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	How the Love of Books Has Enriched My Life By David Finn

When I was a second lieutenant in the Air Force in World War II, I was stationed for a few months in Boston, where I was in charge of a new radar device for airplanes being developed at MIT. One day, as I was walking down a street in Cambridge, there was a fire in a bookstore. When the fire was put out, there were hundreds of books lying on the floor. I picked up a slightly damaged copy of Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus and took it home to read. It turned out to be a brilliant fantasy about a “poet of cloth” named Teufelsdrockh who said many wise things about life while describing his philosophy of clothes. I treasured that book and took it overseas with me to France, where my assignment was to test the new radar equipment. I had made notes on the inside cover of the book referring to lines that I wanted to remember and noting the pages on which they were written—a practice I first started with that book and have continued over the years. One of those passages was:

We speak about the Volume of Nature: and truly a Volume it is—whose Author and Writer is God. To read it! Dost thou, does man, so much as well know the Alphabet thereof! With its Works, Sentences, and grand descriptive Pages, poetical and philosophical, spread out through Solar Systems, and Thousands of Years, we shall not try thee. It is a Volume written in celestial hieroglyphs, in the true Sacred-writing; of which even Prophets are happy that they can read here a line and there a line.

I think that was the beginning of a lifelong love of books that has taken me through many fascinating adventures over the years and enriched my life immeasurably. Another book I fell in love with in those early years was Virginia Woolf ’s The Waves. The descriptions of the different characters— Bernard, Neville, Percival, Jinny, Louis, Rhoda, Susan, Jacob, Nick, Fanny, Clara—as they passed through the stages of their lives, from childhood to old age, were magical to me. I couldn’t believe how beautiful the passages were as the waves of time flowed over their changing experiences. Each chapter began with a passage in italics about the sea. One that I marked was:

The sun had risen to its full height. It was no longer half seen and guessed at, from hints and gleams, as if a girl crouched on her green-sea mattress tired her brows with water-globed jewels that sent lances of opal-tinted light falling and flashing in the uncertain air like the flanks of a dolphin leaping, or the flash of a falling blade. Now the sun burnt uncompromising, undeniable. It struck upon the hard sand, and the rocks became furnaces of red heat; it searched each pool and caught the minnow hiding in the cranny, and showed the rusty cartwheel, the white bone, or the boot without laces stuck, black as iron, in the sand.

Then there was Romain Rolland’s Jean- Christophe. Here, a young man with a passionate love of music had experiences that seemed to mirror my own discoveries of art and life. I found each passage so moving that I dreaded the time when I would reach the final page. One of the passages I copied in the back of the book was:

When he was weary he lay down in the woods. The trees were half in leaf, the sky was periwinkle blue. Christophe dozed off dreamily, and in his dreams here was the color of the sweet light falling from October clouds. His blood throbbed. He listened to the rushing flood of his ideas. They came from all corners of the earth: worlds, young and old, at war, rags and tatters of dead souls, guests and parasites that once had dwelled within him, as in a city. 

I still have copies of books that made a great impression on me in those early years, and when I look at them on the bookshelves that cover virtually all the walls of my home, a momentary spell comes over me, as if I was re-living the experiences of reading them.

I remember vividly when I read The Gooseman, a novel by Jacob Wasserman that was a major landmark in my life. It was a translation from the German, and my friend Ernest Zierer, who had been a refugee from Nazi Germany in the 1930s, told me it was one of the greatest novels he had ever read. He called it intuitive, which was a word he used to describe the highest form of art.

The book was about a boy who had grown up isolated from all living beings and was suddenly freed from captivity and exposed to the world around him. His extraordinary discoveries and sensitivity to new experiences seemed magical to me, and I felt that my own eyes were opened to experiences I had somehow taken for granted in the past.

After finishing that book, I bought copies of everything else Jacob Wasserman wrote, and read every novel from cover to cover. A book entitled The Van Eycks and Their Art by W. H. James Weale, which I somehow came across in the reading room of the New York Public Library, opened my eyes to the greatness of Flemish painting. Later I bought a copy to add to my collection.

Since then, every time I go to London I make a point to visit the National Gallery of Art, and I never fail to look at—perhaps devour is a more accurate word—Van Eyck’s painting of John Arnolfino and His Wife. I do the same when I go to the Frick Collection in New York, where I always spend time in front of Van Eyck’s Virgin and Child with Saints and Donor.

