A LETTER TO BERT (A medley about chess libraries, dealers and collectors) Bob Meadley 2001 1 THERE IS NO COPYRIGHT-ANYONE IS WELCOME TO USE THE CONTENTS FOREWORD This letter to Bert Corneth was expanded to include the dealers and collectors I have met over the years and a chapter on how I acquired the Christmas Series and finally three pages on how chess gradually ensnared me throughout my life. I apologise for the disjointed approach taken and don’t wish to rewrite it. As I am unable to use OCR scanning because of the poor quality of the manual typewriter the fact that I have to retype this ensures I won’t rewrite it. Most of the facts are there and all those interested in chess libraries & c can add more and correct mistakes. I’m told a floppy disc holds 250 A4 size pages of text so I have hardly half filled this disc. One of my real future delights would be to receive a disc in return with additions and corrections to my material. As for the disc it seemed to me that sharing information as cheaply as possible was simply done by sending a disc in the mail. Those of you who wish a hard copy should be able to get the disc printed out at a secretarial service. The last 3 months have been quite enjoyable (including the 1996 period) and the hardest part was the chapter on the Christmas Series as it had to be dug out of files. What makes a collector? Well, in my case, in rural NSW, I needed a library to keep me sane. I don’t drink nor am I a club person. I do like to research and find interesting facts that have been forgotten or need republication. As I near 60 I can say that I must like this as I still do it. Collecting costs money and one reaches a stage where one has to cease. Ken Whyld said I wasn’t a true collector nor was he; and that we are fact finders. He has a great library simply because it is convenient. But that said, it is enjoyable to research in great public libraries. I like collectors who use their libraries and I also like public institutions that continue research into their holdings. We owe a debt to the great collectors – even those who just collected. Niemeijer was the greatest collector and fact finder as judged by his writing. Van der Linde ran him close. J.G. White was a generous collector and a fact finder. So also was M.V. Anderson. But they gave their libraries for the greater public good and that makes me like them a lot. I would love to see The Hague and Cleveland libraries ‘one day’ and I continue to hope. 2 I would like to finish this with a 1999 short story on collectors by Richard Guillatt. He writes so beautifully about us and wherever you see ‘record’ just change it to ‘chess book’ and you have us as a species. (Good Weekend March 20 l999 Herald):- ONE TRACK MIND (He has spent a lifetime of lunch-hours in musty, testosterone-filled second-hand record shops searching for rare John Lee Hooker masterpieces. So what’s wrong with that?) An acquaintance of mine whom we’ll call Richard G – an otherwise normal and well-adjusted middle aged breadwinning father of two with no outward signs of mental illness – enacts an odd and obsessive ritual whenever he enters a hotel room in an unfamiliar city. Before he has even unpacked his bags and toothbrush, he hauls out the Yellow Pages from the dresser drawer, turns to the section marked “Records – second hand” and begins scribbling notes furiously onto the blank page of a small spiral notebook. What he’s doing is writing down the address and telephone number of every record store in town that might even remotely possess a copy of, let’s say, ‘On the Waterfront’ by John Lee Hooker (Wand Records, 1970) or ‘African Cookbook’ by Randy Weston (Atlantic Records, 1972) somewhere in its dust-choked shelves. You see, this hapless individual ( who, of course, bears absolutely no resemblance to the author of the article you are now reading) is plagued by the thought that he could be driving around this unfamiliar city during his short visit and, without realising it, pass within metres of a pristine vinyl copy of the above mentioned artefacts or, for argument’s sake, the obscure Kenyon Hopkins album ‘The Sound of New York’ (ABC, 1959) which, as you’re no doubt aware, features an appearance by the alto sax great Phil Woods and a deluxe gatefold sleeve mocked up to resemble a coffee- table book. You might think this sounds like pathological behaviour and, well, you’d be absolutely right. But on any given lunch-hour in any large Australian city you will find people like this hunched over the racks in shops like Ashwood’s of Sydney, a musty smelling