Charles Wood

My interest in the history of art and architecture began when I spent two years with the United States Army in Germany from 1958 to 1960. I had been studying geology at Trinity College, Hartford CT before I was drafted, but the subject wasn’t for me. When I returned to the States, I found a job at the New Hampshire Historical Society, finished my Master’s degree at Penn and, within a couple of years, I was offered an interesting position at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware. The museum has an incredible collection of American decorative and fine arts, and my job was known informally as the Philadelphia Project. Dr Edgar P. Richardson, the director of the museum, wanted to create a photographic archive of American art, including the decorative and graphic arts, as a scholarly resource. My job was to commission photographs of objects in other collections, and I spent several enjoyable years visiting institutions in the city of Philadelphia, and very often I took the photographs myself. 

The best thing about Winterthur was not so much the job as my lunch break. I would vanish into the rare book room, and spend my time trying to absorb all those wonderful books, many of which I’ve never seen again. By the mid-’60s, I was married to a member of staff who ran the manuscript and microfilm library. When the museum built a new library and moved my wife’s department to the basement, she was furious and resigned on the spot. It was also a turning-point for me, as my long-range plan was to resign from the museum, move back to New England where I grew up, and start a rare book business. I was fortunate that my work for the museum involved quite a lot of time on the road. During my travels I came across country booksellers, and I would often stop in and buy things in preparation for my first catalogue. While I was at Winterthur, I joined the Bibliographical Society of America, and met a fair number of important librarians at their meetings. I wanted them to know who I was so that my eventual catalogue would not come as a complete surprise.

I resigned from Winterthur Museum on 31 December 1967, and began my business on New Year’s Day 1968. As for the Philadelphia Project, Dr Richardson resigned and died soon after I left the museum. The powers that be at Winterthur didn’t want to continue the project, but the idea lived on and eventually it became the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution. As I had inherited some money, I was able to survive for a year while I started the business.  I made a down payment on an unrestored 18^th century farmhouse in Connecticut, and our first child was born on the day that we signed the papers. Catalogue One was a success, and I received a lot of positive feedback from librarians, saying that they wanted to stay on my mailing list. The first ten catalogues were largely devoted to architecture and the decorative arts, my main interests then and now.

After I had been in business for a couple of years, I went to a talk given by Kenneth Nebenzahl on the sale of the Streeter collection of Americana. Afterwards I had a word with Ken and he said something to the effect that I had created a whole new market with my interest in trade catalogues.  It wasn’t quite true, but I took it as a great compliment from someone of Ken’s distinction. As ephemeral items, trade catalogues weren’t intended to be kept, and certainly not preserved in libraries. And yet the best examples are great visual objects. I find them pure dynamite, but it’s a challenging subject, partly because the material is scarce, and you really need to see it before buying, and there is almost no reference literature. The finest example I’ve ever seen was a catalogue of paint brushes, produced by a German manufacturer in the 1890s. It was a large folio illustrated with exquisite chromolithographs. I bought it from Susan Biltcliffe, who had such a great eye. She was working for Peter Eaton at the time, and it took some persuading to get her to sell it. In due course I sold it to Peter Kraus of Ursus Books, who is also very interested in trade catalogues, and he sold it to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. I never found another copy.

Early in my career, I realised that I could also specialise in photographically-illustrated books of the nineteenth century. My interest in photography dates from my time in the army. We had a photo lab, where I learned how to make my own prints from a German photographer. It was fun and I even had a couple of pictures hung in a local show. I started dealing in books with mounted photographs in the early 1970s, but they have become increasingly hard to find. In 1979, I exhibited at a fair with forty or so photography dealers during a conference at the house of George Eastman, the founder of Eastman Kodak, in Rochester, New York.

The fair was a great success and resulted in the formation of AIPAD, the Association of International Photography Art Dealers, of which I became a charter member. After a couple of years, during which I produced an ambitious catalogue of early photography, I began to receive some negative feedback from members of AIPAD. They were photographic dealers who regarded themselves as belonging to the art world, whereas I’ve always considered myself to be in the book trade. They are very different activities, and I believe it to be more or less true that art dealers are interested in money first and art second, whereas booksellers are interested in books first and foremost.

When some members of AIPAD objected to my using the association’s logo in my catalogues, I wanted to be quite clear about the fact that I was a bookseller.  I resigned from AIPAD after two years’ membership, but continued to deal in photographically illustrated books, by which I mean nineteenth-century books illustrated with original photographs pasted in. William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature, 1844, was the first book to be illustrated in that way. I’ve never had a copy, but I’ve handled other publications of the period that contain salt prints made by Fox Talbot. The prints are usually faded because he didn’t know how to use the chemicals correctly. Fox Talbot’s second book, Sun Pictures in Scotland, 1845, is also illustrated with salted paper prints from paper negatives, all faded in every copy that I have seen.  

