Looking back from the age of almost-64, I realize that, throughout my life, the things I've wasted the most money on are the things I have the greatest fondness for. Primarily music and stereo playback equipment, photography equipment and supplies, and now pool, with books bringing up the rear.
Although with books, at least, their physical size (combined with limited room for them and the need to carry them with me through house moves) and the speed at which I can consume them both serve to limit my appetite for them.
With books I was also fortunate to come to some semblance of sense early on. Having a personal library was one of my ambitions since childhood, and when I was an otherwise maladjusted hard-drinking angry-young-man teenager I got started learning about rare books. I'm a fairly quick study when I'm motivated, and in short order I had consumed multiple volumes on collecting, typesetting and printing, bookbinding, and biblio-history. In my twenties, in Washington, D.C., I befriended Bill Hale of William F. Hale Book Shop and his mentor the novelist Larry McMurtry, and soon knew all the rare and secondhand booksellers in D.C. at that time, including Andy Moursund, with whom I've been in contact recently (he's also a pool player, and a good one). Andy was the one who knew the most about photography books—I've never seen Andy's photo book collection, but there is still time. Larry owned a bookshop across the street from Bill's with his business partner Marcia Carter, who, I was told, was the sister of the guy who drove the bus for Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters during the overland trip famously chronicled by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
In fact, I was set to embark on a career in books until I was derailed by none other than Ronald Reagan. I was just about to be hired by Peter Waters at the Library of Congress Preservation Division, as a conservator and bookbinder trainee. I'd been through multiple interviews and was told I had the job when Reagan was elected in 1980 and froze Federal hiring. The Congressional branch didn't have to go along, but it did, out of a spirit of cooperation—an exotic notion which still existed in American government at that time. (Quaint, huh?) So the position was open, I was waiting, and Peter kept calling to tell me he was sorry. I was working at the time as a handyman at a local garden center, and got a job moonlighting at a frame shop in order to learn how to frame my photographs. Months went by, and I got tired of waiting, so I enrolled in photography school at what was then called the Corcoran School of Art, which is about a Brett Favre long pass and a half away from the White House. I don't think I ever knew what became of the L.o.C. job. I guess it just evaporated.
But in the time when I was hanging around Bill and Larry and Andy, I was hot to become a book collector. I wanted to specialize in fine press books and Elizabethan translations. I was a particular fan of the book designer Bruce Rogers, who was a Hoosier like me and died the year I was born. So I saved my money and bought Rogers' magnificent three-volume set of the Essays of Montaigne, translated by John (born Giovanni) Florio 1553–1625, printed in 1902 by the Riverside Press. It was the first book in which Rogers' first typeface, called Montaigne, appeared. I bought it from Larry, who gave me a friendly discount on it—$800 for the set (equivalent to about $2,100 today). It was all the money I had.
But the purchase made me a real book collector, and I was greatly pleased. There the Montaigne sat, on my shelves in my miserable little room under the basement stairs in my father's Westmoreland Hills house. I could enjoy it every day, at will. The trouble was that after making me penniless for months on end, I had transferred my wealth, such as it was, into printed paper and boards; so there also sat, on those shelves, in book form, my entire fortune. It wasn't a very convenient bank. It slowly dawned on me that I could hardly get around to making a second big purchase (although I managed a number of small ones) for a simple but signal reason: I didn't have much money.
So eventually I was forced to come 'round to what is called reality, and apprehended that I could not become a book collector because book collecting is for wealthy people and not for the likes of me. Tail firmly planted between legs, I sold the Rogers set back to Larry and resolved to be a little more realistic about my prospects and not live with my head in the clouds. So I have never been a book collector since, although I do have a few volumes now that commemorate that onetime ambition. I still have a number of books that were gifts from Larry, who I think meant to encourage my interest, including a binder's copy of the first Irish edition of the autobiography of Edward Gibbon, who wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a fine binder's set of which Larry also gave me. Of course I did not become a bookbinder, and have never had enough money to have the Decline rebound—to do it right would cost about $300 per volume, and there are twelve volumes. And so it goes.
I used to say I was the only book collector ever who had a collection with only one book in it. Not quite true—there were three volumes of the Montaigne, and I did have a motley of other books—but you get the joke.
