Transcript
Speaker: Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
Speaker: I'm Ben Miller.
Speaker: When I first started this podcast years ago, my premise was that the antiques world is full of terrific storytellers, and I wanted to create a new way to get those stories out into the world, maybe even beyond the close-knit community of antiques lovers.
Speaker: We've had over 80 episodes now, and I think that premise has absolutely proven itself.
Speaker: There are so many gripping storytellers,
Speaker: And more than that, they're deeply knowledgeable experts and connoisseurs and truth seekers.
Speaker: And even amongst that impressive group, my guest today stands out as one of the truly legendary storytellers.
Speaker: But Kenneth Rendell hasn't just chronicled from the sidelines, he's been part of history himself, pioneering new fields of collecting, debunking major forgeries, sometimes in actual cloak and dagger scenarios.
Speaker: befriending presidents and world leaders and celebrities, building Bill and Melinda Gates' library and collection, and all the while pursuing extreme sports like helicopter skiing and even founding a World War II museum.
Speaker: In short, he has been very, very busy for a very long time.
Speaker: And fortunately for us, Ken has just published his memoir titled Safeguarding History, Trailblazing Adventures Inside the Worlds of Collecting and Forging History.
Speaker: with an introduction by Doris Kearns Goodwin and lavish praise from Ken Burns, Tom Hanks, and so many others.
Speaker: The book is really a gripping read.
Speaker: I don't recommend it as bedtime reading unless you want to stay up late.
Speaker: That was my experience at least, but I'm thrilled to have the chance to talk about it right now with Kenneth Rendell.
Speaker: Ken, thanks for speaking with me.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Before we get into the book, I have a few rapid fire questions for you.
Speaker: Are you ready?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Okay, what is the first object or artwork that you remember falling in love with?
Speaker: With the $1806 half dollar that was spent in my parents' drugstore when I was 10 years old.
Speaker: It was a little bit larger than a normal half dollar.
Speaker: My mother gave it to me and I found out I could sell it for $3.50.
Speaker: And that started me with coins.
Speaker: We're going to get into that story in a lot more detail in a minute.
Speaker: But what piece have you sold over the course of your career that you would most like to have back?
Speaker: Too many.
Speaker: I really had to divorce myself from thinking of owning a lot of things that I sold because I'm at heart a real collector.
Speaker: And I sold things only so I could be at least a part-time owner of something.
Speaker: But there have been many, many pieces I'd love to have back.
Speaker: What's the oldest object that you personally own?
Speaker: 3100 BC, Sumerian tablet.
Speaker: That's pretty old.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: What public figure most surprised you when you met them in person?
Speaker: I had a very good opinion of Harry Truman, which is why I wrote to him.
Speaker: And I could hardly believe it when he invited me to come see him if I was in Independence, Missouri.
Speaker: So I immediately drove to Independence, Missouri.
Speaker: And he so impressed me with his sincerity in answering complicated questions.
Speaker: I found them very believable and very sincere.
Speaker: What's your favorite museum to visit?
Speaker: It depends on where I am.
Speaker: In New York, it's the Met.
Speaker: In Paris, it's the Louvre.
Speaker: And in London, it's the British Museum.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: You just hit the all-star list, I think.
Speaker: We'll be back in just a second to hear stories from Ken Rendell's extraordinary career.
Speaker: Meanwhile, if you haven't already, take a moment to subscribe to the podcast to make sure you don't miss future episodes.
Speaker: And if you'd like to help us out, leave us a rating and a review, which really helps new listeners to find the show.
Speaker: If you'd like to see pictures of the pieces we're talking about today, you can find those at themagazineantiques.com slash podcast.
Speaker: And if you'd like to get in touch directly, you can reach me at CuriousObjectsPodcast at gmail.com or on Instagram at Objective Interest.
Speaker: Now, one of the remarkable features of Ken Rendell's career is just how early it started.
Speaker: He really was a wunderkind buying and selling coins from the age of 10.
Speaker: And it all began with this one very special half dollar coin that you've just mentioned to us.
Speaker: Ken, would you tell us a little more about that coin and how it drew you into this career?
Speaker: I think that the main thing that impressed me with the coin was that it said liberty on the front.
