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Debunking the Hitler Diaries and Other Adventures, with Kenneth Rendell
23 Plays2 years ago
Friend of presidents and billionaires, nemesis of Hitlerism, and helicopter skiing enthusiast, Kenneth Rendell is an antiquer who needs no introduction. But listeners hankering for more had best apply to Safeguarding History: Trailblazing Adventures Inside the Worlds of Collecting and Forging History, Rendell’s recently published memoir and the occasion for his conversation with Curious Objects’ host Benjamin Miller. On the docket in this episode is the role Rendell played in cracking the case of the forged Hitler Diaries, how he amassed twenty-five thousand rare books and manuscripts in just eleven months for Bill Gates’s personal library, and tips for determining the value and authenticity of precious objects, for collectors new and old.
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Transcript
Introduction to Kenneth Rendell and His Career
00:00:10
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
00:00:14
Speaker
I'm Ben Miller.
00:00:15
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.
00:00:30
Speaker
We've had over 80 episodes now, and I think that premise has absolutely proven itself.
00:00:35
Speaker
There are so many gripping storytellers,
00:00:38
Speaker
And more than that, they're deeply knowledgeable experts and connoisseurs and truth seekers.
00:00:43
Speaker
And even amongst that impressive group, my guest today stands out as one of the truly legendary storytellers.
00:00:50
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.
00:01:04
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.
00:01:17
Speaker
In short, he has been very, very busy for a very long time.
Rendell's Memoir and First Collectible
00:01:21
Speaker
And fortunately for us, Ken has just published his memoir titled Safeguarding History, Trailblazing Adventures Inside the Worlds of Collecting and Forging History.
00:01:32
Speaker
with an introduction by Doris Kearns Goodwin and lavish praise from Ken Burns, Tom Hanks, and so many others.
00:01:38
Speaker
The book is really a gripping read.
00:01:41
Speaker
I don't recommend it as bedtime reading unless you want to stay up late.
00:01:44
Speaker
That was my experience at least, but I'm thrilled to have the chance to talk about it right now with Kenneth Rendell.
00:01:51
Speaker
Ken, thanks for speaking with me.
00:01:53
Speaker
Thank you.
00:01:54
Speaker
Before we get into the book, I have a few rapid fire questions for you.
00:01:57
Speaker
Are you ready?
00:01:59
Speaker
Sure.
00:02:00
Speaker
Okay, what is the first object or artwork that you remember falling in love with?
00:02:05
Speaker
With the $1806 half dollar that was spent in my parents' drugstore when I was 10 years old.
00:02:13
Speaker
It was a little bit larger than a normal half dollar.
00:02:16
Speaker
My mother gave it to me and I found out I could sell it for $3.50.
00:02:21
Speaker
And that started me with coins.
00:02:26
Speaker
We're going to get into that story in a lot more detail in a minute.
00:02:29
Speaker
But what piece have you sold over the course of your career that you would most like to have back?
00:02:35
Speaker
Too many.
00:02:37
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.
00:02:50
Speaker
And I sold things only so I could be at least a part-time owner
Encounters and Museum Recommendations
00:02:56
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of something.
00:02:56
Speaker
But there have been many, many pieces I'd love to have back.
00:03:01
Speaker
What's the oldest object that you personally own?
00:03:05
Speaker
3100 BC, Sumerian tablet.
00:03:08
Speaker
That's pretty old.
00:03:09
Speaker
Okay.
00:03:10
Speaker
What public figure most surprised you when you met them in person?
00:03:14
Speaker
I had a very good opinion of Harry Truman, which is why I wrote to him.
00:03:20
Speaker
And I could hardly believe it when he invited me to come see him if I was in Independence, Missouri.
00:03:27
Speaker
So I immediately drove to Independence, Missouri.
00:03:32
Speaker
And he so impressed me with his sincerity in answering complicated questions.
