The question before me was whether to begin collecting all over again.
I had weighed that exact yes-or-no question untold thousands of times across my 60-some years of book collecting. This time was different. Weeks earlier, excepting a few hastily grabbed items, my entire collection of something like 4,000 volumes, acquired one by one over all those decades, had turned to smoke and ash in the Palisades fire. The question before me was not just about this particular book, but about whether it made sense, in my late 70s, to begin collecting all over again.
I’d owned so many books in so many collecting areas that no one but me knew the extent of what I’d had, and even I’d forget the specifics from time to time. My film-book collection, no surprise given my nearly 30-year stint as a Los Angeles Times film critic, covered an entire wall. But I also had shelves upon shelves of hard-boiled crime fiction, including an impeccably jacketed first edition of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice. I had many shelves more of Yiddish literature in translation, with an emphasis on Isaac Bashevis Singer, who’d personally signed a copy of his Nobel Prize speech to me.
There were also hundreds of Grosset & Dunlap’s Photoplay editions, books about the history of Montana (my wife’s home state), and the many volumes I’d bought while researching my joint biography of MGM titans Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg. Then there were the one-off books I’d gotten because they had spoken to me. A first edition of George Eliot’s philo-Semitic Daniel Deronda; a colorful jacketed first of Zane Grey’s Rogue River Feud, bought to celebrate a family boat trip; a book on avian diseases by Robert Stroud, the “Birdman of Alcatraz.” All of it gone, suddenly, overnight. Book blogs mourned my loss, a distinction that was both affirming and heartrending.
My books had almost defined me, providing comfort and order in a chaotic world. Almost a year on, I find myself fantasizing that my collection still exists in another dimension, like a book heaven, intact but eternally out of reach.
Perhaps the fire had been a sign, the universe trying to teach me about the impermanence of objects and the futility of collecting. Maybe the virtuous minimalists who mocked possessions were right. I’d read stories of people using the fire as an opportunity to start over. One couple we knew found in their loss a chance to live in central Paris—where, Notre Dame notwithstanding, the potential for a catastrophic fire was close to nil.
My wife and I were planning to stay in West Los Angeles, which made the prospect of collecting again feel like rebuilding a house in a floodplain. I was also a lot older than my late friend Ricky Jay had been when, at 45, he began a new collection of magic-related memorabilia after he lost an earlier one.
