How I Became a Book Collector
By Jack Prelutsky
By nature, I’m a collector – I’m still trying to find new quarters for about 40 boxes of frogs of every size and description that I’ve amassed in the past 50 years. Extending this kind of obsession to antiquarian books of children’s poetry was inevitable.
The first books I collected were comic books. I was devoted to superheroes. I hated to finally part with them, but eventually I had to when I ran out of space among my jumble of birds, plastic bottle caps, found objects, decades of old National Geographic magazines. You get the picture.
When I first began working with Susan Hirschman, who remained my editor at Greenwillow Books for many years, she convinced me to not read any other children’s poems so I could develop my own voice. I followed her advice for about 10 years, until we were both convinced that I had sufficiently developed a singular style.
I then began frequenting libraries and buying inexpensive books at library sales. I discovered the world of children’s poetry was much larger than I ever imagined. Some of these poets had voices similar to my own and others as different as can be. When I first started writing, I thought I wouldn’t have enough to say, but as I continued to collect books of children’s poetry, I learned this specialized corner of literature is infinite.
I guarantee that the first antiquarian book I bought is NOT in this collection. Let me explain: when I first started buying children’s poetry, I had very little money to spend on books, so what I purchased were inexpensive copies, usually $5.00 or less. As I learned the finer points of book collecting, I replaced these “cheap” copies with ones in better condition, or a first edition, or an earlier printing.
Technically, while not in the category of an antiquarian book, but almost old enough to qualify, one of my purchases was a copy of my OWN book. [As I shuffle through my 80s, my body and mind qualify as “antiquarian.”] My first book, A Gopher in the Garden, went out of print within a few years of publication. It didn’t sell well enough to remain on the backlist and I carelessly gave away my last copy. In those days before instant internet searches, I had to riffle through hundreds of shelves in used bookstores, and after years of searching, I eventually found a worn but serviceable copy—in the “bargain bin” in San Francisco. To this day, it’s still my only decent copy of my first book.
While many of the poems in these books do not speak to a modern audience, this collection contains cultural artifacts and provides historical value. For example, the poem, “There was a Little Girl who had a Little Curl,” has often been attributed to “anonymous,” but among my antiquarian finds, there is a copy of this poem with authorship given to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. (Albeit, there are scholars who dispute that Longfellow wrote this poem.)
I had many years of discovery and joy in putting this collection together, and now it’s time to share these infrequently seen works with a wider audience. I’m delighted that these books have found a home in Special Collections at the Western Washington University Libraries, where adventurers in literature will continue to be surprised and make discoveries of their own.