Speaker: And the coin was worn, which to me was good because it represented all the people who had handled it in the past 150 years.
Speaker: And I was really curious about all these people.
Speaker: 1806 wasn't that far away from 1776.
Speaker: So a lot of people would have been aware of the Declaration of Independence, of the American Revolution.
Speaker: I was fascinated with who those people were.
Speaker: And it really pulled me into the historical world.
Speaker: It's not unusual for children to enjoy collecting things, but for you, that interest blossomed into an actual business at an extraordinarily young age.
Speaker: Again, all starting with that half dollar.
Speaker: Could you tell us a little more about how that happened and what do you think was different about you as a child?
Speaker: Necessity.
Speaker: My parents had bought a drugstore in a really tough section of Boston where kids that I played with, they aspired to not get as caught as often as their fathers did and to spend less time in jail.
Speaker: And in those days, there was no welfare.
Speaker: So when people needed prescriptions and couldn't pay for them, my father gave them the medicines anyhow.
Speaker: But he couldn't endlessly afford to do this.
Speaker: He went bankrupt.
Speaker: He died.
Speaker: So it was a real necessity to make money.
Speaker: And that's what really got me going.
Speaker: going through coins in circulation.
Speaker: And there weren't that many coin collectors in a popular sense at that time.
Speaker: So people weren't going through pennies that were in circulation.
Speaker: But every time and very frequently I could sell pennies for 10 cents or 25 cents, it represented a huge profit with almost no capital.
Speaker: um i used to joke when people said what was the basis of my success was that i wanted to eat it was a necessity and it turned out really well
Speaker: Do you still have that 1806 half dollar that started it all?
Speaker: It's been on my desk now since 1953.
Speaker: I bought it back for $5 six months after I sold it.
Speaker: And I was doing well enough to commit $5 to it.
Speaker: And it's always been on my desk.
Speaker: You wrote in the book that repurchasing that coin was the most significant capital outlay that you ever made as a fraction of your net worth.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: I had about $10 when I decided to buy it back.
Speaker: And it obviously was a great emotional investment, but it also reduced my working capital by 50%.
Speaker: And nothing like that's ever happened again, fortunately.
Speaker: But it was the greatest investment I could make in remembering how everything started and never forgetting that thrill of being connected to an object in history.
Speaker: And then how did you ultimately transition from coins into documents and manuscripts and so on?
Speaker: My best friend in the rare coin field, who I did a lot of things with and a lot of traveling and working together, he started collecting presidential letters.
Speaker: And I went to Pennsylvania for his wedding.
Speaker: And he showed me his collection just before his wedding, which ended up being delayed as we worked out a trade for a collection of British coins that I had for his collection of presidential letters.
Speaker: I originally thought I would be a collector.
Speaker: But I realized I really couldn't afford to obtain that many letters.
Speaker: And I would be much happier if I could be the temporary owner of things, enjoy them, and sadly, in many cases, part with them.
Speaker: But at a very rapid rate, my interest shifted from being a dealer in coins.
Speaker: I still collect coins and I have a very good coin collection.
Speaker: But the letters just had a much greater hold on me.
Speaker: Now, I want to fast forward to another pivotal moment in your career.
Speaker: And this, I think I'm right in saying this is really when you entered the public eye.
Speaker: It was 1983.
Speaker: And you had pivoted from the coin business into rare documents, letters and autographs, as we've just discussed.
Speaker: And then you got a very strange call from Newsweek magazine.
Speaker: What was that call about?
Speaker: Well, they were looking to hire someone who could authenticate a non-current manuscript, but they wouldn't say how old it was.
Speaker: And I had no interest in doing it.
Speaker: I saw no value in doing something for news magazine.
Speaker: I had never been for hire in terms of authentication.
Speaker: Because authentifications really take time and they're really complicated.
Speaker: And you don't always have an answer.
Speaker: And if you're really good at it, you can say you don't know whether something, you can't prove it.
Speaker: can have a feeling, but you can't prove it all the time.
Speaker: And I had no interest.
Speaker: I kept turning them down.
Speaker: And I wouldn't come to New York to talk to them.
Speaker: I wasn't playing hard to get.