00:03:41
Speaker
I found them very believable and very sincere.
00:03:47
Speaker
What's your favorite museum to visit?
00:03:50
Speaker
It depends on where I am.
00:03:52
Speaker
In New York, it's the Met.
00:03:55
Speaker
In Paris, it's the Louvre.
00:03:56
Speaker
And in London, it's the British Museum.
00:04:00
Speaker
All right.
00:04:00
Speaker
You just hit the all-star list, I think.
00:04:06
Speaker
We'll be back in just a second to hear stories from Ken Rendell's extraordinary career.
00:04:10
Speaker
Meanwhile, if you haven't already, take a moment to subscribe to the podcast to make sure you don't miss future episodes.
00:04:16
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.
00:04:22
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.
00:04:28
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.
Beginnings in Collecting
00:04:41
Speaker
Now, one of the remarkable features of Ken Rendell's career is just how early it started.
00:04:47
Speaker
He really was a wunderkind buying and selling coins from the age of 10.
00:04:53
Speaker
And it all began with this one very special half dollar coin that you've just mentioned to us.
00:04:58
Speaker
Ken, would you tell us a little more about that coin and how it drew you into this career?
00:05:03
Speaker
I think that the main thing that impressed me with the coin was that it said liberty on the front.
00:05:13
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.
00:05:25
Speaker
And I was really curious about all these people.
00:05:30
Speaker
1806 wasn't that far away from 1776.
00:05:36
Speaker
So a lot of people would have been aware of the Declaration of Independence, of the American Revolution.
00:05:48
Speaker
I was fascinated with who those people were.
00:05:50
Speaker
And it really pulled me into the historical world.
00:05:55
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.
00:06:06
Speaker
Again, all starting with that half dollar.
00:06:09
Speaker
Could you tell us a little more about how that happened and what do you think was different about you as a child?
00:06:16
Speaker
Necessity.
00:06:19
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.
00:06:34
Speaker
And in those days, there was no welfare.
00:06:37
Speaker
So when people needed prescriptions and couldn't pay for them, my father gave them the medicines anyhow.
00:06:44
Speaker
But he couldn't endlessly afford to do this.
00:06:47
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He went bankrupt.
00:06:48
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He died.
00:06:49
Speaker
So it was a real necessity to make money.
00:06:54
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And that's what really got me going.
00:06:57
Speaker
going through coins in circulation.
00:07:00
Speaker
And there weren't that many coin collectors in a popular sense at that time.
00:07:06
Speaker
So people weren't going through pennies that were in circulation.
00:07:11
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.
00:07:23
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
00:07:39
Speaker
Do you still have that 1806 half dollar that started it all?
00:07:43
Speaker
It's been on my desk now since 1953.
00:07:47
Speaker
I bought it back for $5 six months after I sold it.
00:07:53
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And I was doing well enough to commit $5 to it.
00:07:59
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And it's always been on my desk.
00:08:02
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.
00:08:12
Speaker
That's right.
00:08:12
Speaker
I had about $10 when I decided to
Debunking the Hitler Diaries
00:08:16
Speaker
buy it back.
00:08:17
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And it obviously was a great emotional investment, but it also reduced my working capital by 50%.
00:08:26
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And nothing like that's ever happened again, fortunately.
00:08:32
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.
00:08:47
Speaker
And then how did you ultimately transition from coins into documents and manuscripts and so on?
00:08:54
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.
00:09:07
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And I went to Pennsylvania for his wedding.
00:09:12
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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.
00:09:26
Speaker
I originally thought I would be a collector.
00:09:29
Speaker
But I realized I really couldn't afford to obtain that many letters.
00:09:36
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.
00:09:48
Speaker
But at a very rapid rate, my interest shifted from being a dealer in coins.
00:09:54
Speaker
I still collect coins and I have a very good coin collection.
00:09:59
Speaker
But the letters just had a much greater hold on me.
