and started to take it back to the old world.
Even though folks back at home were pretty puzzled at first,
(16:53):
you know what was really going on, and one of
the interesting items Arrant's collection includes as a record of
a Spanish sailor being arrested during the Inquisition for smoke
coming out of his mouth because he was having a
smoke and folks thought that he must be possessed by
the devil for something so horrifying to to be happening.
But by the time he got out of prison, he
(17:14):
found that everybody around him was smoking. It had become
commonplace during just that that time he was put away.
The first sailors seen smoking in London created a riot.
People thought that they were actually drinking smoke. But a
smoking caught on in England. Some elegant men felt that
they actually needed smoking teachers, people who would teach you
how to look good. Not that it was okay at
(17:37):
the time to walk around and smoke. Men would actually
have to duck into apothecary shop, have a smoke, and
then hit the streets again. So it made sense that
tobacco was still considered medicinal by many, and that's why
connection there exactly. So it was like you had an
excuse to be smoking. Obviously, tobacco and smoking can be
(17:57):
a really controversial topic today for health related reasons. Because
of health related concerns, some of Aaron's inclusions reflect how
it was controversial even throughout history. His collection contained critiques
of tobacco through the ages, the earliest of which criticized
the non medicinal use of what was believed to be
and that's when you think about today. It reminded me
(18:19):
a lot of the Radium Girls podcast that we did
last fall, and how people would thought that radium was
medicinal and they would use it even to treat cancer
and things like that, and then later they figured out, oh,
it's actually causing cancer, and uh, it's similar sort of
thing here with tobacco. One of the items that is
in the collection, Tobacco Tortured from sixteen sixteen, focuses on
(18:41):
a degenerate family man who's ruined his life through tobacco.
His wife pleads, quote, Oh, my husband, my husband, why
dost thou so vainly preferred a vanishing, filthy fume before
my permanent virtues? Have I not here brought forth an
army of children into they And the descript and of
just this ragged man who's been destroyed by tobacco kind
(19:04):
of reminds me of the classic After School special almost
except that it's from sixteen sixteen. But thinking about all
the controversies that have surrounded tobacco throughout the years and
even up to today, made us really wonder about how
a collection of the sort is perceived. So we asked
Michael about that. We asked Michael Inman, and he noted
(19:25):
that they haven't really received a lot of flak for
the tobacco collection, but that's probably because it's mostly historical.
He said, most of the volumes are actually pre nineteen
hundred well, and he also shared because of the huge
number of items that aren't really about tobacco, they just
have that mention of it. About fifty percent of the
(19:45):
people who use the collection, who consulted for their research,
aren't really interested in the tobacco content at all. You know,
they're interested in that Alice in Wonderland copy or the
Wizard of Oz or whatever it may be, something completely
apart from tobacco. But tobacco wasn't all that Errants was
interested in. As we mentioned in the intro to this podcast,
in he started his second book collection, Books and Parts,
(20:10):
So it was about a quarter of a century after
he started that initial tobacco collection, and it just made
us really curious. I mean, we had a sense of
what Books and Parts are, but we wanted to talk
to Michael a little bit about what that entails. The
Books and Parts collection is, to my knowledge, is a
unique collection. I mean, there are other rare book collections
(20:30):
out there that have books and parts material material and parts,
I should say, but what makes the Errants collection of
Books and Parts so special is that, so far as
I know, it's the only collection of its kind that's
solely predicated on collecting material in parts. And by parts,
I mean these are original works of literature and a
great many genres which are still in their original serialized form,
(20:54):
and the individual paper wrappers that they came in. The
practice would usually have been to those individual parts bound
up into one binding, but in fact these actually remain
in their original serialized form. I think that that probably
was part of the appeal for Arrans. That here, just
as had been the case with the tobacco part of
(21:16):
the collection, which also I believe is fairly unique in
the sense that it's solely predicated along those lines of
just dealing with tobacco, here was another aspect of book
collecting that Arrants could could focus upon that really was
something that was the other people weren't collecting at that
time at any rate. Michael also went on to theorize
(21:36):
that starting the second collection really allowed Errants a great
avenue for a perfectionist to take. I mean, he was
a perfectionist, and if you collect books and parts, you
can gradually assemble not just a complete set, but a
