For book collectors, the 1980s were known as the Burden Decade.
That’s because New York’s Carter Burden was on a tear – acquiring a collection of 80,000 works of 20th-century American literature – one that he’d eventually whittle down to 12,000 first editions and related material.
“Burden set the market for modern firsts during the 1980s,” says Carolyn Vega, assistant curator of literary and historical manuscripts at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. “He was acquiring on a vast scale and paid record prices for copies in the best possible condition, with notable attributes such as authors’ annotations and presentation inscriptions.”
Burden was a descendant of Cornelius Vanderbilt and a former New York City councilman and publisher of the Village Voice. He was also a Harvard grad whose English thesis in 1963 had covered Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. At the time, the book was front and center for an obscenity trial.
When he graduated, he returned to New York and began collecting the work of abstract expressionists. “He was a collector first and foremost, at a time when you could pick up a Frank Stella for $2,500.”
Fast-forward to 1973, as Burden flips through a Sotheby’s catalog and finds a first edition of Tropic of Cancer. He places an absentee bid on it, wins it and bingo! – a new collection is launched.
“He said he purchased one lousy book by one unreadable author, but it set off his mania for collecting fiction,” she says. “He was a lifelong, voracious reader, and 20th-century American literature was what his readings led him to – Henry James, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway were the cornerstones of his collection and he built around them.”
Burden died suddenly of a heart attack in 1996, with no provision in his will for the collection. His family decided to donate it in installments beginning in 1998 to the Morgan Library, where he’d served as trustee. Thirty of the very best works arrived that first year.
Now the library has organized an exhibition called Gatsby to Garp: Modern Masterpieces from the Carter Burden Collection. It brings together nearly 100 outstanding works from the collection, including first editions, manuscripts, letters, and revised galley proofs from the big guns, including Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Mailer, Salinger, Steinbeck, and Updike.
“They’re all first editions, but Burden was interested in more than just first editions – he also acquired drafts of those works, and notebooks and scripts,” she says. “He was interested in creating a complete record, including correspondence and diaries.”
The evidence indicates he succeeded.
The exhibition runs through Sept. 7.
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Photography by Graham S. Haber, 2014; Images courtesy of The Carter Burden Collection of American Literature, The Morgan Library & Museum