Speaker: I just saw no real purpose in having any involvement, and I wasn't going to make a trip to New York.
Speaker: They contacted me at one point.
Speaker: I was at the Library of Congress doing a lecture on forgery detection.
Speaker: So that impressed them even more.
Speaker: And finally, I actually guessed what it was.
Speaker: I remember the phone call.
Speaker: They couldn't tell me anything.
Speaker: It was super secret.
Speaker: And I said, you know, you can't be this interested if it's just the discovery of a document that is known to exist, but its location wasn't known.
Speaker: That would be a minor news story.
Speaker: That's not going to make it in a magazine.
Speaker: I said, so it has to be a journal or a diary, something where there's publication value and there's information not previously known.
Speaker: There's some kind of insight.
Speaker: And with all of the secrecy and you're wanting to pay any price that I want to work on it, I said, so it has to be somebody really saleable.
Speaker: And the top of that list is Adolf Hitler.
Speaker: And the representative of the owner of Newsweek was stunned that I had guessed this.
Speaker: And I could tell from his voice that I had actually hit on it.
Speaker: So I was doing an NYU lecture on a Saturday, and I said, well, I'll meet on Saturday.
Speaker: And I went by there, and I was really interested in what they told me, and I agreed to work on this.
Speaker: What changed your mind about getting involved in it?
Speaker: I thought it was fascinating.
Speaker: I thought the whole structure of the deal, Newsweek was paying $2.5 million for American publication rights.
Speaker: It clearly was an enormous story that hadn't been broken.
Speaker: I mean, no one had released this.
Speaker: Stern magazine had come up with the diaries.
Speaker: The story about them was very interesting, potentially.
Speaker: And I think curiosity.
Speaker: And the deal was that I would write the story one way or the other, provided I had an opinion.
Speaker: But I had to be able to demonstrate it in Newsweek magazine.
Speaker: Newsweek was certain that the editor in chief was certain it was genuine.
Speaker: There had been about 10 authentifications done.
Speaker: One was an American, a couple of English, the rest were Germans and one Swiss.
Speaker: And they had all written authentifications and they were supposedly all experts.
Speaker: Newsweek had hired historians to study it and they declared it was genuine.
Speaker: So it seemed like something from their standpoint
Speaker: that I was just going to confirm what they already believed.
Speaker: I didn't know which way it would go.
Speaker: And I don't like to go into any situation predisposed to want to believe something or to think, you know, this is going to be a hoax or who knows.
Speaker: And as long as you have the originals, there's no reason to guess because you can prove it.
Speaker: in almost every case.
Speaker: And particularly if you have diaries, you have so much material forensically to work with that I was certain that I could come up with an answer and prove it.
Speaker: And just to give us some context, what was at stake here in terms of the authenticity of these diaries?
Speaker: Well, there was a lot of money.
Speaker: I mean, there certainly was more than $10 million at stake.
Speaker: Reputations, jobs, people who had been involved at Stern, almost everybody at Stern was fired, except the person who had approved buying it, which just gave a sense of
Speaker: the political ability of this person.
Speaker: He had overruled the editors.
Speaker: The editor who I spent some time with, he had been opposed to doing this, not because he thought it wasn't genuine, but he really hated
Speaker: all of the focus on Nazis in Germany, German media.
Speaker: And I later worked for Stern magazine to uncover how it happened.
Speaker: And he wrote a memo that I quoted extensively, saying that he didn't want any more Nazi shitezy in the magazine.
Speaker: But he lost his job.
Speaker: Basically, everyone at Stern got fired who had anything to do with this.
Speaker: But as I say, the person who made the decision to spend the money and overrule the editors, he survived.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So the financial stakes were enormous, but there were also political and cultural stakes as well, right?
Speaker: I mean, these diaries would have changed in a meaningful way the public image of Adolf Hitler.
Speaker: Yeah, I don't want to say that I was skeptical about what Stern was telling me, but I was going to Germany and they said there was a real concern for my security because the diaries showed a much better side of Adolf Hitler than was real.
Speaker: And the neo-Nazis liked the view that was in the diaries.
Speaker: So if they had me saying they're not genuine, that didn't fit in with their political desires.
