Horizontal hula Getting a bead on collecting old books BY TANYA WHITON
	Between the lines • Sunday, June 20, from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., MABA and the Maine Historical Society cohost the 25th Annual Portland Book, Print & Paper Show, at the Portland Expo, 239 Park Avenue. Preview starts at 8:30 a.m. for die-hards. • June 4 and 5, University of New England will be hosting a writer’s conference centered on the theme of "Time, Place and Memory: Memoir and Historical Fiction," featuring Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Ahab’s Wife and Four Spirits. For more info go to www.une.edu/mwwc/writconf/index.htm.

I’ve long felt that there was something wrong, something suspect, about writers who don’t love books. Not just books, paperback or hardcover, but rare books, aged books, signed first editions. Antiquarian books. The sort of books whose spines you cradle in your palm, protecting the binding, books whose pages you turn gently.

A confession: I’m one of them. I’ve never understood the attachment to books as objects. In my mind, once you’ve read a book, you’ve completed your business with it, taken the language up with your eyes and allowed it to inhabit your mind. Need it also inhabit your shelves? A year ago, I sold my fiction, all of it, all that unfinished business with Calvino and Borges, who insisted each time I surveyed the shelf that I really ought to exercise my brain a little harder. Choose me, each book said. I’m the one. Where would I begin to choose, faced with the added weight of history, of rarity?

I called my friend Buffy, a collector, a great lover of books, and one of the most voraciously well-read people I’ve ever encountered, and I asked her: What’s the big deal? She read me the following passage from Jeanette Winterson’s essay, The Psychometry of Books: "Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it. Those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp-collecting, a sister of the trophy cabinet, bastard of a sound bank account and a weak mind."

Elegant, I thought. But I still don’t get it. I’m unable to understand the covetousness that accompanies collecting anything, other than the type of summer dresses my mother refers to as "slatternly."

I phoned Barrie Pribyl, President of the Maine Antiquarian Booksellers Association, and owner of ABCD Books in Camden, and asked her the same question, albeit in slightly more diplomatic language: Why?

"Do you collect anything?" she asked. To which I replied, "Not really, well, yeah, well, no." I haven’t even bought a flimsy summer dress in over a year.

"You don’t have the collecting gene," Pribyl said. "In the future, they’ll do DNA tests, and [be able to identify it]." Pribyl bought ABCD Books when the original owner passed away. She’d first seen the store in 1968. "My father always said he’d support me in anything I did, but when I decided to do this, he said it was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard of ¾ after all, you can just go and check out a book from the library." That was 10 years ago.

Pribyl adds that there are two ways to collect: vertically, or horizontally. She gives an example, in which the vertical collector is narrow, specific, a person who, perhaps, is only interested in Jane Austen, and therefore solely collects books related to Austen’s life and work. The horizontal collector, on the other hand, goes to Venice for a week, falls in love with Venice, and then begins collecting books related to various aspects of the city, or even the country: history, art, etc.

"Horizontal horizontal," I said. I would be a horizontal collector, and therein lies my problem: choosing. I meander from book to book, writer to writer, never reading all of one person’s work, disdaining biography. I dread conversations with real bibliophiles, with other writers, in which the names and titles of even books I loved elude me.

I drove out to the Burbank branch of the Portland Public Library to get a copy of Jeanette Winterson’s essays, Art Objects, and read the piece from which my friend had quoted earlier. Winterson writes about purchasing her first First Edition, a hand-set copy of Robert Graves’s To Whom Else?, from a "talking bear," a worldly and perhaps somewhat pedantic rare books dealer who accused her of "autograph hunting." She develops a relationship, an affection for the bear, and years later, buys a signed copy of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room: "As he said, expensive. But so rare to find one signed . . ."

And oddly enough, that made me cry. To have a book signed by Virginia Woolf, to have her presence in the room, with the dusty plants and scattered papers, illuminating the occasional shabbiness of a writing day with her signature ¾ the thought of that made me a little dizzy, made me squint to imagine it on the page.

Barrie Pribyl mailed me a copy of MABA’s directory, which can be found online at www.mainebooksellers.org, a handy pamphlet that lists all of the antiquarian book dealers in Maine and their respective specialties: maritime history, women’s writing, literary correspondence, the Civil War ¾ there’s something for everyone, horizontal or vertical ¾ and it contains a map, too. This summer, I plan on making a tour. I’ll be the one sitting baffled on the old Oriental rug, a book about pirates in one hand and the collected letters of T.S. Eliot in the other, hamstrung over where to begin.

Tanya Whiton can be reached at twhiton@prexar.com