Anyway not being a book collector has saved me a whole lot of money over the years. Although I do prefer hardcovers, mostly I buy books for that most practical of reasons: to read.
The same cannot be said of photography equipment. Granted, the issue is confused (slightly) by the fact that I've written about photography equipment over the years. But I can't avoid admitting that over the years I have bought altogether too many cameras and lenses. I never got much use at all out the two most expensive cameras I ever bought. In both cases, for whatever reason, I didn't warm to them, and neither one ever became a go-to, even for a short period of time.
Of course, they are only the tip of the iceberg; I do not wish to attempt to calculate the amount of money I have spent on photography equipment and supplies over the last 40 years. There's little doubt that it reaches into six figures—$100,000 divided by 40 is only $2,500, and there were years that I spent more than that on photo paper alone.
Don't want to think about it, don't want to think about it.
I have to drive to Rochester today, to get the car serviced. When I get back I'll tell you what I wish I had done where photography equipment is concerned, and confess to my current obsessions. To be continued....
Mike
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Featured Comments from:
Paul McEvoy: "Not entirely related but for a while I had a cool 1960s cruising sailboat. Only 28.5', not big but capable. I found after I bought it that it needed tons of work to do what I wanted. I didn't have much money but spent every dollar I made on the boat. I had no idea how much I was spending.
"About halfway through the rebuild, which took three years off an on, I added up my credit card bills from West Marine where I'd been buying supplies. I was using a friend's commercial account so was getting supplies at wholesale prices.
"I added it up and it was well over $50k. The crazy thing is...I didn't even know I had $50k. I had nothing. And West Marine was by no means the only place I was buying stuff.
"I was making reasonable money working as a nurse but still.
"After that, I stopped looking at the bills. I really have no idea how much I sank into the boat. It was all a great adventure and I sailed her 2,000 miles by myself and saw a lot of amazing stuff. I wish I'd been a little smarter when I bought the boat but I don't have a ton of regrets. During the pandemic, little pleasant memories of adventures I've had come filtering in and out on an hourly basis and the boat provided hundreds of vivid ones. Walking around an island in Maine where I knew I was the only person on it, looking at stunning views. Or sailing with a pack of hundreds of dolphins off of New Jersey.
"My joke is, I bought the boat for $6k, put $70k into her and sold her for $10k. So I made $4k!!"
Mike replies: That's a lovely little tale. Thanks Paul.
robert mckeen: "Nothing wrong about buying camera equipment, they can provide pleasure in multiple ways, what they look like, how they sound and for a special gifted few, what they capture. Although being the devil's advocate the words of Oscar Wilde cannot be forgotten. 'I can resist everything but temptation.'"
Jnny: "If you had all the money you spent on cameras, you'd spend it on cameras. (Said about many cost-intensive hobbies.)"
Crabby Umbo: "As an ex-D.C.'er, let me just say I'm monumentally impressed that you got so far as to get a 'sort-of' promise for a job at the Library of Congress! I waltzed into D.C. (at the time) with 30 years photographic experience, and 15 years management experience, and I couldn't get a job in any part of the Smithsonian in any area of media or photography! It was even almost impossible to get 'informational' interviews, although I got a few. When I saw the people that were getting the jobs I wanted, it was inexplicable! Not just 'sour grapes' thinking, but truly not the best people based on skills and experience!
"I met many people working at some of the places I wanted to work at in the govt., and many were clueless about how they got the job they got! One went so far to tell me she applied for the job under hers, didn't get it, and was given a job over the position she wanted, and had spent the last two years trying to get 'down' to the position she wanted, to no avail!
"Although I got a job at a national broadcaster, it was obvious that there was no way I was going to get something I wanted in D.C. When my Dad passed and I needed to move back to the Midwest for my Mom, it was no great decision to do it.
"I left D.C. understanding that the job market was totally based on a meritocracy, and the ruler for measurement was 1. Multiple college degrees (at the best schools). 2. Military experience. 3. Who you know. 4. Some undefined thing at the department you're trying to get a job at based on their current internal politics. 5. (and last), Your ability to actually do the job, and having relative experience doing it.