second hand record store located at the flophouse end of Pitt Street which, coincidentally, I myself have wandered into about twice a week for the past five years just because I happened to be passing by. In silent communion, the customers in here comb through endless rows of discarded Jimmy Barnes and Uncanny X-Men albums, eyes flitting left and right whenever a fellow scrounger pulls something from the racks (please God, don’t let it be a mint-condition copy of “The Two Sides of Laura Lee’ (Hot Wax,1972). The truly committed are down on their knees with their heads buried inside the bottom cabinets, sifting through the effluvia for some pearl that they can bring back to the surface. 3 One thing you will notice immediately about this place, apart from the smell, is that there aren’t too many women around. The odd girlfriend might be idly staring at the walls, lured in here by some misguided notion that she will be able to participate in her companion’s quest, but you’re very much in an oestrogen- free environment because, by and large, collecting records is a Bloke Thing. Just why this is so was something I’d never really analysed until I came across ‘High Fidelity’, Nick Hornby’s best-selling 1995 novel about a London record shop owner who spends his life immersed in the insular milieu of the committed record collector, his brain a vast database of useless information from the history of Western pop music. ”High Fidelity’s’ protagonist, Rob Fleming, is the kind of guy who gets into long, passionate arguments with his girlfriend about why Art Garfunkel and Solomon Burke cannot possibly coexist on the same compilation tape. At moments of peak stress, he re-categorises his vast collection of albums. “Is it so wrong, wanting to be at home with your record collection?” asks Fleming plaintively. “It’s not like collecting records is like collecting stamps, or beer mats, or antique thimbles. There’s a whole world in there, a nicer, dirtier, more violent, more colourful, sleazier, more dangerous, more loving world than the world I live in……” Leaving aside the fact that Fleming is an emotionally retarded loser whose inability to communicate his feelings borders on the pathetic, I have to admit I identified with the guy. In fact, judging by the sales of ‘High Fidelity’-which made Nick Hornby a multimillionaire-there’s an entire global community of blokes out there who see Fleming’s obsessive immersion in the world of records as some kind of metaphor for the male condition, a symbol of some deeper primordial urge that several millenia of civilisation have apparently failed to ease. One shouldn’t generalise about these things, of course, but I’ll give it a go. It has been my experience that women simply do not understand the point of record collecting. My own collection of 12-inch albums finally outgrew the lounge room a few years back and had to be transplanted to the children’s bedroom- where it now occupies the entire south-east wall from floor to ceiling, like the towering obelisk from ‘2001:A Space Odyssey’-and I was standing there one afternoon admiring the orange-and-black colour scheme of an Impulse! Album spine when my sister-in-law walked in. “When are you going to get rid of all these?” she asked with a sweep of the hand. A pretty stupefying question, I’m sure you’ll agree-particularly to a guy who’s still suffering post-traumatic stress disorder from the day he lost his copy of ‘Funhouse’ by the Stooges (Elektra,1972). Perhaps collecting records is the closest the contemporary male can get to the hunter-gatherer role of his forebears, some throwback to the Neanderthal retrieve-and-hoard instinct. Women collect stuff, of course-antique thimbles, dolls and other depressingly gender-specific items-but there’s a certain gigantism to the way men accumulate their possessions. Their collections become monuments to their own egos, domestic versions of Bruno Grollo’s towers. Sir Thomas Phillips, the British book and manuscript collector, was so hell-bent on possessing every 4 book in the world that he canvassed his friends to find him a rich wife to finance his quest. In his 1986 book ‘The Recording Angel’, Evan Eisenberg tracked down the modern-day equivalent of Sir Thomas – a New Yord record collector who filled virtually every square inch of his 14-room house from his parents, along with a large fortune which he spent almost entirely in pursuit of his dream of owning every jazz album, every pop album, every movie soundtrack, ethnological field recording and 101 Marimba LP ever foisted on an unsuspecting world.