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| William Andrews Clark, Jr. |
It’s
a long stretch from 18th century England to early 20th
century California but for a bibliophile the journey is an easy one. A recent serendipitous purchase on Ebay
spanned the time and distance in short order.
The book bought was a 1925 edition of Thomas Gray’s An Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard printed by John Henry
Nash of San Francisco for collector William Andrews Clark, Jr. of Los Angeles
and Butte, Montana. It is an elegant
production limited to 200 copies and designed as a Christmas gift for friends
of Clark. Clark fortified his biblio-eggnog with a lengthy foreword tracing
the history of the work’s publication.
He writes, “Having in my library the first eleven separate editions of
the Elegy, it may be of interest to
note herewith the changes in the text as they successively appeared compared
with the text of the first edition.” No
light sing-along caroling here for friends—this was a serious bookman at work. For good measure he provided a separate
facsimile of his copy of the first edition of 1751.
I acquired the book because it was
described as having not only the printed presentation slip normally encountered
but also a personalized inscription from Clark.
The limitation statement indicated that this was copy no. 1. Clark inscriptions in the wild are quite
uncommon and this example showed promise for my association collection.
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| Clark inscription in Gray's Elegy |
The book arrived, the package
hastily unwrapped. The volume slid carefully from it's slipcase. . . a look at the
inscription, “To Dear Sophie, with my love & affection.” A previous online search of Clark’s immediate
family had yielded no Sophie. Then I went
through the book itself (as the seller had not) and on the printed dedication
page I found: “To Sophie Braslau This
Volume. . . Is Dedicated with
Admiration.”
The Dedication Copy! My wife in the next room wondered what my throaty
exclamation was all about and why I’m suddenly drinking a five-star craft beer
at 10:30 am. I have other dedication
copies in my collection, but there is always space for one more. 
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| Sophie Braslau |
Braslau’s exact relationship with Clark—platonic
or not-- will require further research but the acquisition got me thinking more
about Clark’s life and his collecting. His highly successful public endeavors
were intertwined with a complex and often tragic personal life.
William Andrews Clark, Jr. (1877-1934),
son of a Montana copper baron and U.S. Senator, had no cash flow problems. In the face of such easy material living and
the temptation for dissipation and squandering, he retained an admirable focus
on achievement. Just as importantly for
posterity, he developed a philanthropic nature.
Clark, born in Montana, received a
varied and high quality formal education in Europe at a very young age. His first language learned was actually
French and he was a lifelong Francophile. He later attended public and private
schools in New York, California, and Virginia where he graduated with a law
degree from University of Virginia.
After a short stint as a lawyer he joined the family copper business in
1901.
His father, although a reader and book
lover, focused most of his collecting energy on art. However, William’s older brother, Charles
Clark, was a devoted bibliophile and provided inspiration and encouragement,
introducing him to notable booksellers such as George and Alice Millard of
Pasadena, George D. Smith of New York City, and A.S.W. Rosenbach of
Philadelphia. (The Clark brothers,
“Charlie” and “Willie,” are featured prominently in Wolf’s 1960 biography of
Rosenbach.)
Will Clark began collecting around 1909
in haphazard fashion buying American literature, English literature, French
books, books on tobacco, fine bindings, and fine press books. In 1911 he made a purchase from bookseller E.
Byron Hostetter of Boston-- a selection of works by Oscar Wilde including The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898)-- that
eventually would culminate in one of the finest single author collections ever
assembled.
From
the late Teens until the Great Depression of the early 1930s when copper prices
sank into oblivion, Clark was all in
when it came to the rare book collecting game.
He was very interested in 17th and 18th century
English literature, poetry, and culture.
A world class John Dryden collection anchored this area. Tempted by availability, unburdened by
financial restraints in the Roaring Twenties, and influenced by Charlie’s
similar interest, he succumbed often in the field of Elizabethan and Jacobean
drama. The result was a superb collection
peppered with rare Shakespeare quartos and the Four Folios in multiple copies. He also gathered other important book and
manuscript collections of early printing, later English literature, French material,
Western Americana, and Fine Press books including complete runs of the
Kelmscott and Doves Press.
Although Clark’s wide-ranging library
had superficial similarities on a smaller scale to that of his mighty book
collecting neighbor, Henry Huntington, Clark approached his hobby in a vastly
different fashion. Huntington had a
habit of swallowing whole collections.
Clark, with few exceptions, had no interest in this approach. He turned down an extensive collection of
Joseph Conrad offered in 1926 by Byrne Hackett of the Brick Row Book Shop in
New Haven and wrote, “This particular disinclination I have to purchase the
collection is that I find more pleasure in picking up the books. . . item by
item and not a collection en bloc. It
gives me far more enjoyment and I can familiarize myself in this way more
thoroughly with my books.”
