This is an abridged primer for owners of a personal design research library—for divesting and extricating oneself from a massive amount of books and journals, portfolios and documents accumulated, like mine, for over 50 years.
In the heat of the collection frenzy—for me, from age 17–65—one rarely considers what will happen to the rare and rarefied (not to mention heavy) stash of design/design-adjacent, typography and art books, but at some point a personal or practical need for deaccession will become necessary. At this auspicious moment in a lifetime, the purging of property takes over and you will doubtless become caught up in an overwhelming emotional period of self-realization.
Here is my story (in part), and how I’ve coped so far with the transformation from devoted chronicler and avid collector of design’s historical raw materials to someone who needs to rid himself of a burden that has become crushingly immense.
Collections are living things: They grow old, hungry, quirky, stubborn and illogically defiant. This was true of my first here that was stuffed into (seeped out of) a dedicated apartment. Eventually the entire cave had to be disassembled and deposited in accessible new homes with climate control and UV protection.
For all those who are in the throes of building and adding to their personal libraries, I hope these simple lessons will be useful.
To the wannabe collector or archivist: Find a place where your collection can breathe. Where you and others will have access to the often unexpected large number of books that have been authored, compiled and otherwise chronicled the expansive fields of graphic and industrial design, typography and popular art (add to my book list an impressive number of tomes on propaganda history). I built my haven in the wilds of New England, where not by chance other older designer collectors with similar passions lived, worked and collected throughout the mid-20th century (some of whom became my friends and dealers).
It is crucial to create a pleasant and comfortable environment where you can access the items when you need them. A place you can work without stress with generous enough space to hold your treasures and acquisitions. I created three separate library spaces in three different rooms (amounting to 400-plus lineal feet of built in shelving).
Be certain that there is enough room to grow your holdings and to organize them as best you can. My own organizational system was in my own head (but I knew where almost everything was). This is the core of my upstate library.
There is no rhyme or reason to where on the shelves the books are placed (no Dewey Decimal System or color coding). Yet part of the fun, if sometimes frustration, was not knowing the exact whereabouts of a volume—then stumbling upon it after giving up the ghost.
To be honest, this library is one of two. The major holdings are in New York City (350 lineal feet). So you might say this was my run-over stash. However, there are almost as many important rarities here as are in the apartment. I’d venture I have 6,000-plus books in both places. Plus a few hundred in my office.
I have donated many boxes of books and periodicals over the years as my needs for information and access to it have changed (e.g., I moved on to different themes). But with this second library it was always good to know that if ever I needed a particular volume, I would eventually find it on one of these shelves.
The “Library” portion of the house also includes an “office” with bookshelves and closets where I store books I couldn’t fit anywhere else. Above is a filled shelf in the living room, which is rather minimalist, save for the full wall of built-ins. Much of the material on these shelves dates back to when I first haunted the bookstores of northern and southern New England.
This year it was decided that owning a second house was too difficult and stressful. But determining what to do with the collections caused even more stress. What do I keep? What do I donate? What do I sell? Who do I donate or sell it to?
A plan was devised to keep the disparate collection together, rather than dispose of it piecemeal. I had fantasized about opening a pop-up design bookstore in a neighboring town, but that idea was quickly nixxed. The next best idea was to offer the library—lock, stock and barrel—to anyone who would pack and take it away to someplace it would be tended for, looked after and made available as a research body for students and professionals. Once that was established, the process was like pulling out my heart by the aorta. I was in pain as they were slowly taken from the shelves and packed safely in boxes, wrapped in protective sheets of material.
I swore I wouldn’t look at the packing and loading of the two trucks that would haul them to their (hopefully) final destination. (More on that later.) But hell, I couldn’t not say goodbye. So, I sat in the library listening to their new owner as they came down around me as if an avalanche of printed paper. I did not have the heart to venture into the living room (above) or the upstairs closets or the office until the day after. That’s when I saw emptiness—a void where once these entities acquired over 50 years, each with their own separate stories, were housed and now gone.
The truckers asked me if I wanted to take any “special” ones out to keep. A kind of book-lover’s Sophie’s Choice. I did not. I had made up my mind: all or nothing (6840 pounds). I stuck to that, too, until the last minute when I salvaged one volume. I brought it back to the city, and here it will stay until it’s time to dismantle this library, too.
INTERMISSION
(Part Two to come: Objects and Artifacts)