perfect set, something that was really appealing to Arrants. But
another another reason why he might have started the second
(21:57):
collection is that it allowed him to pursue the chase,
you know, like we talked about earlier, the hunt behind
book collecting. It allowed him to maintain the paith of
book collecting he'd gotten used to. It was really an
adventure for him. As we mentioned, I mean, Sarah and
I were really taken with one part of an essay
we read where it said that Aaron's would learn of
(22:19):
a book that he wanted to get in London and
he would just decide on the spur of the mount
on a boat, take off, get on a boat, and
go get it. And that really excited us. So we
wanted to talk to Michael a little bit about that
thrill of the chase and ask him what his favorite
story or what are some of the most interesting stories
of how Aaron's obtained a volume, And here's what he
(22:40):
had to say. One that comes to mind is that
for a great many years he had had a nearly
complete set of hackle It's voyages and not only was
this is this isn't terribly important work in terms of
North American history, in terms of voyages and travels, uh,
and in terms of printing history, but also the particular
set that he had acquired had belonged to Queen Elizabeth
(23:03):
the first It bears her coat of arms on the binding.
He had a complete set of that work. It's a
multi volume set except for one volume that he was missing,
and finally persistence paid off. He had been searching for
it for years and years and it finally turned up
at at auction and he was able to acquire that
missing volume. But this is something that transpired over a
(23:24):
great many years that he doggedly pursued this one missing
volume out of a multi volume set. Uh. He he
was sort of like a dog with a bone. He
wouldn't let go of something, and he always tried to
to acquire the complete work, as I mentioned earlier. So
that's one example. Uh, he went to great lenks to
(23:46):
acquire all sorts of items. Another example, it's something that
he tried to come by over a period of years.
Were very lucky in the Errant's collection to have the
original manuscript, the original four act manuscript of us. For
wild it's the importance of being earnest and that's something
that again he had to search for the complete set
(24:07):
for a number of years, or the multi volumes because
it's written in several notebooks and he had to search
for several years until he was able to assemble uh
that those two works. I think another thing that surprised
us during our research was that this is not a
static collection. It's something that's grown, and it's something that
has been added to even after Aaron's's death, and the
(24:30):
library still I don't know. Michael talked a little bit
about what acquiring books is like today and he said, well,
he hasn't jetted to London to to obtain materials. There
is still that kind of thrill of the chase element
to pursuing a book that is just perfect for the collection,
something that has high research value but is also incredibly unique.
(24:51):
And he said that they need to always, of course
focus on things that have a link to tobacco. That
is the prime quality vacation for anything that's going to
be in the collection. But it really does need to
be important. It can't just mention tobacco. It has to
almost live up to all the items that are already
in the collection. Right he mentioned research value in particular,
(25:12):
the items that they get must have some sort of
research value, must have some sort of research value to them,
I should say. And so, of course talking about all
of these volumes and their value made us really wonder
what are Michael's favorite things in this collection as the curator,
And so we posed a kind of interesting scenario to
him with nightmare scenario, probably a nightmare actually for a
(25:36):
curator like him. We asked, if the building were burning down,
what would he take with him? The importance of being
earnest is one of my favorites, certainly. There is a
handwritten letter from Queen Elizabeth the First to Charles the
ninth of France, in which she writes in French, uh well,
in response to charles offer he had offered his brother's
(25:57):
hand in marriage to Elizabeth in order to forge alliance
between France and England. And so she wrote back to
him in this very sort of flowery circumlocutionary pros, oh,
I love France and I adore you, and I think
your brother is great. And she goes on and at
the very end of the letter she says rather tersely
sort of thanks but no thanks. That's a good example
(26:18):
again of arrances, very broad mindedness in terms of collecting.
For years I wondered why that letter was in the
collection because there's no connection to tobacco that I can
discern at all. And finally, after a number of years,
I was able to find some notes that Errans had
written where he explained that he had acquired that item
(26:39):
simply because Elizabeth was the first modern female monarch who
was known to smoke. So the connection there even was
somewhat tenuous. But I suspect he saw that letter at
auction or someone offered it to him and it was
just too tempting to pass up. So that's how he
was probably able to justify acquiring it after the fact.
