Insatiable Lust

I suppose there must have been a time when I didn't collect something, but I really don't remember one. The book closet in my bedroom on East Nineteenth Street and Glenwood Road in Brooklyn was a repository for the books, papers, and ephemera that I was gathering (though I did not yet know the word ephemera). Shelved from floor to ceiling, my books were neatly arranged. It was my childhood haven. I was not content borrowing books from the public library—those books had to be returned. I needed to own the books. I was a collector.

While an undergraduate at Cornell I was exposed to special collections. That experience, though brief, opened a door to the historical importance of collecting; I interpreted it in a personal way.

By the mid-sixties my husband and I were collecting, both together and individually. Omnivorously. We collected medals and plaquettes, Mocha ware, rewards of merit, ephemera, and early illustrated books; as well as chiaroscuro woodcuts, color printing, Rudolf Bresdin and Hendrik Goltzius, the d'Agotys, Altdorfer, model books, and ornament prints—all of these things that were not yet particularly sought after by others and not yet expensive. Our pockets were not as deep as our passion for stuff, and we often sold some things to allow us to acquire others. We sold our emblem books, color printing, Goltzius collection, Mocha ware and chiaroscuro woodcuts. There were, however, things that were sacrosanct. My growing collection of Käthe Kollwitz and Paula Modersohn-Becker prints, for example. In the mid-nineteen sixties, we were collecting early illustrated books, among them some printed or illustrated by women. I bought Maria Sibylla Merian's De europische insecten (Amsterdam, 1730) around 1966.

The part that my husband Leonard Baskin played as I formed my collection is without measure. It gave him enormous satisfaction to find treasure for me. His small watercolor cards at Christmas and birthdays that always accompanied gifts of books, manuscripts, or objects would often depict a woman at a printing press or in her bindery—reflecting his understanding of what I was about in collecting the myriad stories of women.

In the 1960s, I actively began collecting things relating to women. The core of the collection was, and is, social history. My politics informed my collecting. The anti-war and civil rights movements were part of my growing up in the 1950s. At age thirteen, I was influenced by adults returning from the Freedom Rides and voting rights campaigns in the South. My own civil disobedience was first in response to the Vietnam War. I supported Eugene McCarthy's 1968 presidential campaign. Later, the strains of my activism combined as I organized and co-chaired the Western Massachusetts Rainbow Coalition. I was elected a delegate to the Democratic Convention in 1988 pledged to the Rev. Jesse Jackson. As a young person, I had been radicalized; as an adult, I have continued working to achieve a more just and equitable world.

Women's history and black history are tightly woven together; both are hidden and rarely taught in schools. The women's movement and my compelling interest in these untold stories ultimately directed my passion to help fill in the history of ordinary women—women who worked every day without recognition or acknowledgement. Sidney Kaplan—our close friend, backdoor neighbor, and the editor of the Gehenna Press—is the person who enlightened me and first spoke to me of Phillis Wheatley and the utopian Northampton Association that had attracted Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, David Ruggles, Lydia Maria Child, and Sophia Foord to Northampton, Massachusetts. The relationships between Douglass, Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were evidence of the powerful ties between the anti-slavery and suffrage movements.

During the beginnings of the women's movement in the late sixties, Patricia Holland was in my consciousness-raising group. She was writing her dissertation and editing the letters of Lydia Maria Child. She and Ann Gordon became the editors of the Stanton and Anthony Papers Project, located in New Africa House at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Women's suffrage and African American history were here joined together. Working with them contributed to my growing knowledge. I organized and curated the first exhibition at the Elizabeth Cady Stanton House at the Women's Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls. At UMass I curated an exhibition marking the two hundredth anniversary of the death of Phillis Wheatley.

The historian Michelle Aldrich, an archivist of science, was also in my consciousness-raising group. When we established the Valley Women's Center, she created an archive of papers generated during that new wave of the women's movement. She impressed upon me the necessity of documenting an historical moment through collecting papers. With Lee Edwards and Mel Heath, two others from my group, I co-edited special issues of the Massachusetts Review—Woman: An Issue (Winter/Spring 1972), followed by Woman: The Arts 1 and 2 (1983)—and in the process I was drawn, once again, to the work of early women artists and activists.

