A great many people, over a great number of decades, have written essays, pamphlets, whole books even, to justify the collecting of books. This seems to me to be an unnecessary exercise. If you are predisposed to collect books, you don’t need any ex-post-facto justification for having done so. And on the other hand, if you are not convinced before you start, the chances are that no argument is going to win you over. Therefore, this book will focus on how to collect books in the modern world, with particular reference to twentieth-century authors, not why. There are, of course, a great number of books already in existence on the subject of book collecting, some of them excellent. But most of them are rather general, and many seem to be addressed solely to the wealthy collector, going into great detail about the pleasures of collecting incunabula, first editions of Dickens in the original parts, and other such rarities, which, however desirable, are usually far beyond the reach of beginning collectors. This work will concern itself solely with the so-called moderns, a group of writers beginning with such figures as Henry James, Walt Whitman, and Stephen Crane close to a century ago.
As might be expected, this book would not have been possible without the help and encouragement of a number of people. To list them all would be impossible, but it is only polite to mention especially Charles Elliott, without whose insistence this book would never have been written. Others who contributed greatly, in various ways, include Jordan Davies, Marshall Clements, Herman Abromson, Kenneth Doubrava, William S. Wilson III, J. M. Edelstein, Timothy d’Arch Smith, George Bixby, Arthur Uphill, and Nicolas Barker.