00:10:05
Speaker
Now, I want to fast forward to another pivotal moment in your career.
00:10:10
Speaker
And this, I think I'm right in saying this is really when you entered the public eye.
00:10:15
Speaker
It was 1983.
00:10:17
Speaker
And you had pivoted from the coin business into rare documents, letters and autographs, as we've just discussed.
00:10:24
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And then you got a very strange call from Newsweek magazine.
00:10:28
Speaker
What was that call about?
00:10:30
Speaker
Well, they were looking to hire someone who could authenticate a non-current manuscript, but they wouldn't say how old it was.
00:10:43
Speaker
And I had no interest in doing it.
00:10:46
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I saw no value in doing something for news magazine.
00:10:52
Speaker
I had never been for hire in terms of authentication.
00:10:57
Speaker
Because authentifications really take time and they're really complicated.
00:11:02
Speaker
And you don't always have an answer.
00:11:05
Speaker
And if you're really good at it, you can say you don't know whether something, you can't prove it.
00:11:13
Speaker
can have a feeling, but you can't prove it all the time.
00:11:17
Speaker
And I had no interest.
00:11:18
Speaker
I kept turning them down.
00:11:21
Speaker
And I wouldn't come to New York to talk to them.
00:11:25
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I wasn't playing hard to get.
00:11:27
Speaker
I just saw no real purpose in having any involvement, and I wasn't going to make a trip to New York.
00:11:36
Speaker
They contacted me at one point.
00:11:39
Speaker
I was at the Library of Congress doing a lecture on forgery detection.
00:11:44
Speaker
So that impressed them even more.
00:11:48
Speaker
And finally, I actually guessed what it was.
00:11:54
Speaker
I remember the phone call.
00:11:56
Speaker
They couldn't tell me anything.
00:11:58
Speaker
It was super secret.
00:11:59
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.
00:12:11
Speaker
That would be a minor news story.
00:12:13
Speaker
That's not going to make it in a magazine.
00:12:16
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.
00:12:26
Speaker
There's some kind of insight.
00:12:29
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.
00:12:44
Speaker
And the top of that list is Adolf Hitler.
00:12:48
Speaker
And the representative of the owner of Newsweek was stunned that I had guessed this.
00:12:57
Speaker
And I could tell from his voice that I had actually hit on it.
00:13:02
Speaker
So I was doing an NYU lecture on a Saturday, and I said, well, I'll meet on Saturday.
00:13:11
Speaker
And I went by there, and I was really interested in what they told me, and I agreed to work on this.
00:13:22
Speaker
What changed your mind about getting involved in it?
00:13:26
Speaker
I thought it was fascinating.
00:13:29
Speaker
I thought the whole structure of the deal, Newsweek was paying $2.5 million for American publication rights.
00:13:40
Speaker
It clearly was an enormous story that hadn't been broken.
00:13:44
Speaker
I mean, no one had released this.
00:13:47
Speaker
Stern magazine had come up with the diaries.
00:13:51
Speaker
The story about them was very interesting, potentially.
00:13:57
Speaker
And I think curiosity.
00:14:02
Speaker
And the deal was that I would write the story one way or the other, provided I had an opinion.
00:14:17
Speaker
But I had to be able to demonstrate it in Newsweek magazine.
00:14:22
Speaker
Newsweek was certain that the editor in chief was certain it was genuine.
00:14:28
Speaker
There had been about 10 authentifications done.
00:14:32
Speaker
One was an American, a couple of English, the rest were Germans and one Swiss.
00:14:38
Speaker
And they had all written authentifications and they were supposedly all experts.
00:14:44
Speaker
Newsweek had hired historians to study it and they declared it was genuine.
00:14:51
Speaker
So it seemed like something from their standpoint
00:14:55
Speaker
that I was just going to confirm what they already believed.
00:15:01
Speaker
I didn't know which way it would go.
00:15:03
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.
