A Book Lover's Memories of WHA

Al Lowman

Although book collectors collect books because of a life-long love of learning, they also collect them to build friendships. Nowhere was this process more apparent than at WHA conferences. While the Internet may some day confine books to computer screens, for the time being, book collectors will continue to buy books and meet fascinating people.

Posh Oltorf is--or was--the closet thing that Marlin, Texas, has to a boulevardier. In a delightful memoir called The Marlin Compound (Austin, 1968), he recited how his uncle Tom Bartlett would take his sons and nephews on Sunday afternoon strolls through the old Cavalry Cemetery, telling stories about those buried under the tombstones. Came the day that one of those boys expressed curiosity about a grave marker in the shape of an electric utility pole. It was explained that it signified both the occupation as well as the cause of death of the grave's occupant. He had been electrocuted while working as a lineman for the power company. "Uncle Tom said this was a dangerous precedent, lest there follow a steady erection of granite in the shape of phallic symbols and whiskey bottles."	1
Seventy years later I wander among the shelves of my library and see books that stimulate my memory as grave stones stimulated those of Tom Bartlett's. In my case, they are memories of book people--authors, illustrators, designers, publishers, sellers--many of whom I met at Western History Association conferences. Here is the palpable record of a lifetime's accumulation of friendships.	2
In the 20 June 2000 issue of the New York Times, John Updike wrote eloquently of the ways in which his entire life story unfolds in the books that he has acquired along the way, each book bringing to life cherished memories. His point is that the presence of the physical book could never be filled with a computer screen. Everette DeGolyer Jr., a familiar figure at WHA meetings almost to the year of his death, would have likened such a substitution to a swain giving his enamorata a good-night kiss through a latched screen door.	3
Psychologist Werner Muensterberger in his book Collecting: An Unruly Passion (Princeton, 1994), speculates that the collector's impulse is born, not of intellectual curiosity or an appreciation of beauty, but as a means of compensating for some deficiency in one's upbringing. He makes a comparison with drug addiction and sexual profligacy. Like Don Juan, there are collectors who live for the chase and conquest, not for any long term relationship.	4
OK. Tell that to Petrarch, the great apostle of the Renaissance, the first modern man, who gave his books and manuscripts to found the library at Venice. "There is within me," Petrarch said, "an unquenchable desire which I have never been able to suppress, nor have I desired to suppress it, for I flatter myself that the desire for worthy things can never be unworthy. Would you know my complaint? I cannot satisfy my hunger for books, even when I have already more perhaps than are needful to me. But the search is like others; success only sharpens the edge of desire."	. . .