Speaker: But to me, I had said right at the beginning with Newsweek, if I was going to fake Hitler's diaries, the only way you could make them saleable
Speaker: would be to appear, you're appealing to your middle class in terms of age, German readers.
Speaker: They're going to want to hear about a Hitler that wasn't so bad because their parents voted for him.
Speaker: People do forget that the Nazis won the election.
Speaker: That's what put Hitler into power.
Speaker: So you want to have a nicer Hitler that they voted for.
Speaker: And all the extremes happened because of the henchmen that followed along with him.
Speaker: And that's exactly what the diary said.
Speaker: My favorite was referring to Himmler, the head of the SS.
Speaker: I just told Heinrich I didn't like the town.
Speaker: Now he's burned it down.
Speaker: I have to speak to him about this.
Speaker: And the forger instinctively knew what he needed to say in the diaries to be appealing and to be saleable.
Speaker: My favorite part of the Hitler Diaries hoax was that the forger actually was not a very smart person intellectually.
Speaker: And when he was questioned by the Stern reporter who was making the deal, the Stern reporter said, I have to know where these come from.
Speaker: And he said, well, I can't tell you.
Speaker: It's a secret.
Speaker: He couldn't tell them because he had never thought of where they came from.
Speaker: And the reporter said, well, it must be East Germany then.
Speaker: And he said, well, I just can't confirm that.
Speaker: And the reporter said, well, how are they getting out of East Germany?
Speaker: He said, well, I can't tell you that.
Speaker: And the reporter said, well, it must be a very high ranking East German official to be able to take these out.
Speaker: So for every question where Kouyao, the forger, had no idea what to say, the reporter told them.
Speaker: It was just masterful.
Speaker: There's a German film called the Schrank, which is a comedy about all of this.
Speaker: And a British film called Selling Hitler, which is very amusing as well.
Speaker: I mean, after the fact, you can say it was amusing, but at the time it was serious business.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, and you traveled to Hamburg to examine the diaries in person physically, but Stern would only give you access to those under very specific conditions.
Speaker: How did you handle that?
Speaker: Well, the conditions initially, you signed a non-disclosure agreement that you're not going to disclose anything that you've seen.
Speaker: But it got very complicated later because I wouldn't sign an agreement with Stern.
Speaker: And they wanted to hire me.
Speaker: And I thought they would flood me with material so that I could get delayed in declaring that it was a hoax.
Speaker: And I wouldn't go along with that.
Speaker: I mean, two can play the game.
Speaker: And I knew what they were trying to do.
Speaker: And I gave them one week.
Speaker: And that was it.
Speaker: And if you're working with news magazines, television was not the big deal then.
Speaker: You know when the magazine goes to print.
Speaker: which is the last minute when they can make changes.
Speaker: So you work within that.
Speaker: Newsweek started printing on a Saturday night.
Speaker: So Newsweek couldn't use any information that they shouldn't use Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday.
Speaker: It came out on Sunday.
Speaker: And so you had a different perspective.
Speaker: on secrecy and embargoes of news stories.
Speaker: And at one point, didn't you even tape some photocopies under your pants legs to smuggle them out?
Speaker: I made multiple copies of a Hitler diary and telling office staff that some of them weren't clear enough to use with a microscope.
Speaker: Well, none of them were.
Speaker: You can't use a microscope on photocopies.
Speaker: So I had different sets.
Speaker: And I was taping them around my legs.
Speaker: And so I got a full set out of Stern's offices because I suspected that they might double cross me and cut me off because they didn't like what I was saying.
Speaker: And so I wanted to protect the integrity of the news story.
Speaker: I didn't want to get used.
Speaker: Other people did get used.
Speaker: In quite a few of these cases, a person would be told that other people said that a document passed.
Speaker: But the experts should not be taking an interested party's word for something.
Speaker: They should be checking with each other.
Speaker: And they should be reading each other's reports to make sure.
Speaker: But it was a world in which you had to be very skeptical.
Speaker: And I am very skeptical.
Speaker: So I wouldn't take anybody's word for it.
Speaker: And I didn't trust Stern in this whole thing.
Speaker: So, of course, in the end, you determined that these were obviously fakes.
Speaker: But why do you think so many people were so eager to believe in them?
