(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.

Other shelves are weighed down by two- and three-inch thick tomes on Turkish harems, Russian palaces, French chateaux, English gardens, and American country houses. Elegantly bound volumes on mounted porcelains, precious stones, Chinese lacquer, and Chippendale furniture abound.

“I’ve never said no to a book,” says Alexander, an interior designer who studied at Manhattan’s Fashion Institute of Technology, then spent six years at the firm of Parish-Hadley and now runs his own business. Growing up near Kansas City, Missouri, Alexander conceived the idea of a library early on. “By the time I was twelve, I had hundreds of books,” he recalls. “My mother had a huge bookcase built for me in my bedroom.” Even now, at 33, Alexander takes stacks of books to bed with him, “reading them over and over” until he drifts off to sleep. Such devotion raises a few eyebrows, especially when he spends hours poring over a history of 18th-century tortoiseshell spoons or waxes ecstatic over a signed copy of the classic slim volume Recipes for Succesful Dining by legendary decorator Elsie de Wolfe.

“I get so much pleasure from my collection,” Alexander says. “It gives me a real edge in my professional life. So many people decide they have good taste, even though they’ve never done anything, seen anything, or known anybody! The idea of studying books on furniture or beautiful rooms would never occur to them.”

Alexander does more than just look at his books: he creates his own leatherbound scrapbooks (with marbelized paper) filled with clips from old issues of Vogue, Connaissance des Arts, Architectural Digest, Town & Country — even National Geographic. Many of the photos feature the homes of tastemakers such as the late Charles de Beistegui and Pauline de Rothschild, as well as the work of Alexander’s favorite decorators, including Stephane Boudin, Madeleine Castaing, Renzo Mongiardino and Albert Hadley.

The dearth of connoisseurship in the design world, Alexander says, “is a major problem today. You can’t do beautiful rooms unless you understand them in their historical context. You have to know about rooms by Syrie Maugham, Elsie de Wolfe, and Billy Baldwin. It’s very important to me to carry on the tradition. There are great collections of books on decorative arts, but they are not as personal as mine.”

What makes Tice Alexander’s collection so personal is his boundless curiosity for the obscure and esoteric. Many of his books focus on dandyism, that peculiar social phenomenon of 19th-century England in which young, well-to-do men dressed in fanciful attire and affected a worldly decadence. Baudelaire described dandyism as a “sunset like the declining daystar, it is glorious, without heat and full of melancholy.” But to Alexander, dandyism was a significant development in the history of style, representing an almost “spiritual quest” on the part of the aesthetes to express their inner selves within the contraints of society.

Browsing through Alexander’s library, one might easily get the impression that he is obsessed by high society, aristocracy, and European royalty. Besides Nancy Mitford’s celebrated biographies of Frederick the Great, Madame de Pompadour and Louis XIV, there are scads of books on the Windsors (including one amusingly called Gone with the Windsors) as well as a droll treatise entitled The Book of Snobs, by the Duke of Bedford. And Alexander’s noble obsession extends beyond books. He eats off china from Spode that the Windsors commissioned for their New York apartment. A red leather and gilt-tooled royal dispatch box engraved with the Windsor coat of arms and a rare set of 18th-century engravings commissioned by Louis XIV depicting costume designs for the Ballet de la Nuit are only several of Alexander’s possessions boasting of a royal provenance.

But what interests Alexander most is not a person’s title or social prestige. “It is the way an individual expresses his or her unique point of view,” he says. “I wouldn’t have friends whose sense of style I couldn’t respect. Is that a terrible thing to say? Well, it doesn’t have to be my style particularly, but something they have nurtured.”

The person Alexander most admired for her ingenious and dramatic sense of style was Diana Vreeland. “I was fascinated by her whole point of view,” he says. “The way she moved, dressed, and talked, her sense of elegance, restraint. To me, that is what style is all about.” After Vreeland’s death in 1989, Alexander was able to purchase her personal copy of a book for which he’d been searching for years: The Book of the Pearl, by George Frederick Kunz and Charles Hughes Stevenson, published in 1908. A rare, extravagantly oversize volume (subtitled The History, Science, Art, and Industry of the Queen of Gems), the Book of the Pearl proved invaluable not only because of its glamorous lineage but also because Vreeland marked her favorite sections, including a photograph of an exquisite Indian carpet made entirely of pearls and diamonds that some experts assert was originally designed to cover the tomb of Muhammad. To the true collector, such personal touches are often more valuable than the book itself.

“It was Stanley Barrows, the chairman of the interior design department at FIT, who first encouraged me to collect seriously,” Alexander says. “He made lists of what I needed and sent me to antiquarian book fairs and used-book shops all over town. I practically lived at the Strand (a large second-hand bookstore on lower Broadway). As a student it was the only place I could afford.” But the early rummaging paid off. Alexander found many of the books his mentor Barrows recommended, “and thank God,” he adds, “because most of them are impossible to find and many are ten times what I paid for them.”

Alexander’s most highly prized possession, however, cannot be bought at any store or found at any auction house. It is a boxed set of renderings of “fantastical, whimsical” grottoes, chateaux, and “wild” conceptual designs by the noted Cuban-born architect Emilio Terry. The portfolio, published as a tribute after Terry’s death in the 60s, was limited to 100 copies. “There is a legend surrounding this book,” Alexander says. “It can only be given away, passed on by one admirer of Emilio Terry’s work to another.” According to Alexander, he doesn’t plan to give away his copy anytime soon.”