Years ago I made a special trip to the small city of Ghent to see Van Eyck’s magnificent polyptych with the great Adoration of the Lamb, and felt that the experience was one of the high points of my life. When I went to Melbourne, Australia, I was able to make arrangements for Van Eyck’s Madonna and Child (which I fell in love with when I first saw it reproduced in LIFE magazine when I was a teenager) to be taken off the wall of the museum gallery and placed in the director’s office where I could photograph it. Somehow, in those early years, I came across Modern Man in Search of a Soul by C. G. Jung, and felt that his words touched a special nerve in my brain.

At the time I was struggling to come to a “conclusion” about how I felt about spiritual experiences, and I thought Jung provided a profound answer for me. One of the passages I marked was: 

The living spirit grows and ever outgrows its earlier forms of expression; it freely chooses the men in whom it lives and who proclaim it. The living spirit is eternally renewed and pursues its goal in manifold and inconceivable ways throughout the history of mankind. Measured against it, the names and forms which men have given it mean little enough; they are only the changing leaves and blossoms on the stem of the eternal tree. 

My reading became more intense as I grew older. F. Max Muller became one of my favorite authors. In his Science of Language, I reveled in such phrases as “Words are not natural images, images thrown by nature on the mirror of the soul; they are statues, works of art, only not in stone or brass, but in sound.”

Soon after I bought a copy of his book entitled The Origins of Religion, and thought his insightful descriptions of the human explorations of the unknowable opened a window in my mind. Then I wanted to buy a whole set of his Sacred Books of the East, but could only find a few volumes—which I treasured —to add to my growing library. At one time I read the entire, unedited, edition of Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and made copious notes of such sentences as: “The traveler who has contemplated the ruins of ancient Rome may conceive some imperfect idea of the sentiments which they must have inspired when they reared their heads in the splendour of unsullied beauty.”

Many of his descriptions have come to mind on my frequent visits to Rome as I have walked through the streets and stood in front of one or another remnant of those ancient times. One of my most treasured acquisitions for my growing collection of books was the complete twelve-volume set of J. G. Fraser’s The Golden Bough.

To me it was a panoramic overview of myths from virtually all known cultures of the world, and I devoured every word I read, including the footnotes! I found it to be a revelation, and when I placed those books on my shelves, I felt for the first time that I was actually building a library.

My passion for books took a different turn when, in my thirties, a friend of mine who worked for Prentice Hall asked if I would like to write a book on Public Relations and Management. I was delighted with the idea, and even more pleased when the book I wrote was translated into Spanish, Japanese, and Arabic. I also began to write articles for the Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Reader’s Digest and other publications.

One day I received a letter from an editor at Simon and Schuster, Joe Barnes, who had read an article I had written for Harpers entitled “Stop Worrying About Your Image” and wondered if I wanted to write a book on the subject. Under his expert guidance I wrote a book entitled The Corporate Oligarch, and after it was reviewed positively, Joe assured me that no serious book in the future about the executives who head American corporations would fail to refer to my thoughtful text.

I was amused when the perceptive reviewer of the New York Times, Christopher Lehman-Haupt, praised the book but wondered if my cautious comments about the tobacco industry and its critics were influenced by my firm’s work for one of the major tobacco companies. How right he was! I thought the industry was not winning any supporters by repeatedly making the claim that no direct cause-and-effect had ever been proven between smoking and cancer.

I had shown a draft of the article to our client in advance, and I was told that if I thought cigarette smoking was in any way harmful to one’s health I should not be working for any company in the industry. I did my best to tone down my comments and merely suggested that the Surgeon General’s frequent reports about the health problems of smoking should be treated with respect by the industry. Unfortunately my efforts were unsuccessful, and after my observations were published, I became a persona non grata with our client.

There was something else on my mind in those early years. My father had been a writer, and I had been proud of his books although he had not published them in his own name and had ghostwritten them for a well known public figure. Several of his books had become bestsellers, and his successes inspired me to think of publishing more books of my own. But what happened was totally unexpected. In the early l960s, my wife and I took a vacation trip to Oslo, Norway. I had always wanted to visit Norway because I loved Knut Hamsun’s novels, Edward Munch’s paintings and Edward Grieg’s music.

To my surprise, we discovered a sculpture park in Oslo in which there were hundreds of remarkable sculptures by a twentieth-century artist I had never heard of, Gustav Vigeland. I had recently purchased a Polaroid camera and took some photographs of those unusual works.

