SECONDHAND ROWS

...I can still remember the mingled excitement and frustration I felt, in early December 1963, when I found a fi rst edition of The Great Gatsby for $10 at the old Benjamin Franklin Book Shop on Pennsylvania Avenue...

...In my defense, I should explain that my collecting has been largely confined to certain subjects—18thcentury English literature, the history of Virginia, King Edward II, beagling, Max Beerbohm, T.S...

...I arose early on a Saturday morning and, as I have once a year for decades, drove with cash, checks, credit cards, and mounting anticipation to the annual Washington Antiquarian Book Fair, held in an unprepossessing hotel ballroom in Arlington, overlooking the Potomac River...

...Yet, as I stood perusing the goods, I felt a sudden, unaccustomed sense of detachment, and it hit me: After half-a-century of sustained acquisition, I may have reached the saturation point...

...but what I felt, instead, was a curious uncertainty...

...What next...

...Browse, that is, because my allowance was not designed to support a collecting habit...

...Reifschneider’s lair at 19th and Sunderland Place, the Savile on P Street in Georgetown, the old Salvation Army shop near Union Station, now paved over by Interstate 295...

...I would like to say that this yielded a feeling of accomplishment or sense of satisfaction...

...Or to put it another way, I may very well possess every (affordable) volume pertaining to Edward II, so for the time being there is nothing to add to my collection...

...Among my earliest memories are sitting—patiently, I like to think—on the fl oors of stores, long since gone, while my father perused the stock...

...Schwerin, Menlo Park (Calif...

...The scene was almost exactly as it had been a year earlier: The familiar dealers were standing in their booths (smiling at me, as my wife likes to say, in cruel anticipation), and hundreds of customers in late middle age—mostly males with gray beards and checked woolen shirts, fugitives from coin shows—milled anxiously about the room...

...By the time I could read, and had money to spend, I would climb into one of Washington’s buses and head to the old secondhand neighborhood of downtown—now largely subsumed by the Verizon Center—and browse...

...Still, my study now features rows of books two deep in the shelves, and vertical piles in odd corners of the room...

...Indeed, to universal horror, I remove all dust jackets...

...Eliot, modern British political history, psychoanalysis, the poet John Clare, William Faulkner, Piers Plowman, Wilhelmine Germany, biographies of Episcopal bishops, etc.—and that the content of the volumes is what matters, not their market value or gilded binding...

...Like many collectors, I associate cities I know well—Richmond, London, Nashville, Nicosia, Baltimore, Oxford, Los Angeles, Berlin, Providence— with favorite shops, and other places almost exclusively with bookstores: Cincinnati, D?sseldorf, West Chester (Pa...

...I have generally avoided the rarefi ed world of fi rst editions and the like, and since there is a fi nite amount of space in my residence, I strive to discard volumes with the same alacrity that I acquire them...

...Many of the titles were remembered from earlier shows...

...He was right, of course...

...Or, as my alluring wife likes to ask, when I am called to the great antiquarian shop in the sky, what’s to be done with all these damn books...

...I related the experience to my parents that evening, and a few weeks later on Christmas morning, my father (who was not prone to such gestures) made a present of the slender green volume to me...

...My late father-in-law, who taught medicine for a living and accumulated rich antiquarian volumes for pleasure, once warned me, only halfjokingly, that book-collecting “is a disease...

...PHILIP TERZIAN...

...I mention all this as background to an epiphany I experienced a few weeks ago...

...This cannot necessarily be said of most collectors...

...Shall I never again make a pilgrimage to Baldwin’s Book Barn...

...I felt some slight interest, but no great urgency, to purchase this and that...

...and I have since concluded that the only cure, the only sure antidote to excess, is morbid obesity...

...frustration because, in those days, ten bucks was a princely sum—to me, in particular...

...Excitement for the obvious reason...

...Mentioning the Benjamin Franklin (at the corner where the Navy Memorial now stands) reminds me of the dozens of shops that survive now exclusively in my memory: Loudermilk’s, the premier antiquarian shop in Washington, the Estate Book Store, on H Street near the White House, old Mrs...

...Do I now begin rearranging my library, oiling bindings, or compiling a catalogue...