"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,"
"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,"
A collector hesitated over buying a 1938 Carmen volume at Angel City Books & Records in Santa Monica. The collector had spent roughly 60 years assembling about 4,000 volumes across many fields. Weeks earlier most of that collection had been destroyed in the Palisades fire, leaving only a few hastily grabbed items. The collection included extensive film books, shelves of hard-boiled crime fiction with a jacketed first edition of The Postman Always Rings Twice, Yiddish literature translations including a signed Isaac Bashevis Singer copy, Grosset & Dunlap Photoplay editions, Montana history, biography research volumes, and sentimental one-off purchases.
Read at The Atlantic
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