Rare Times with Rare Books

by Leonard Hansen,
Class of '43

It was in my senior year at Rutgers,
1942, that I took a noncredit Team
Teaching course on the history of the
arts in Western Civilization. The course,
taught by Howard McKinney (music),
Donald Cameron (literature), and
Franklin Biebel (art and architecture), met
late on Monday afternoons.This meant
I would arrive tardy for football practice.
It was understood that an essential "lab"
course was the cause. One can imagine
the shock and disbelief when the assistant
coach investigated and found that the his¬
tory of art took precedence over football.

This was my first exposure to the
visual arts. After four years in the infantry,
marriage, three children, and a small real
estate business, my wife Eleanor and I
began to collect antiques and European
works of art. We refinanced our home in
Englewood, NJ, in 1960 and took time off
to spend five days at the Plaza Hotel in
New York City. We planned to enjoy the
museums, the theater, and restaurants.
To my complete surprise we spent the
entire money on four early works of art.
Returning home overwhelmed, I knew
that while Eleanor had the good taste and
eye to distinguish an authentic piece from
a false one, I would have to further edu¬
cate myself. I began systematically to take
courses in art history at the New School,
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the
Institute of Fine Arts in New York City.
My education focused on medieval and
Renaissance studies.

In 1969 I took a course at the Institute
under Professor Colin Eisler, on the His¬
tory of Prints from the mid-fifteenth cen¬
tury to the advent of photography. It was
there that I discovered the book as a work
of art and learned to more knowledgeably
enjoy its extraordinary handmade paper,
the precise bite of the print, the woodcut,
the sumptuous engravings, and one-of-
a-kind decorative binding. I now saw
the early printed book as an exquisitely
beautiful artwork that also contained a
rich world of learning within its pages.
Furthermore, at a time when the price of
art and antiques began to skyrocket, early
printed books were still reasonable. I was
hooked. For the next twenty-five years
I was passionately involved in acquiring
books and manuscripts. I constantly
attended auctions in New York and pur¬
chased from rare book dealers all over
the United States and Europe.

My early collecting included books in
several languages, but I gradually settled
on British books, with an emphasis on the
Tudor and Stuart periods, as well as single
pages of illuminated manuscripts. When
my four sons moved out of my home, it
was amazing how quickly their rooms
were transformed into libraries. It also
meant I had to develop my own reference
library in order to throughly research my
early books.

My life has been immensely enriched
by books. Twenty-five years ago, I
acquired a copy of the Great Bible from

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