A Library Made to Order:
Pretty Covers and Pretty Content
Call it the instant library.
It used to take years to amass a library full of rare books. But today rare-book dealers are coming out from behind their dusty corridors to pull together hundreds of volumes almost overnight for clients with empty shelves and plenty of money to spend. For $20,000 to $45,000, personal-library dealers can assemble a collection of 800 to 1,200 titles, enough to make you want to don your smoking jacket and retire to the study.
Cynthia and Charles Vance at first balked when their interior designer recommended hiring outside help to outfit their library. "I can't buy my own books?" Mrs. Vance remembers her husband saying. But now
the Vances' personal stacks in their McLean, Va., home are filled with 800
antiquarian titles -- including such finds as "Memoirs of an Aesthete" (1939, $250) and "The History of the Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire" (1880, leatherbound, $1,850) -- collected for them by Kinsey Marable, a Manhattan book dealer specializing in personal libraries. "It would have taken me years to do that," says Mrs. Vance, a former TV news anchor whose husband runs a security business.
Not 'Books by the Yard'
Booksellers say this approach differs from the "books by the yard" shortcutthat decorators sometimes use to fill empty bookcases. Althoughbooks-by-the-yard costs far less at $100 a foot, it comes with noconsideration for content. Booksellers preparing personal libraries, on the other hand, meet with clients to discuss their interests and then tailor the collections accordingly. The books "certainly are pretty and decorative-looking," says Mr. Marable, "but hopefully the client would want to pick one up one day."
Like other collectibles, the books' prices depend on their condition and how scarce the titles are. For the booksellers, the appeal of arranging an instant library is that they can sell several hundred volumes at once, at the same prices collectors would pay for individual volumes.
Some dealers, though, thumb their nose at such enterprises. "The whole notion of 'new house, new library' could not be more offensive to me," says Peter Howard, owner of Serendipity Books in Berkeley, Calif. "It's an act of ego out of control."
Saving Time
But clients who've bought their library collections say it's impractical to do it book by book. When Alease and Andrew Fisher moved into a new house in Greenwich, Conn., they realized their new library was three times the size of their old one. "We really needed books," says Mrs. Fisher, a stay-at-home mom whose husband runs a hedge fund. "I didn't want to have to put a lot of knickknacks on the shelves."
Lee Biondi of Heritage Book Shop in Los Angeles says most of the people who hire him to create a library either have recently come into some money or moved into larger homes. The bookshop has been around for 35 years, but Mr. Biondi says it has been only in the past two or three years that the store found a market for its library-building service.
Kenneth Rendell, a South Natick, Mass., rare-books dealer, says his personal-library clients are most interested in collections that relate to their jobs. Mr. Rendell stocked a collection of more than 10,000 books and manuscripts for Bill Gates's three-room library, including shelves dedicated to computer history and Leonardo da Vinci.
Getting to read all the books in the collections is another story. Mrs. Vance says she is skeptical of her husband's plans. "He keeps saying that he's going to read them all before he dies, and I say, 'Yeah, good luck.' "
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