00:15:17
Speaker
And as long as you have the originals, there's no reason to guess because you can prove it.
00:15:24
Speaker
in almost every case.
00:15:26
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.
00:15:40
Speaker
And just to give us some context, what was at stake here in terms of the authenticity of these diaries?
00:15:46
Speaker
Well, there was a lot of money.
00:15:48
Speaker
I mean, there certainly was more than $10 million at stake.
00:15:54
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
00:16:11
Speaker
the political ability of this person.
00:16:17
Speaker
He had overruled the editors.
00:16:19
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
00:16:35
Speaker
all of the focus on Nazis in Germany, German media.
00:16:41
Speaker
And I later worked for Stern magazine to uncover how it happened.
00:16:48
Speaker
And he wrote a memo that I quoted extensively, saying that he didn't want any more Nazi shitezy in the magazine.
00:16:59
Speaker
But he lost his job.
00:17:01
Speaker
Basically, everyone at Stern got fired who had anything to do with this.
00:17:09
Speaker
But as I say, the person who made the decision to spend the money and overrule the editors, he survived.
00:17:19
Speaker
Yeah.
00:17:21
Speaker
So the financial stakes were enormous, but there were also political and cultural stakes as well, right?
00:17:26
Speaker
I mean, these diaries would have changed in a meaningful way the public image of Adolf Hitler.
00:17:33
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.
00:18:01
Speaker
And the neo-Nazis liked the view that was in the diaries.
00:18:07
Speaker
So if they had me saying they're not genuine, that didn't fit in with their political desires.
00:18:17
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
00:18:26
Speaker
would be to appear, you're appealing to your middle class in terms of age, German readers.
00:18:37
Speaker
They're going to want to hear about a Hitler that wasn't so bad because their parents voted for him.
00:18:44
Speaker
People do forget that the Nazis won the election.
00:18:49
Speaker
That's what put Hitler into power.
00:18:52
Speaker
So you want to have a nicer Hitler that they voted for.
00:18:56
Speaker
And all the extremes happened because of the henchmen that followed along with him.
00:19:03
Speaker
And that's exactly what the diary said.
00:19:07
Speaker
My favorite was referring to Himmler, the head of the SS.
00:19:12
Speaker
I just told Heinrich I didn't like the town.
00:19:15
Speaker
Now he's burned it down.
Motivations and Media in Forgery Scandal
00:19:18
Speaker
I have to speak to him about this.
00:19:21
Speaker
And the forger instinctively knew what he needed to say in the diaries to be appealing and to be saleable.
00:19:36
Speaker
My favorite part of the Hitler Diaries hoax was that the forger actually was not a very smart person intellectually.
00:19:47
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.
00:19:59
Speaker
And he said, well, I can't tell you.
00:20:01
Speaker
It's a secret.
00:20:02
Speaker
He couldn't tell them because he had never thought of where they came from.
00:20:07
Speaker
And the reporter said, well, it must be East Germany then.
00:20:11
Speaker
And he said, well, I just can't confirm that.
00:20:14
Speaker
And the reporter said, well, how are they getting out of East Germany?
00:20:17
Speaker
He said, well, I can't tell you that.
00:20:20
Speaker
And the reporter said, well, it must be a very high ranking East German official to be able to take these out.
00:20:27
Speaker
So for every question where Kouyao, the forger, had no idea what to say, the reporter told them.
00:20:37
Speaker
It was just masterful.
00:20:39
Speaker
There's a German film called the Schrank, which is a comedy about all of this.
00:20:46
Speaker
And a British film called Selling Hitler, which is very amusing as well.
00:20:54
Speaker
I mean, after the fact, you can say it was amusing, but at the time it was serious business.
00:21:01
Speaker
Yeah.
00:21:01
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.
00:21:12
Speaker
How did you handle that?
00:21:15
Speaker
Well, the conditions initially, you signed a non-disclosure agreement that you're not going to disclose anything that you've seen.
