(This week at Brooks Books Etc I am having a very large Fall Clearance Sale. I guess I just decided I had too many books and needed to make room for some new inventory. While I was going through some of the shelves I was reminded of a short piece I wrote many years ago for Connoisseur magazine. In it I profiled Tice Alexander, a leading decorator in New York at the time. He had a passion for books that made my own little collection seem small and pedestrian. I loved interviewing him. Sadly, he passed away not long after this article appeared. I have no idea what happened to all his wonderful books. Ironically, this article was written before the advent of the internet and Amazon.com and ABEBOOKS which makes collecting old tomes so much easier and in many cases less expensive. In fact some of the titles mentioned in this article I was able to find on Ebay. While I appreciate the facility offered by these new options, I think something intangible and magical has been lost in the bargain. Nothing can take the place of browsing through an old bookstore and stumbling upon a find, or a book you’ve been longing to have for years. I’m not sure what Tice would have made of Alibris and the lot. But I do know that he would have enjoyed perusing my bookstore and sharing a spot of tea over a good game of Scrabble.)

All Booked Up

Bibliomania is the world’s most exalted neurosis. The passion for collecting books — usually in large quantities — is as old as civilization itself, dating back to the libraries of ancient Alexandria in Egypt where manuscripts were treasured as nourishment of the soul. In modern times, the urge to accumulate private collections has in no way diminished, although finding top-quality first editions and rare out-of-print books has become increasingly difficult and prohibitively expensive.

Tice Alexander is one of New York City’s most eclectic, yet selective, bibliophiles, having assembled more than two thousand biographies, folios, encyclopedia, notebooks, novels, catalogs and diaries dealing specifically with the decorative arts, fashion and style. A casual glance at the towering black bookcases that line the living room walls of his Upper West Side apartment reveals an astonishing diversity: a copy of Les Passions Selon Dali signed by adding a flamboyant original drawing done with a felt-tip pen; a mint-condition copy of a catalog from Florine Stettheimer’s 1946 exhibition of paintings at the Museum of Modern Art; sketchbooks by muralist Rex Whistler and Vertes, the elegant thirties fashion illustrator; photographic anthologies by Jerome Zerbe and Baron Adolph de Meyer; complete sets of rare first edition Cecil Beatons; novels by Ronald Firbank and F. Scott Fitzgerald (including a first edition of The Great Gatsby with its haunting dustjacket); plus a smattering of Sitwells, Mitfords and Waughs. (more…)