Speaker: Well, I think that the general public has a great interest in evil.
Speaker: I mean, just look at any newspaper right now, what's playing.
Speaker: And look at the most popular area of movies across the board, not specific movies.
Speaker: Well, if specific movies are horror movies and criminal stuff with violence.
Speaker: So the idea of Hitler, Hitler books sell unbelievably well.
Speaker: There's a fascination with evil.
Speaker: And the general public interest in this was unbelievable.
Speaker: It got out of hand.
Speaker: And the person in charge at Stern magazine told me they never realized what a big story this could be.
Speaker: they thought they were going to get like 10 magazine covers out of it.
Speaker: And that would be it.
Speaker: Not that it would take off and they could recoup and make a lot of money selling publication rights all over the place.
Speaker: It was unreal.
Speaker: An agent...
Speaker: um uh literary agent who worked for CAA told me that they had never they as the organization CAA had never seen anything like the millions of dollars being thrown out Rupert Murdoch was in it everybody was in publication rights and they they were correct it was a huge story um the uh I think the the experts
Speaker: were overly impressed with being in a position of signing secrecy agreements.
Speaker: This was a huge story.
Speaker: You're dealing with Stern Magazine, big magazine in Germany.
Speaker: They were in way over their head in terms of maintaining their own balance in who they were and why they were brought in.
Speaker: I think that all of them lost a sense of they were brought into this because they supposedly were an expert in their world.
Speaker: So they, but they didn't stick to their world.
Speaker: You know, it was a sense of celebrity and they really lost their balance because a lot of these people should have said they don't, didn't know that it was beyond them.
Speaker: They didn't really know the forensics involved.
Speaker: These were mostly people who did modern check, forged checks, forged contracts.
Speaker: They had no idea of aging of ink or what paper should be used, what kind of a writing instrument.
Speaker: They just had no idea.
Speaker: What a lesson in due diligence.
Speaker: And saying no when you don't know something and some humility that you could be over your head, it was handled very poorly.
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Speaker: So in the wake of this forgery scandal and several other high profile events, you had started to become a public figure yourself.
Speaker: And that is part of what led you to every dealer's dream client, Bill Gates.
Speaker: How did he first reach out to you?
Speaker: Well, he came to us through other people in Silicon Valley, not through the news.
Speaker: And what did Bill and Melinda want you to do for them?
Speaker: Well, I've never discussed what's in their collection.
Speaker: That's really up to them or the people who have seen their collection.
Speaker: We gave them what I called a briefing book that's about five inches thick of collections I had put together.
Speaker: Everything from White House library to just collections on colonial America.
Speaker: And they both annotated it with their level of interest or disinterest.
Speaker: and with authors, which authors were of interest and how much interest from one to five.
Speaker: One being just their most important book and five being really nice inscribed copies of everything the author had written.
Speaker: And that was the basis for putting it together.
Speaker: And generally speaking, what sorts of books were they prioritizing?
Speaker: What did they want to put into this library they were building?
Speaker: Well, obviously, science and mathematics and computer development, but a lot of other things in addition.
Speaker: But I mean, those were areas that I thought would most likely be of interest to Bill Gates.
Speaker: And I really studied, and I have a very good knowledge of people in history and music and literature, but I really studied the people that were three levels below what I considered the famous people.
Speaker: And this project came together very quickly, just in the course of a year, right?
Speaker: Well, the initial collection of books came together very quickly, but the project went on for years of adding special manuscripts and collections of letters.
Speaker: That went on for quite a long period of time.
Speaker: I can only imagine what sort of budget you must have been working with.
Speaker: And that kind of frenzied acquisition, did that have a serious impact on the general market?
Speaker: It did.
Speaker: It did all over the market in the rare book world and the manuscript world.
Speaker: It was a very significant factor with books for about a year, but after that in historical manuscripts, because things were just disappearing from the marketplace.
Speaker: Oh, and I mean, I never told anybody what I was doing or anything at all.
Speaker: And I didn't...
Speaker: mention anything until Bill Gates and the cover story in Time Magazine said that I was building the library for him.
Speaker: And I said, you know, to him, we had this agreement, I wouldn't say anything.