00:21:29
Speaker
But it got very complicated later because I wouldn't sign an agreement with Stern.
00:21:36
Speaker
And they wanted to hire me.
00:21:41
Speaker
And I thought they would flood me with material so that I could get delayed in declaring that it was a hoax.
00:21:53
Speaker
And I wouldn't go along with that.
00:21:55
Speaker
I mean, two can play the game.
00:21:57
Speaker
And I knew what they were trying to do.
00:22:00
Speaker
And I gave them one week.
00:22:04
Speaker
And that was it.
00:22:06
Speaker
And if you're working with news magazines, television was not the big deal then.
00:22:14
Speaker
You know when the magazine goes to print.
00:22:19
Speaker
which is the last minute when they can make changes.
00:22:22
Speaker
So you work within that.
00:22:26
Speaker
Newsweek started printing on a Saturday night.
00:22:30
Speaker
So Newsweek couldn't use any information that they shouldn't use Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday.
00:22:39
Speaker
It came out on Sunday.
00:22:41
Speaker
And so you had a different perspective.
00:22:48
Speaker
on secrecy and embargoes of news stories.
00:22:54
Speaker
And at one point, didn't you even tape some photocopies under your pants legs to smuggle them out?
00:23:02
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.
00:23:15
Speaker
Well, none of them were.
00:23:15
Speaker
You can't use a microscope on photocopies.
00:23:20
Speaker
So I had different sets.
00:23:23
Speaker
And I was taping them around my legs.
00:23:26
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.
00:23:41
Speaker
And so I wanted to protect the integrity of the news story.
00:23:45
Speaker
I didn't want to get used.
00:23:46
Speaker
Other people did get used.
00:23:51
Speaker
In quite a few of these cases, a person would be told that other people said that a document passed.
00:24:02
Speaker
But the experts should not be taking an interested party's word for something.
00:24:09
Speaker
They should be checking with each other.
00:24:12
Speaker
And they should be reading each other's reports to make sure.
00:24:17
Speaker
But it was a world in which you had to be very skeptical.
00:24:23
Speaker
And I am very skeptical.
00:24:25
Speaker
So I wouldn't take anybody's word for it.
00:24:28
Speaker
And I didn't trust Stern in this whole thing.
00:24:32
Speaker
So, of course, in the end, you determined that these were obviously fakes.
00:24:37
Speaker
But why do you think so many people were so eager to believe in them?
00:24:42
Speaker
Well, I think that the general public has a great interest in evil.
00:24:50
Speaker
I mean, just look at any newspaper right now, what's playing.
00:24:55
Speaker
And look at the most popular area of movies across the board, not specific movies.
00:25:03
Speaker
Well, if specific movies are horror movies and criminal stuff with violence.
00:25:13
Speaker
So the idea of Hitler, Hitler books sell unbelievably well.
00:25:18
Speaker
There's a fascination with evil.
00:25:22
Speaker
And the general public interest in this was unbelievable.
00:25:28
Speaker
It got out of hand.
00:25:30
Speaker
And the person in charge at Stern magazine told me they never realized what a big story this could be.
00:25:39
Speaker
they thought they were going to get like 10 magazine covers out of it.
00:25:46
Speaker
And that would be it.
00:25:47
Speaker
Not that it would take off and they could recoup and make a lot of money selling publication rights all over the place.
00:25:58
Speaker
It was unreal.
00:26:00
Speaker
An agent...
00:26:02
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
00:26:30
Speaker
were overly impressed with being in a position of signing secrecy agreements.
Building the Gates Library
00:26:38
Speaker
This was a huge story.
00:26:42
Speaker
You're dealing with Stern Magazine, big magazine in Germany.
00:26:51
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.
00:27:03
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.
00:27:14
Speaker
So they, but they didn't stick to their world.
00:27:18
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.
00:27:31
Speaker
They didn't really know the forensics involved.