Mike replies: I might have been among those "truly not the best people based on skills and experience" you mention. There was a gifted conservator working at the Preservation Division at the time who was experimenting with new methods of bookbinding—I remembered his name for many years but have now forgotten it—and of course Peter himself was a master bookbinder from England. They told me they were looking for someone who had promise and aptitude as a craftsperson so they could train him or her from scratch, rather than hire bookbinders who had already been trained and already had experience. Apparently skilled bookbinders they hired tended to be "set in their ways" and were difficult to re-train. So the other conservator whose name I can't recall interviewed me extensively by testing various generalized craftsmanship skills, but they intended to train me to do things their way. That's not well expressed but that's my memory. It was a full forty years ago now, and it didn't end up being my field, so I don't recall all the details any more.
That's a pretty good assessment of the job market in D.C., by the way, especially item no. 4, although your no. 2 didn't have much bearing on the kinds of jobs I would have been interested in. I did wrangle an information interview once with Eugene Ostroff, which impressed certain people in town at the time. He was Curator of the Photographic History Collection at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, and a formidable scholar. And just formidable, too. I was trying to get him to let me work for him for six months just for my own training and experience, with the expectation that I didn't want and wouldn't expect employment after that. Following the advice of David R. Godine, a book publisher from Boston who was a close friend of one of my professors at Reed College, the poet Gary Miranda, I offered to "sweep floors," metaphorically or literally, to get a foot in the door. It was a pretty outrageous request, looking back on it, but Mr. Ostroff almost went for it. He finally demurred because he felt it would have been too unfair to those who worked for years to qualify themselves legitimately for the positions he had to offer at the Museum.
Gregory Kriss: "When my son was in 3rd grade, his teacher asked each of the students to count the number of books in their house. My son told the class that there were something like 500+ books in his house. Next day I received a call from his teacher that she wanted to see me. I came to the school to meet with her and she told me that we had a problem... My son had obviously lied and exaggerated on the number of books that were in our household. I told her that he actually vastly undercounted the amount of books we had."
Mike replies: Made me laugh. :-) Reminds me of an old New Yorker cartoon I've never been able to find again. A rich old man in a Chesterfield coat smoking a cigar and a young bimbo in a mink coat are being shown an empty apartment by a real estate agent. All the walls are lined with empty bookshelves. The young woman has a bewildered expression on her face and asks, "What kind of people lived here?"
David L Glos: "It is a far sadder tale to encounter someone that has never aspired for a mountaintop or tilted at a windmill, even if unrealistic upon reflection. Desires can be mercurial, but oh do they make life interesting. As I see it, there was no harm done, and you were able to share an interesting and enriching experience. Net positive."
Geoff Wittig: "Book collecting used to be a lovely and diverting hobby. There was a substantial reward for becoming knowledgeable about books and fine printing because you could immediately recognize under-valued 'finds' on the dusty shelves of quaint little mom 'n' pop bookstores in small towns. Circa 1990 I would plan vacations and medical training courses partly around proximity to appealing small used-and-rare bookstores. Some of my proudest possessions are beautifully printed letterpress books from the fine press Renaissance (circa 1890 to 1930s) bought for a song at such places.
"The Internet unfortunately dropped a neutron bomb on my hobby. By the early 2000s such bookstores were passing into the hands of the owners' media-savvy kids who sensibly listed their holdings on-line. And big money collectors promptly swooped down to vacuum up the most desirable books, driving prices sky-high and making serendipitous finds a thing of the past. Now anyone with a platinum credit card and a knowledge of Google and Alibris can find whatever they can afford in seconds. Sigh."
Mike replies: The Internet killed pool hustling deader than a doornail, too, not that it ever had anything to do with my life. It used to be that the hustler would travel to towns where he wasn't known and play the best players at the local halls for money. As soon as the Internet happened, whatever action was still left in the towns and hamlets not only knew which hustlers were coming, they knew all about them before they got there.
I have a cousin whose ex-husband used to collect artifacts of her and my family's legacy business, an early ice-cream manufacturer called Furnas Ice Cream that by midcentury became part of the Borden's dairy cooperative. (My great-great grandfather started in 1888 and eventually owned ice-cream factories in seven Midwestern cities. I joke that ice cream made the family wealthy for four generations but I'm the fifth.) Anyway, if I remember the story correctly, Mark spent 30 years looking and had found six major items and a bunch of smaller ones by scouring junk shops and antiques stores. Then the Internet and eBay came along and in only a few years he had so many items that he stopped collecting. No more joy in the hunt.