Speaker: I said, now, you know, what am I supposed to say to people?
Speaker: He said, well, you can confirm it, just don't tell anybody what I collect.
Speaker: So you've worked with many, many wealthy collectors over the years, of course, but I wonder, was it in some significant way different to work with someone at that truly phenomenal scale of wealth?
Speaker: Not at all, actually.
Speaker: I think it's been one of the things that I'm not sure why I have always had this attitude, but I've never been in awe of anybody.
Speaker: I can be in awe of what they've done, but I always treated them as a human being.
Speaker: as someone who was enormously successful in part of their life.
Speaker: And, you know, I don't know about the other parts.
Speaker: I know the parts that I come in contact with.
Speaker: I have never treated anybody except Harry Truman, you know, I think.
Speaker: But I met a lot of other people in the political field and been very disappointed in them.
Speaker: You know, they have one public image, but they're not really like that.
Speaker: And in my contact with people, they have to be generally interested in people other than themselves.
Speaker: The fact that people have made billions of dollars, if they're only interested in themselves, I wouldn't come in contact with them.
Speaker: They wouldn't want what I do.
Speaker: You know, my focus and their focus has to be the people in history, literature or music or whatever.
Speaker: And I think it's made a big difference that I treat them like people.
Speaker: I'm so interested in this because, you know, one of the observations that's impossible to avoid reading through your book is just how extraordinarily successful you've been in persuading people to trust your judgment and rely on your advice and, of course, to buy things from you.
Speaker: And I wonder if what you've described is a large part of what makes you so good at that.
Speaker: Well, I think that, but I also had the idea, and I'm not sure what year I wrote it, but it was before Hitler Diaries.
Speaker: No, it was after Hitler Diaries, so it would have been the late 80s.
Speaker: But Dillis always said they just knew whether something was genuine or not.
Speaker: And I didn't think that was good enough.
Speaker: I thought you should be able to explain and demonstrate to a collector why you thought it was real or why you thought it wasn't.
Speaker: And that was a very different way for someone to act.
Speaker: And I did a lot of court cases.
Speaker: And I'm demonstrating to a judge and or a jury why my opinion is right.
Speaker: And I would never take the view, well, I'm Ken Rendell, and I have the biggest business in the world.
Speaker: And therefore, you have to believe me.
Speaker: I demonstrated.
Speaker: I proved things.
Speaker: And I think that's why people trusted me, because I respected them enough
Speaker: to want to provide evidence to them that they would be convinced.
Speaker: I would be remiss not to mention your athletic feats.
Speaker: You've been a competitive skier, you've done even extreme sports like helicopter skiing.
Speaker: Do those hobbies connect in some way with your business endeavors?
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: You know, they provide the clearing my mind.
Speaker: And I do a lot of 50 mile bike rides.
Speaker: And I always have a notebook.
Speaker: And wherever I am,
Speaker: in whatever I'm not helicopter skiing, because you go off a cliff if you're thinking about other things.
Speaker: And it's one of the things that's appealing about snowboarding, because if you make a slight mistake, you can have a bad crash.
Speaker: But just clearing your mind, hiking and windsurfing, all of these things, to me, you can't keep up an intensity in business, in all of the different things that you're having to consider.
Speaker: I can't keep that up indefinitely.
Speaker: And I can...
Speaker: do things in nature that give me relief.
Speaker: And then I can come back and really hyper focus on situations.
Speaker: So there, I mean, one tax court case that I took on, there were 12 million uncatalogued pieces.
Speaker: And it was already scheduled for tax court.
Speaker: And it took me two weeks to work out how to organize the collection.
Speaker: And I did it hiking every day.
Speaker: I took two weeks to work out the strategy to come to a realistic way to interpret the value of this.
Speaker: There was no quick answer to it.
Speaker: I mean, if you thought there was a quick answer, you'd be on the losing side.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And with the Gates, my partner, my wife, said to me after a meeting with them in which I agreed to deliver 25,000 volume library in 11 months.
Speaker: cataloged and on their shelf in a specific day 11 months later.
Speaker: And she said, I know you take on enormously complex projects, but I have no idea how we're ever going to do this.
Speaker: And I said, I'll tell you a secret.