00:27:34
Speaker
These were mostly people who did modern check, forged checks, forged contracts.
00:27:41
Speaker
They had no idea of aging of ink or what paper should be used, what kind of a writing instrument.
00:27:50
Speaker
They just had no idea.
00:27:54
Speaker
What a lesson in due diligence.
00:27:57
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.
00:28:16
Speaker
When did making plans get this complicated?
00:28:20
Speaker
It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together.
00:28:25
Speaker
Use polls to settle dinner plans.
00:28:27
Speaker
Send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom's 60th.
00:28:32
Speaker
And never miss a meme or milestone.
00:28:34
Speaker
All protected with end-to-end encryption.
00:28:36
Speaker
It's time for WhatsApp.
00:28:38
Speaker
Message privately with everyone.
00:28:40
Speaker
Learn more at whatsapp.com.
00:28:44
Speaker
So in the wake of this forgery scandal and several other high profile events, you had started to become a public figure yourself.
00:28:55
Speaker
And that is part of what led you to every dealer's dream client, Bill Gates.
00:29:01
Speaker
How did he first reach out to you?
00:29:04
Speaker
Well, he came to us through other people in Silicon Valley, not through the news.
00:29:10
Speaker
And what did Bill and Melinda want you to do for them?
00:29:15
Speaker
Well, I've never discussed what's in their collection.
00:29:19
Speaker
That's really up to them or the people who have seen their collection.
00:29:26
Speaker
We gave them what I called a briefing book that's about five inches thick of collections I had put together.
00:29:36
Speaker
Everything from White House library to just collections on colonial America.
00:29:45
Speaker
And they both annotated it with their level of interest or disinterest.
00:29:52
Speaker
and with authors, which authors were of interest and how much interest from one to five.
00:30:02
Speaker
One being just their most important book and five being really nice inscribed copies of everything the author had written.
00:30:12
Speaker
And that was the basis for putting it together.
00:30:17
Speaker
And generally speaking, what sorts of books were they prioritizing?
00:30:21
Speaker
What did they want to put into this library they were building?
00:30:26
Speaker
Well, obviously, science and mathematics and computer development, but a lot of other things in addition.
00:30:39
Speaker
But I mean, those were areas that I thought would most likely be of interest to Bill Gates.
00:30:47
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.
00:31:09
Speaker
And this project came together very quickly, just in the course of a year, right?
00:31:13
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.
Client Relationships and Authenticity Methods
00:31:29
Speaker
That went on for quite a long period of time.
00:31:33
Speaker
I can only imagine what sort of budget you must have been working with.
00:31:37
Speaker
And that kind of frenzied acquisition, did that have a serious impact on the general market?
00:31:45
Speaker
It did.
00:31:47
Speaker
It did all over the market in the rare book world and the manuscript world.
00:31:56
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.
00:32:11
Speaker
Oh, and I mean, I never told anybody what I was doing or anything at all.
00:32:21
Speaker
And I didn't...
00:32:24
Speaker
mention anything until Bill Gates and the cover story in Time Magazine said that I was building the library for him.
00:32:34
Speaker
And I said, you know, to him, we had this agreement, I wouldn't say anything.
00:32:39
Speaker
I said, now, you know, what am I supposed to say to people?
00:32:42
Speaker
He said, well, you can confirm it, just don't tell anybody what I collect.
00:32:47
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?
00:33:03
Speaker
Not at all, actually.
00:33:05
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.
00:33:18
Speaker
I can be in awe of what they've done, but I always treated them as a human being.
00:33:29
Speaker
as someone who was enormously successful in part of their life.
00:33:33
Speaker
And, you know, I don't know about the other parts.
00:33:36
Speaker
I know the parts that I come in contact with.
00:33:40
Speaker
I have never treated anybody except Harry Truman, you know, I think.
00:33:49
Speaker
But I met a lot of other people in the political field and been very disappointed in them.