You can't do it alone! The members of the antiquarian book trade have been my stalwart companions. In the later sixties, I was active as a dealer in the antiques and book trades and exhibited at fairs. For some years I kept an open shop during the summer months where I sold books as well as paintings, pottery, and works on paper. I scoured the coast of Maine during our summers on Little Deer Isle. We went “booking” frequently in Maine and Massachusetts. Avis and Rocky Gardner, Betsy and Timothy Trace, Sam Murray, Benny Tighe, Francis O'Brien, and Aimee MacEwen were among the booksellers who provided significant additions to my growing collection. Avis and Rocky were constantly on the road, scouting the country for antiques and paper. I acquired from them the anarchist journal Lucifer, Stanton and Anthony's The Revolution, Emma Goldman's Mother Earth, as well as The Woman's Advocate, the anti-slavery weekly The Standard, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Forerunner, and myriad piles of women's suffrage ephemera. To my knowledge, the run of The Revolution in the collection is the most complete extant. Booksellers and antiques dealers were learning about me, beginning to comprehend broadly the delineation of my subject. Responding to my intense focus, they had begun to find things that documented women's history.

My collecting focus was not always understood and often not taken seriously. This reflected, I think, the assumption that women didn't have money to buy, resulting in a lack of interest in women customers. It was this disinterest that allowed me to be a stealth buyer. There were, however, a clutch of dealers who were supportive. In the sixties, I discovered that Russell and Martha Freedman had moved nearby to North Adams, Massachusetts, and they were specializing in women's books. With Cheryl Needle I shared politics while acquiring books and manuscripts—including Laura Terracina's Il discorso (Venice, 1638), as well as The Married Woman's Private Medical Companion, the 1847 second edition, the first book to advertise condoms in America. Jake Zeitlin and Lucien Goldschmidt took my collecting seriously. Ken Leach of Brattleboro, Vermont, was magnificently generous to me, and I treasure memories of my visits to his tobacco-suffused book rooms. Leif Laudamus, just over the bridge in Amherst, sold me Torrey's A Portraiture of Domestic Slavery (Philadelphia, 1817), amongst many other books. Carol and Steve Resnick had a ferret's eye similar to my own. Dorothy Johnson and Doris Abramson of the Common Reader Bookshop, Frances Hamill and Margery Barker in Chicago, Barbara Walzer, Kay Gregory, Priscilla Juvelis, Sarah Baldwin, Sharon McBlain, Sheryl Jaeger, Evie Eysenberg, Valerie Jackson-Harris, Paulette Rose, Mary Cooper Gilliam, and PEKL were an impressive group of women booksellers from whom I added to my collection. Margolis and Moss, Bernard Rosenthal, David Block, Fred Schreiber, Jeff Mancevice, Frank McQuaid, Tom Boss, Bolerium, Frannie Ness and Gary Oleson, and David Miles are among the booksellers who have been constant in their willingness to share their knowledge and books. Peter Howard sold me Rideout novels and Abigail Scott Duniway, as well as eighteenth-century pamphlets printed by Anne Baldwin. One day, during a California Book Fair, Peter insisted on driving me to meet David Sachs in Oakland. I am grateful for Peter's friendship, and for transporting me to David's book-packed rooms all those years ago. Leona Rostenberg and Madeline Stern were scholar-booksellers, feminists, and astute businesswomen. They taught me as they sold me the books of Marguerite de Navarre, Vittoria Colonna, Margherita Costa Romana, and Juan Vives. They introduced me to Helen Maria Williams, the revolutionary writer. Nico Israel took me to the Maria Sibylla Merian exhibit in Haarlem; though alas, I could never afford to buy a copy of Merian's Surinam from him. From Jonathan Reilly at Maggs I acquired Agustín's Dialoghi (Rome, 1592) with its illustrations by Geronima Parasole. James Arsenault and Hosea Baskin were responsible for my acquisition of Phoebe Anna Traquair's manuscript In Memoriam (Edinburgh, 1892), on a suggestion provided by Phillip Pirages. And the list could go on—Deborah Coltham, Veronica Watts, Susanne Schulz-Falster, and many more.

The magic of seeing and holding an original object—a notebook recording sewn piecework with the prices paid to the dressmaker, a needlework wrought by Charlotte Brontë, Phillis Wheatley's signature on the reverse of her title page—conjures the spirits and lives of working women. The heart of my collection, the reason for its existence, was always about imparting knowledge, about recording and remembering, about saving the stories and affirming the contributions that women made throughout the millennia. The limitations of language and the geographic focus solely on Western Europe and the Americas are shortcomings, but the collection continues to grow. It is deeply satisfying that my collection sits so well in its new home at the Rubenstein Library. The overlaps and intersection with Duke's comprehensive History of Medicine Collection and the John Hope Franklin Center for African and African American History and Culture are significant to me. To continue collecting collaboratively with the Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture is a rare opportunity; this joining together is unique.

The Lisa Unger Baskin Collection is a teaching collection. It was always my intention that the collection have a useful life in its next iteration, to be available to students, researchers, and ordinary people who might find inspiration in women's work and accomplishments, achieved even as they were burdened and oppressed. In its new context the collection will continue to grow, to educate, and to spark the kind of unexpected connections that made it such a labor of love.