Speaker: I don't either.
Speaker: But the actual real answer is I model an awful lot of what I do on the D-Day invasion plans.
Speaker: where you have multiple things going on simultaneously.
Speaker: And you have to consider each of those activities as to how they affect the other ones.
Speaker: And your time available works backwards.
Speaker: Would you say that you've observed changes in general collecting habits and proclivities over the decades?
Speaker: Yeah, the one that surprised me the most, I think, and I very quickly reacted to it, was the way people needed...
Speaker: to understand other people.
Speaker: When People Magazine came out, I thought, you know, this is, I don't know how short-lived I thought it would be, but I couldn't imagine wanting to read just two pages about somebody.
Speaker: I mean, either they'd be interesting enough to read a lot more, but not just two pages.
Speaker: And I don't know how many people they cover in every issue.
Speaker: But I remember the early, I had refused to do an interview for People magazine, because I thought it was a joke.
Speaker: And I think that the developments in society, and let's say People is 40 years or 50 years old, it's somewhere in there.
Speaker: I think the dehumanizing of society in general with computers and more and more automated things starting back then caused people to need to know how other people did things, how other people survived various changes in society, how did people survive things that happened to them.
Speaker: And I think that was a major change in my field.
Speaker: And it was a real basis of our galleries.
Speaker: that the satisfaction in our gallery, our main gallery was on Madison Avenue at 76th Street, but we also had Beverly Hills and Tokyo.
Speaker: It was terrific.
Speaker: People came in.
Speaker: And they never believed they could own a letter of, could be Charles Dickens, it could be Fitzgerald or George Washington.
Speaker: And they were absolutely thrilled to have that connection with the person.
Speaker: I got so much more satisfaction out of that than selling an archive to a university library.
Speaker: when the reaction you get is a purchase order.
Speaker: Last question.
Speaker: What advice would you give to someone starting to build a collection today?
Speaker: I think depending upon how much of a factor money is, I think there are a lot of interesting areas that you could pioneer.
Speaker: I mean, something that I got into 25 years ago, ephemera, leaflets and other things that by their very nature were thrown away on important subjects.
Speaker: And you could build really important research.
Speaker: I think going with your own instinct, but realizing, you know, you may be the only person out there.
Speaker: And that can be really positive.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: but you know a lot of people you know don't want to do that they want to collect what's popular
Speaker: because it reinforces what they're doing.
Speaker: And in a sense that, you know, that's their personality needs to be reinforced rather than standing alone doing something.
Speaker: So I think you have to think a lot about yourself and what interests you.
Speaker: What do you read about?
Speaker: What are you fascinated with?
Speaker: You need to have an understanding of yourself, right?
Speaker: to go your own way and also understanding all the market forces.
Speaker: You know, is there anything to collect?
Speaker: you know, does this exist?
Speaker: There are a lot of areas that are really closed out.
Speaker: Because material doesn't turn up, it's not privately owned.
Speaker: There was a guy who I thought was in all this for the social parts.
Speaker: And at a manuscript society meeting, I asked what he collected.
Speaker: And he told me Mozart manuscripts.
Speaker: And all I could say was, doesn't everyone?
Speaker: I didn't know if he even owned one page of Mozart.
Speaker: I mean, that would be a very futile area to collect because it doesn't turn up.
Speaker: So you need to be practical and understand the market.
Speaker: But you can get a lot of different dealer advice.
Speaker: But in the end, it's really up to you.
Speaker: What are you going to get a thrill out of?
Speaker: Well, this has been a great pleasure.
Speaker: Thank you, Ken.
Speaker: Once again, the book is Safeguarding History by Kenneth Rendell.
Speaker: You'll find stories like the ones we talked about today, plus many, many more.
Speaker: And it is a terrific read, but don't take it from me.
Speaker: Ken Burns said, Ken Rendell humanizes and personalizes the scope and promise of human endeavor.
Speaker: Hard to do a lot better than that.
Speaker: We'll be back next week with more Curious Objects.
Speaker: Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati with social media and web support by Sarah Bellotta.
Speaker: Sierra Holt is our digital media and editorial associate.
Speaker: Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
Speaker: And I'm Ben Miller.
