High Spots in Human Progress

Those who say that acquiring books on a grand scale is an anachronism in the twenty-first century should take a look at the catalogue of an exhibition recently concluded at the University of Dayton featuring fifty selections from the two-thousand-volume library of Stuart Rose, an Ohio businessman who has been quietly assembling a private collection of international stature in a very determined way for the past twenty-five years, with no sign whatsoever of slowing down.

Imprints and Impressions: Milestones in Human Progress was especially noteworthy for the fact that it was organized around the wide-ranging curriculum of the Marianist university, with teachers from various academic departments choosing titles they felt pertinent to their courses, and students invited to examine primary works that were consequential in the evolution of our culture. Those familiar with Printing and the Mind of Man, the landmark exhibition mounted in 1963 at the British Museum, will see parallels between the concept explored there, and the premise embraced in Dayton—books, essentially, that “made things happen in the world”—only in this instance every treasure came from the private library of one collector, with many hundreds more that could very easily have been included as well.

Some examples of what Rose has on his shelves? How about, just off the top, Shakespeare, Copernicus, Dante, Homer, Aquinas, Bacon, Newton, Galileo, Boswell, Goethe, Kepler, Diderot, Descartes, Darwin, Marx, Balzac, Baudelaire, Twain, Pascal, Freud, Curie, and Einstein? They are represented in the earliest printed editions, many of them with remarkable associations and bearing impressive inscriptions. Unlike Printing and the Mind of Man, the Rose collection is also strong on fiction, works of the imagination in general, and American masterpieces. And while this very definitely is a “high spot” collection, there is considerable versatility and depth that renders it unpredictable, as I learned when Rose, chairman and chief executive officer of REX American Resources Corporation (REX on the New York Stock Exchange), invited me to spend some time among the treasures shelved in two wood-paneled rooms of his home. 

Rose generously allowed me to pick and choose as I pleased, so I decided to start with one of the Caxtons—he has seven—and to make it The Recuyell of the Histories of Troye, 1473-4, the first book to be printed in the English language, one of eighteen surviving from the first printing, and one of just six in private hands; he bought it in 1998 at the Wentworth sale of early English printing by William Caxton and Wynkyn de Worde at Christie’s in London, for $1.26 million, twice the pre-sale estimate. From there, I chose his First Folio of Shakespeare, a copy I happen to know a good deal about, having been present in 1989 at the Garden Ltd. sale in New York when it was hammered down with the Second, Third, and Fourth Folios to Richard Manney for $2.1 million, and then again at Manney’s sale at Sotheby’s in 1991, when it failed to meet its reserve, and was acquired privately by Lou Weinstein, then of Heritage Books in Los Angeles, who later sold it to Rose. Better known as the Haven O’More copy (see chapter six in A Gentle Madness, “To Have and to Have no More”), it is truly gorgeous, complete, and comparable, in my humble opinion, to the copy now in the library of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, which I handled on several occasions when it was owned by the late Abel Berland of Chicago. 

Rose then showed me a book he had acquired just a week earlier, a dazzling association copy of The Tale of Two Cities presented by Charles Dickens in the year of publication with this inscription, “To George Eliot. With high admiration and regard. December, 1859.” Rose said he was pleased to add the book to what he regards as “easily the finest collection of Dickens to be found anywhere in private hands.” Discussing other recent triumphs, Rose said he had “pretty much swept” the most coveted Joseph Conrad items offered at Sotheby’s in London in 2013 and 2014 that had been gathered by the late Stanley J. Seeger. 

I didn’t discuss specific numbers with Rose, I didn’t have to, because it is manifestly obvious that he is “all in,” as the expression goes, when it comes to getting what he sets his sights on. He does all of his own bidding at auction by telephone, and has a reputation among booksellers for driving a hard bargain for their choicest offerings, but that doesn’t stop them from giving him first refusal on items of uncommon interest. 

“People are at the house all the time, bringing in books, bringing in books, bringing in books,” according to Rose’s wife Mimi, who is not a collector herself, but is totally comfortable with the dynamic that drives her husband. “There’s nothing I don’t have that I want,” Rose conceded, “but there are a few things I don’t have in first edition that I do want. Like Cervantes, that’s at the top of my list, and Gutenberg, of course. I try to keep the finest copy in private hands in my library, which in most cases I think I have.” There is a significant presence of manuscripts, too. Some highlights: the holographic copies of Jules Verne’s Voyage to the Center of the Earth, Frank Lloyd Wright’s autobiography, Arthur Conan Doyle’s manuscript for The Valley of Fear, the annotated typescript of Alex Haley’s Autobiography of Malcolm X.  

A native of New Orleans, Rose received a graduate degree in business from Emory University in 1976, and in 2009 established REX American Resources Corp, a public alternative energy company based in Dayton that operates seven ethanol refineries. The stunning success of an enterprise he established in the early 1980s, Rex Radio & Television, Inc.—he turned four stores that sold electronic equipment into a chain of 125 retail outlets operating in twenty-three states—enabled him to start collecting seriously while in his early thirties. 

But why focus on books, I wondered, and not paintings, which he could clearly buy at a high level, if he chose to do so? “I collect books because I can afford to buy the greatest and the best that’s in existence, and I couldn’t do that in art,” he said. “I love books, too, because they are what made the world. Art is what is popular one day and not necessarily popular the next. You actually learn something while you’re collecting books, and you have a lot of fun while you’re doing it. So what’s not to like about that?”