So that letter, I think there are several others um
(27:02):
from Sir Walter Rawleigh and several other individuals from that
period that are quite magnificent. There is another item that
I really love is the first edition of the Wizard
of Oz that Frank Baum inscribed to his mother. Very
touching little inscription there where he writes a note to
his mother. So that's that's certainly wonderful. It's really hard
(27:24):
to sort of draw the line just two or three.
I think we're you know, Goodness forbid, the building I
were on fire, I would probably be in the building
much longer than it was probably safe to be, trying
to grab as many things as I could. But certainly
those would be a few of the top picks that
come to mind. Um, he would ask me the same
question tomorrow, I probably would give you a completely different list,
(27:47):
and you know, to keep going on for the next
several months. So that drastic scenario, you know, the building
burning down, what are you going to save? Kind of
led us to a less drastic scenario one of how
how are these material is preserved? How do people use them?
And it was interesting to hear that because this is
a library a lot of these museum where the items
(28:08):
are available to the public. You know, you can apply
to to consult with these materials and look at them yourself.
Something I think, touch them, we have touch them, something
that I think really sets rare book libraries like this apart. Yeah,
and Michael told us a little bit about the preservation
and how meticulous they have to be to make sure
(28:29):
that these volumes do stay intact so that people can
use them. In the future as well. And so that's
a big aspect of keeping the collections there. It's not
just curating them and finding the right volumes and the
thrill of the chase. It's making sure that they're they're around,
that they're around for a while. And uh, to that point,
(28:50):
we also talked to him about the future of these collections,
thinking about you guys especially, I mean, will these ever
be available for people to see even if you can't
make a trip all the way to the main building
of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. And
he mentioned that there is a digitization project going on
at the New York Public Library, as I'm sure there
(29:11):
are in many libraries around the world, and they're slowly,
i think, converting all these volumes or as many as
they can, to digital versions. So someday you may be
able to look us up from the comfort of your home. Yeah,
And that really does have to two values to it.
One that if you have these high quality reproductions digital reproductions,
(29:33):
not as many people need to touch that first manuscript
of importance of being earnest if they're researching it. But also, yeah,
people who can't make it to New York can can
take a look at some of this stuff, take a
look at that baseball card or the counter blast or
whatever it may be. Obviously that holds a lot of
allure for us. We always need more materials for research,
(29:55):
and so this was kind of a little bit of
a vanity podcast for us, I guess in that sense
because or maybe that question in particular was because we
we really would love to have access to these. But
that's about all we have for this episode on George
Arrants and his collection. Um, I would love to know
if any listeners out there have their own collections books
(30:16):
or otherwise that they've started as hobbies, side projects and
have seen grown throughout the years. I mean, I would
really I have hobbies, but my hobbies are like playing
soccer or have been playing music or whatever. I haven't
really collected anything ever, and that has always held a
lot of fascination for me. Well, and I really liked
(30:36):
the idea of a focused book collection because it meant
that Arrants, even even when he was young, even when
he didn't have a lot of money to spend on
some of these more magnificent items or money to go
off to London and collect a huge amount of work.
He had a collection even with just a few items,
and that was the appeal. You know, if you have
(30:59):
this fox gus to your collection, even a few books
are a collection that you don't need an entire library. Well,
I think that's a more hopeful way to look at it.
So if you do have, if you've started, even if
it's with just a few books, book collection, or any
sort of collection, and you want to share that with us,
please write us wre History Podcast at Discovery dot com.
(31:20):
You can also look us up on Facebook or on
Twitter ATMs in history. And we also have a great
article out there for all of you guys who are
trying to choose the prime things you'll be adding to
your future collection. It's called top ten rare Book. Then
you can find it by searching on our homepage at
www dot house stepp works dot com. Be sure to
(31:45):
check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future.
Join how stepp Work staff as we explore the most
promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The Houstuff Works iPhone
app has a ride. Download it today on iTunes. Do
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