His personal life was filled with regular
sorrows. Will Clark would lose two wives
and his only child. His first wife, Mabel, died
in 1902 only a month after giving birth to his son, William Andrews
Clark III, nicknamed Tertius. Teritius would be killed in a plane crash in
1932. Clark married his second wife,
Alice, in 1907. The family moved to Los
Angeles shortly thereafter where the Clarks became rooted to the
community. Alice died in 1918 and Clark,
just past age 40, never re-married. All
this upheaval certainly intensified his book collecting and fostered his other
major interest in music as a source of relief.
Music was his connection to Sophie Braslau. Clark was an accomplished violinist and in
1919 organized and underwrote the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra with whom
he occasionally played.
It was in 1919 that Clark also hired
renowned California bibliographer, collector, and book dealer, Robert Ernest
Cowan, to assist in cataloging and developing his quickly expanding
library. What was originally intended as
a six-month project turned into a fourteen year employment for Cowan and the
formation of a close friendship. Kevin
Starr writes in Material Dreams, “Clark
paid Cowan a thousand dollars a month, an extraordinary salary in that era, and
provided him with a home near his own.
Cowan dined almost nightly in the Clark household. . . Los Angeles now
had its own accomplished bibliographer in residence.”
Many years ago I bought a special
copy of Michael Sadleir’s groundbreaking work, Excursions in Victorian Bibliography (1922) with Will Clark’s
bookplate. I hold it now. The inscription reads: “To Robert E. Cowan, my most estimable
librarian & co-worker, with expression of my personal esteem, William A.
Clark, Jr., 9/9/1922.”
With the expertise of Cowan and the help
of two other library assistants, Cora Edgerton Sanders and Harrison Post, Clark
produced a twenty volume private library catalogue between 1920-1931 of his holdings
(eighteen volumes describing material and two index volumes). The catalogue itself was a high quality fine
press production printed by John Henry Nash of San Francisco. Clark also issued eleven limited editions
printed by Nash focusing on specific books and authors in his collection such
as the Gray volume inscribed to Braslau.
Clark participated heavily in the
production of the volumes, contributed introductions, and oversaw the
descriptions and printing. Few other
prominent American collectors have ever been involved so intimately and
extensively in the publication of their own library catalogue. It’s obvious that Clark had a bibliographical
bent. He took public pride in his
accomplishments and wished to record them for posterity. Also, his brother Charles
had earlier produced a privately printed catalogue of his library using Nash as
printer so Will had that for motivation.
All collectors innately strive to create order
with their collections. Clark’s
strivings were over-sized. Perhaps this
hyper-productive activity was a result of trying to bring order to inner
turmoil, to normalize his public persona in contrast to a personal world marked
by tragic losses and untidy desires in an age not so open as today.
And this brings us to Irish writer and
poet Oscar Wilde (1854-1900). Wilde was
Clark’s first major author collection and it remained foremost throughout his
collecting career. Six volumes of the
eighteen of his library catalogue are devoted to Wilde books, manuscripts, letters
and miscellanea. Clark relentlessly
chased and cajoled Wilde material from all the major book dealers, at auction
sales, and from personal associates and family members of Wilde. But why was he obsessed with Wilde? What drew Clark to his works and the man
himself in such a strong fashion?
Oscar Wilde was not only a great writer
but a bon vivant who became the subject of huge controversy in his day when he
was convicted of “gross indecency” in a series of trials that electrified the
public. Homosexuality was illegal in
Victorian England and when Wilde began a not so subtle relationship with Alfred
Lord Douglas, son of the Marquis of Queensberry, all hell broke loose when the
Marquis confronted Wilde. Wilde’s trials
and conviction resulted in a two-year prison sentence of hard labor. When he was released in 1897 he was a broken
man physically and spiritually. Wilde
had been married as well and his wife refused to let him see his two
children. Only a few of his closest
friends remained and he died destitute in Paris in 1900.
Among Clark’s most prized possessions
was the correspondence of Wilde and Alfred Douglas acquired through Rosenbach. (How’s that for association material!) Clark would publish a selection in one of his
privately printed offerings, Some Letters
from Oscar Wilde to Alfred Douglas, 1892-1897 (1924). This fascination with Wilde became easier to
explain when I encountered a Los Angeles
Times review of Sam Watters’ Houses
of Los Angeles (2007):
“Watters'
research uncovered all sorts of interesting sociological sidelights, including
information on L.A.'s gay subculture at the time. William Andrews Clark Jr.,
for example, built an ornate early-1900s house and library in the Kinney
Heights neighborhood of central L.A. . . .