00:33:55
Speaker
You know, they have one public image, but they're not really like that.
00:34:01
Speaker
And in my contact with people, they have to be generally interested in people other than themselves.
00:34:11
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.
00:34:22
Speaker
They wouldn't want what I do.
00:34:24
Speaker
You know, my focus and their focus has to be the people in history, literature or music or whatever.
00:34:34
Speaker
And I think it's made a big difference that I treat them like people.
00:34:42
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.
00:35:01
Speaker
And I wonder if what you've described is a large part of what makes you so good at that.
00:35:08
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.
00:35:20
Speaker
No, it was after Hitler Diaries, so it would have been the late 80s.
00:35:24
Speaker
But Dillis always said they just knew whether something was genuine or not.
00:35:29
Speaker
And I didn't think that was good enough.
00:35:32
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.
00:35:41
Speaker
And that was a very different way for someone to act.
00:35:49
Speaker
And I did a lot of court cases.
00:35:53
Speaker
And I'm demonstrating to a judge and or a jury why my opinion is right.
00:36:01
Speaker
And I would never take the view, well, I'm Ken Rendell, and I have the biggest business in the world.
00:36:09
Speaker
And therefore, you have to believe me.
00:36:15
Speaker
I demonstrated.
00:36:16
Speaker
I proved things.
00:36:19
Speaker
And I think that's why people trusted me, because I respected them enough
00:36:26
Speaker
to want to provide evidence to them that they would be convinced.
Balancing Business and Personal Pursuits
00:36:33
Speaker
I would be remiss not to mention your athletic feats.
00:36:38
Speaker
You've been a competitive skier, you've done even extreme sports like helicopter skiing.
00:36:45
Speaker
Do those hobbies connect in some way with your business endeavors?
00:36:49
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:36:51
Speaker
You know, they provide the clearing my mind.
00:36:56
Speaker
And I do a lot of 50 mile bike rides.
00:37:02
Speaker
And I always have a notebook.
00:37:04
Speaker
And wherever I am,
00:37:06
Speaker
in whatever I'm not helicopter skiing, because you go off a cliff if you're thinking about other things.
00:37:15
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.
00:37:23
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.
00:37:43
Speaker
I can't keep that up indefinitely.
00:37:46
Speaker
And I can...
00:37:49
Speaker
do things in nature that give me relief.
00:37:53
Speaker
And then I can come back and really hyper focus on situations.
00:38:00
Speaker
So there, I mean, one tax court case that I took on, there were 12 million uncatalogued pieces.
00:38:09
Speaker
And it was already scheduled for tax court.
00:38:12
Speaker
And it took me two weeks to work out how to organize the collection.
00:38:17
Speaker
And I did it hiking every day.
00:38:22
Speaker
I took two weeks to work out the strategy to come to a realistic way to interpret the value of this.
00:38:36
Speaker
There was no quick answer to it.
00:38:40
Speaker
I mean, if you thought there was a quick answer, you'd be on the losing side.
00:38:45
Speaker
Yeah.
00:38:47
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.
00:39:03
Speaker
cataloged and on their shelf in a specific day 11 months later.
00:39:09
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.
00:39:18
Speaker
And I said, I'll tell you a secret.
00:39:20
Speaker
I don't either.
00:39:23
Speaker
But the actual real answer is I model an awful lot of what I do on the D-Day invasion plans.
00:39:32
Speaker
where you have multiple things going on simultaneously.
00:39:39
Speaker
And you have to consider each of those activities as to how they affect the other ones.
00:39:45
Speaker
And your time available works backwards.
Collecting Habits and Advice for New Collectors
00:39:50
Speaker
Would you say that you've observed changes in general collecting habits and proclivities over the decades?
00:39:58
Speaker
Yeah, the one that surprised me the most, I think, and I very quickly reacted to it, was the way people needed...
