James W. Valentine
The urge to collect can clearly range from a pleasant hobby to a pathology. Collectors are frequently lampooned and said to have a “collector’s gene”. Indeed, a Google query for collector’s gene returned about 15,400 results, and the entries included a vast range of objects of interest and descriptions and sources of “collectibles”, all indicating an extensive industry. The gene obviously is not rare, and seems to be represented by a large number of variants and, bottom line, to bring pleasure to a great many people.
Although not a particularly dedicated collector while growing up, my early professional life as an academic paleontologist was spent collecting, and then identifying and describing, large marine fossil assemblages, gradually learning to use them as part of a research program investigating broader aspects of paleobiological theory. Those studies thus made reasonably good use of a collector’s gene, expressed fully only late in development.
In 1962 I was visiting the National Museum of Victoria in Melbourne, working on fossil assemblages from nearby ice-age terraces, and living in a quiet neighborhood with a street of small shops, among which was a used bookstore. There, on shelves of nominally priced books, were a number of Darwin’s, including the Origin of Species in the royal green bindings of John Murray, his most important British publisher. The title pages were dated and indicated how many thousands had been printed. The bookseller explained that the different issues were essentially alike, and the thousands had little effect on their value. Although that was probably true for his stock, the small binding and title page differences caught my fancy so I bought several; I no longer know which they were. My wife believed that I was wasting money, but humored me.
During an earlier trip to England I had been in the company of a geologist who collected books by Charles Lyell and understood book collecting. I paid little attention to his accounts of points marking various issues, but now I tried to remember his collecting stories and did remember his enthusiasm. So the next time I was in England I began canvassing bookstores, and lo and behold one could find perfectly fine Murray Darwins on shilling shelves, so I began buying all the different issues of all his books that I could find, including those of different publishers, which was a lot. My wife now considered me crazy. Later, in Cambridge, I found two first editions of the Origin for sale. One was significantly cheaper; the binding had been lightly washed, and one of the pages of ads inserted at the back was torn, but it was perfectly sound. The other was a bit brighter and had different ads. I bought the cheaper one, and although tempted to buy them both, bad judgment got the better of me. From then on, however, I was committed to aggressive collecting of all issues in all languages. My favorite bookseller (Eric Korn, in London) began calling me a completist, surely a compliment?
A bibliographic handlist of Darwins had appeared in 1965, authored by Richard Freeman, to whom Korn introduced me. Once it was possible to know what one didn’t have, collecting became even more interesting (though prices rose noticeably). I lent Freeman a deck of 3X5 cards on which my holdings were listed, and can tell that some of those records made it into in his 1977 edition, of which I was unduly proud.
The biological collections that are the naturalist’s basic toolkits are largely housed in museums, and there are clear protocols when it comes to preserving the specimens that form the basis for descriptions of taxa or of assemblages. For descriptions of newly identified species, a type specimen is selected and clearly labeled and housed in a particularly secure location; it serves to validate the identity of the species and permits repeatable observation and thus identification of conspecific specimens — rather analogous to the repeatability of experiments in the physical sciences. Photographs are extremely useful of course, but nothing can quite substitute for the original specimens. Naturalists become frequent visitors to the collections that are appropriate to their specialties, from which they piece together the tree of life.
Collections of books that serve bibliographic purposes can be thought of in much the same way; each unique variant is a species, which can be represented in a library collection by a type to serve as an exemplar. Each type embodies the decisions of the staffs of the publishing and printing establishments, and perhaps of the author(s). Darwin frequently revised the Origin between Murray’s printings, so that evidence of the evolution of his thinking, and of his manner of expression, is preserved — a trove for studies of the history not only of science but of western thought and of intellectual history in general. A nearly complete sequence of those changes has been traced (by Peckham in a wonderful variorum edition), and some changes are present in editions of his other books. Moreover, the myriad editions and translations of Darwin’s books indicate the many paths through which his writings have reached the public.
The Valentine collection of Darwin publications, while not actually complete, represents a good start in assembling exemplars of all of Darwin’s published writings during the first 200 years since his birth. The APS library holds much other important Darwin material, including copies of his voluminous correspondence, and a broad range of material relating to the history of evolutionary studies. A superb library with an expert staff devoted to the accumulation and preservation of basic scientific and scholarly materials, it is the perfect place for an archive of Darwin’s writings. And perhaps others who take pleasure from their collector’s genes will help to fill in the remaining cracks and gaps in this collection, which after all forms a primary record of the origin, introduction and spread throughout the world of what for humanity is surely the single most remarkable set of insights in the history of science.