Clark also amassed the world's largest collection of Oscar Wilde
materials and embellished his home with classical depictions of what might be
considered homoerotic art. Although he appeared to live a married life, he also
seems likely to have had a liaison with a younger man, his assistant librarian,
Watters says. The young assistant drove a rare Rolls-Royce convertible and
lived in a Mediterranean villa near Clark's mansion, both of which were gifts
from Clark, who named the assistant an executor in his will.”
This assistant librarian was the
aforementioned Harrison Post (ca. 1896-1946), who according to the finding aid
for the Clark Papers was “a close associate (and probable romantic partner) of
WAC, Jr.'s. Post also worked at the Clark Library as a junior bibliographer,
helping to compile and write several of the library's printed catalogs.”
So, there you have the possible seeds of
a complex private life that resulted in the formation of one of the most
impressive single-author collections by an individual collector. Nowadays such personal revelations would carry
smaller weight on a more tolerant society’s much larger scale. But to Clark, only a couple decades removed
from Oscar Wilde’s trial, it would have been a bigger challenge.
In 1923 a fire at Clark’s residence gave
him a serious scare and he had a separate fireproof library building
constructed on his property for $750,000.
Lawrence Clark Powell called it a “jeweled oasis in a city of stucco.”
Clark retired from business in 1926. In
June he wrote the board of regents of the University of California, “For some
time it has been my intention to make a conditional gift of the library
building, the books, manuscripts and equipment contained therein, and the real
property, where I reside while I am in Los Angeles, California, so that the
grounds may eventually be used as a park by the public, generally, and the
library building and its contents by students for research.” The wording and structure of the gift were
modeled closely to that of the Henry Huntington Library. Clark retained a life estate on the property
and books.
The gift of the library in 1926 did not
mean the end of Clark’s collecting. He
continued to augment his holdings and issue the series of finely printed
library catalogue volumes and Christmas gifts. Much more of his time after retirement was
spent in his beloved Paris where he had an apartment. The astute bookman, Seymour De Ricci, also a
resident of the city, assisted Clark in building a small but choice collection
of French works. Clark wrote his
employee and future biographer William Mangum in 1930, “I am heartily sick of
the U.S., Montana, and California. There
is only one place to live & that is France.”
By early 1933 the Great Depression had taken its toll on Clark’s
finances—he was to leave substantial endowments and gifts to various
institutions—but money for daily living on a large scale had dried up. His librarian and bibliographer Robert Cowan
had to resign. Clark wrote Cowan on Jan.
16, 1933, from Paris, “Things have come to such a point that I have to
drastically cut down my expenses or face bankruptcy. . . I have bought no books
for the Library and have spent very little on myself, but for two years and a
half I have received no income of any kind.”
Cowan
replied in his resignation letter, “For your unfailing generosity and
consistent kindness throughout all these many years, Mrs. Cowan, the family,
and I will always be most deeply grateful.
You have been more to us than any one we have ever known.”
On June 14, 1934, Clark died of a heart
attack at the early age of 57, but he had squeezed an immense amount out of
life from collecting and philanthropy.
His collection established the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
(named in honor of his father), one of the greatest gifts ever received by
UCLA. Clark’s accompanying endowment
allowed for maintenance and growth. Lawrence
Clark Powell fortuitously served as the head librarian of the Clark Library
from 1944 to 1961 and played a major role in transforming it into a highly
regarded research institution. Powell
wrote, “William Andrews Clark, Jr., was not an impecunious book-collector; nor
was he a Croesus. The fingers of two
hands would more than number his millions, and, at his death. . . he left a
library of sixteen thousand volumes. By
willing his private collection, complete with building and grounds, to a public
institution. . . Clark joined a select company of American book-collectors
whose bequests are among the glories of our national library strength.”
William Andrews Clark, Jr. in the end, like
Oscar Wilde, found himself most comfortable in France. Like Wilde, he was creative, passionate and
after following the family path, struck out on his own. However, unlike Wilde, he had a reticent
personality and was not overtaken by rashness in his decision-making or a naive
sense of personal immortality. Characters such as Sophia Braslau and Harrison
Post added texture and biographical interest to Clark’s life but do not
overshadow the remarkable cultural legacy he succeeded in establishing.
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| Will Clark: A Well-Dressed Reader |
Notes
on sources: The best sources on Clark as
a collector are William Conway’s essay, “Books, Brick and Copper: Clark and His
Library,” in William Andrews Clark, Jr.:
His Cultural Legacy (1985) and Joseph Rosenblum’s essay in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 187:
American Book Collectors and Bibliographers (1997). Dickinson’s Dictionary of American Book Collectors (1986) lists other important
sources including the Powell article. An
online search will pull up interesting tidbits.
Link to the Clark Library: http://www.clarklibrary.ucla.edu/
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