I’m also interested in books on the history of photographic technology, of which Blanquart-Everard’s La Photographie, ses origins, ses progres, ses transformations, Lille, 1870 is one of the most important. The book contains specimen plates of images produced by different photomechanical processes, and provides an excellent account of photographic technology then in use. There is a small number of similar books, published in the late nineteenth century, which are all very much in demand by collectors and librarians.

After almost twenty years in rural Connecticut, I moved my business to Providence. I had just got divorced from my first wife, and I didn’t quite know where I was headed. I soon discovered that I didn’t want to live in Providence, and so I moved to Boston. It was a much better location, although it didn’t particularly affect my business as I’ve never had a shop in 57 years of bookselling, nor have I met most of my customers. I tend to dislike dealing with the general public, which probably stems from my early experience of exhibiting at books fairs in America. I would always come away thinking, ‘Well, I didn’t enjoy that’. Actually, my business has always been and still is selling to libraries by catalogue.

On the other hand, I love visiting fairs to buy. One of my favourites is the antiquarian book fair in June held in Place Saint-Sulpice in Paris. The venue is wonderful with wooden booths arranged around the square. The exhibitors can bring anything, and don’t need to be a member of a trade association. On one occasion I spotted two middle-aged French women with a booth full of pornographic magazines. It looked very funny, especially as they were quite straight-faced about it. Another favourite is the ABA fair in London, which I’ve visited almost every year since 1967.

During all my years of travelling in search of books on art and architecture for my business, I would often see books on angling, and buy them for my personal collection. When I was ten years old, my father took me to Maine to learn how to flyfish.  It was a magical experience, and I cherish the memory of my father for introducing me to fishing. Forty years later I had assembled a good collection of books on angling, which I sold at Swann Auction Galleries in New York in 1986. I stopped collecting for a few years, but it was actually Mardges, my second wife, who encouraged me to start again, and this time I concentrated on salmon fishing, specifically to do with Atlantic salmon. My book on the collection, Bibliotheca Salmo Salar, was published by David R Godine in 2017. David belongs to that talented group of printers, publishers and designers who studied under Ray Nash (1905-1982), the director of the Graphic Arts Workshop at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire.

In my life as a dealer, the person whom I admired most for his extraordinarily high standards was Mickie Brand of Marlborough Rare Books. Mickie died in 2012, but he had more or less retired from the business by the early 1990s. Mickie was a role model for me, as I’m sure he was for many other booksellers. During his last twenty years in the business, the quality of his stock went down. It was nothing to do with Mickie - just a reflection of the drying up of good material in the marketplace.

When AbeBooks was launched in 1996, it rapidly became the unstoppable online marketplace for used, rare and out-of-print books. It came at a time in America when bookshops were falling by the wayside because of rising rents and overheads. Today it’s the major channel that keeps the international antiquarian book trade running. At first I didn’t pay a lot of attention to ABE.  I was still at the stage of regarding the fax machine as a miracle, and I have a problematic relationship with all electronic things. When I finally began to look for books to buy online, I discovered that it was not only easy but it was also possible to find remarkable things - in fact items that I had never seen before.

Recently I did a search online for books in English on architecture with a cut-off date of 1800, just to see if anything came up that was new to me. There were almost 3,000 results, amongst which I only found half a dozen things to buy, but one of them was very special. It was a set of six loose Piranesi prints, copied and re-engraved in London, in small format, by François Vivares, with the title A Book of Ruins in Rome in quotation marks on the first print. Vivares’s engravings are undated but the seller and the entry in OCLC both agree on ca.1748-1760. OCLC locates only one other copy, which is in the Bibliotheca Herziana in Rome. I was delighted to find it from my trawl online, not least because it demonstrates the demand in England for Piranesi’s work, and its popularisation in the 1760s.

Having done almost 200 paper catalogues, I’ve reached the point where all my future catalogues will be electronic. I realise that I’m breaking with a long tradition in the book trade, but the last printed catalogue was just one problem after another, stressful and expensive. Electronic lists are easy to produce and I already have a few in the pipeline. I still haven’t lost my love of buying and selling, and the sense of joy I derive from the physical presence of books. I know so much more than when I started in the business that I’m able to buy more creatively, and I can still find wonderful things. I hope I croak while ordering a book, because it’s been so much fun.

Interviewed for The Book Collector in Winter 2024