00:40:12
Speaker
to understand other people.
00:40:16
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.
00:40:31
Speaker
I mean, either they'd be interesting enough to read a lot more, but not just two pages.
00:40:37
Speaker
And I don't know how many people they cover in every issue.
00:40:40
Speaker
But I remember the early, I had refused to do an interview for People magazine, because I thought it was a joke.
00:40:48
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.
00:41:01
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.
00:41:29
Speaker
And I think that was a major change in my field.
00:41:36
Speaker
And it was a real basis of our galleries.
00:41:41
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.
00:41:59
Speaker
It was terrific.
00:42:00
Speaker
People came in.
00:42:01
Speaker
And they never believed they could own a letter of, could be Charles Dickens, it could be Fitzgerald or George Washington.
00:42:11
Speaker
And they were absolutely thrilled to have that connection with the person.
00:42:16
Speaker
I got so much more satisfaction out of that than selling an archive to a university library.
00:42:26
Speaker
when the reaction you get is a purchase order.
00:42:29
Speaker
Last question.
00:42:30
Speaker
What advice would you give to someone starting to build a collection today?
00:42:35
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.
00:42:48
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.
00:43:02
Speaker
And you could build really important research.
00:43:05
Speaker
I think going with your own instinct, but realizing, you know, you may be the only person out there.
00:43:12
Speaker
And that can be really positive.
00:43:14
Speaker
Yeah.
00:43:17
Speaker
but you know a lot of people you know don't want to do that they want to collect what's popular
00:43:24
Speaker
because it reinforces what they're doing.
00:43:28
Speaker
And in a sense that, you know, that's their personality needs to be reinforced rather than standing alone doing something.
00:43:38
Speaker
So I think you have to think a lot about yourself and what interests you.
00:43:42
Speaker
What do you read about?
00:43:45
Speaker
What are you fascinated with?
00:43:48
Speaker
You need to have an understanding of yourself, right?
00:43:52
Speaker
to go your own way and also understanding all the market forces.
00:43:59
Speaker
You know, is there anything to collect?
00:44:01
Speaker
you know, does this exist?
00:44:05
Speaker
There are a lot of areas that are really closed out.
00:44:09
Speaker
Because material doesn't turn up, it's not privately owned.
00:44:13
Speaker
There was a guy who I thought was in all this for the social parts.
00:44:18
Speaker
And at a manuscript society meeting, I asked what he collected.
00:44:22
Speaker
And he told me Mozart manuscripts.
00:44:24
Speaker
And all I could say was, doesn't everyone?
00:44:28
Speaker
I didn't know if he even owned one page of Mozart.
00:44:34
Speaker
I mean, that would be a very futile area to collect because it doesn't turn up.
00:44:40
Speaker
So you need to be practical and understand the market.
00:44:44
Speaker
But you can get a lot of different dealer advice.
00:44:47
Speaker
But in the end, it's really
Conclusion and Credits
00:44:49
Speaker
up to you.
00:44:49
Speaker
What are you going to get a thrill out of?
00:44:51
Speaker
Well, this has been a great pleasure.
00:44:53
Speaker
Thank you, Ken.
00:44:56
Speaker
Once again, the book is Safeguarding History by Kenneth Rendell.
00:45:00
Speaker
You'll find stories like the ones we talked about today, plus many, many more.
00:45:04
Speaker
And it is a terrific read, but don't take it from me.
00:45:08
Speaker
Ken Burns said, Ken Rendell humanizes and personalizes the scope and promise of human endeavor.
00:45:15
Speaker
Hard to do a lot better than that.
00:45:17
Speaker
We'll be back next week with more Curious Objects.
00:45:20
Speaker
Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati with social media and web support by Sarah Bellotta.
00:45:26
Speaker
Sierra Holt is our digital media and editorial associate.
00:45:30
Speaker
Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
00:45:32
Speaker
And I'm Ben Miller.