As it happened, the publisher Harry Abrams was a friend of mine, and one day when he visited our offices he asked about some prints of Vigeland sculptures I had enlarged photostatically. When I told him about the park in Oslo with Vigeland sculptures he said, “We should publish a book on his work.” I told him I thought he should. “I said we should,” he exclaimed. “You go back to Oslo with a good camera and photograph all the sculptures, and we’ll publish the book.”

But I’m not a photographer, I replied. “Yes you are,” he insisted. “You have a good eye for sculpture, and I know you’ll do a great job.” He was sure the book would be successful.

So I bought a new camera, went back to Oslo to photograph all of Vigeland’s works, and not long after Harry published my first book on sculpture, entitled Embrace of Life: The Sculpture of Gustav Vigeland. Harry’s instincts were right. The book was a great success and a new phase in my love of books was started. What followed in the next forty years would have been hard for anybody to predict. I have published books on sculpture with over a dozen different publishers from around the world.

My ninetieth book, which is on the sculpture of the contemporary American sculptor Joseph McDonnell, was recently published by the University of Washington Press. Among those scheduled for publication in the near future are The Sculptures of Lorenzo Maitani in Orvieto, Italy; The Pulpits of Nicolo and Giovanni Pisano in Pisa, Pistoia and Siena; and The Sculpture of Lynn Chadwick in Lypiatt Park, England. There is also a multi-volume series, The World of Sculpture, from Ancient Egypt to Modern Times, that I am working on. We started our own publishing company, Ruder Finn Press, after the World Trade Center disaster, with a book entitled Lamentation 9/11—with a text by E.L. Doctorow and my photographs. It was reviewed as one of the best books on 9/11.

My passion for books has another dimension— an unquenchable thirst for collecting books. I am not a major collector of rare books, although I do have some of those, too. But I love to buy books, indeed it is one of my great passions. Each weekend my wife and I go to tag sales in Westchester and Connecticut, and I inevitably come home with a few books to add to my library. Sometimes there are only two or three, but more often there are eight or ten, and sometimes there have been more than twenty!

What do I do with those books? I desperately try to read them—and I do read something in all of them. But in time they move from my sunroom where they wait to be read, to one of my many bookcases where I look at their titles with the pleasure of remembrance or frustration at the limits of time. There’s one recent project that has been especially moving to me. After my father ghostwrote his few bestselling books, he decided the time had come to write a book in his own name. His idea was to write a biography of an unusual woman named Janet Roper, nicknamed Mother Roper, the one-time head of the Seaman’s Church Institute in New York.

John Farrar loved the idea, and my father signed a contract with him to write the book. He spent about three years on the project in the early 1940s, interviewing Janet Roper many times and studying the records of the Institute. In the course of the project, Ms. Roper died, and although my father finished writing the book—which I thought was most impressive—there were apparently some problems with the family and the project was dropped. I think my father was devastated, and although he lived another twenty years, he never wrote another book. My father died in 1973 at the age of 87 and left a file of papers that I stored away in my basement. Recently, while going through some old materials, I came across the manuscript on Janet Roper, and on a hunch I sent a copy to the current director of the Seaman’s RUDER·FINN MOVE! 41 Church Institute, Reverend Jean Smith, and suggested that Ruder Finn Press would be glad to publish the Janet Roper biography my father wrote. She was delighted with the idea, and we are now in the process of doing so. I feel it will be a gift, more than a half-century later, from my father to the Institute.

When I visited the new building for the Seaman’s Church Institute, which, as it happens, was designed by a friend of mine, Richard Olcott, I discovered it had a collection of old ship models that was most impressive. So I decided to photograph some of those wonderful models, and they will also be included in the book we are planning to publish! Many years ago, when I was working on a book on the sculptures of the Florence Baptistery doors, two of which were created by Lorenzo Ghiberti, I visited Richard Krautheimer, the great Ghiberti scholar, who was living in a lovely apartment in Rome. I showed him some of my photographs of Ghiberti’s sculptures, and he was delighted to know that a new book would be published on one of his favorite subjects.

While I was there, I looked around his study and told him how impressed I was by his wonderful collection of books that filled all the wall space in his study. “This is not what a scholar’s study will look like a few decades from now,” he said. “Why not?” I asked. “Because,” he said, “in years to come, a scholar’s study will simply have file cabinets with drawers for computer disks.” I told him I was sure there would always be a place for the books we love, no matter how much information is stored on disks, but he was skeptical.

Today, although computer technology seems to be expanding at an astronomical rate, I am as convinced as ever that books will always be with us, and that there will always be people who will treasure collecting them as a way of enriching their lives.

I hope I am right.