Book Dealer Opens Cover on Durant Collection

The pursuit of ideas took Davis Dutton, dealer in rare and antique books, to strange quarters Friday.

Dutton, the soft-spoken and slightly graying owner of Dutton Books, drove his rattletrap Volkswagen van to a concrete and cinder-block compound in North Hollywood that looked like a penitentiary dropped from the sky.

He punched his code into a digital key pad, received his clearance from an electronic voice and pulled past the automatically opening iron gate. He parked, opened a steel door leading into a concrete and sheet metal hallway, fumbled for a key and hoisted a roll-up door.

With a mixture of pride and pathos, he waved his hand over stacks of packing boxes extending to the back of the 20-foot chamber.

“A most ignominious--temporarily, we hope--end to the Will and Ariel Durant library,” he said.

The library of the late husband-and-wife scholars, whose 60-year collaboration produced the popular 11-volume “History of Civilization” and a Pulitzer Prize, went on the auction block last Sunday.

And Dutton had a feeling he would want it, even if his family-run bookstores in North Hollywood, Burbank and Brentwood are already stuffed with leather-bound volumes of science, religion and philosophy.

He and his store manager, Steve Daly, arrived only five minutes before the bidding began at Abell’s auction house in the West Adams district.

“I think my pulse began to rise a bit,” he said. “I put a limit of $12,000 on myself. But I kept my hand up.”

When his hand came down, Dutton had paid $17,600 for the more than 200 cartons into which the Durants’ books had been packaged sometime after their deaths two weeks apart in 1981.

“I probably would have paid more for it,” Dutton said. “Although I used to be contemptuous of the Durants for popularizing history, after I started reading them, I really liked it and I learned a hell of a lot about history.”

Dutton estimates that the cartons contain 5,000 to 8,000 volumes, but he won’t really know until he digs in.

He’s not sure when that will be. Even before he bought the Durant collection, Dutton had filled another vault in the storage compound with books.

“You get them stored in here and you may forget about them,” he said. “We may have to bring on some help in the next several months.”

Dutton has no clear idea yet what will become of the collection.

“It would be great if a university wanted to acquire it,” he said.

He doubts that will happen, however. Dutton judges the Durants’ library as too general and diverse to be of value as a university library collection.

“If they were all on the history of Persian development, that would be different,” he said.

Rather, the books cover every age, every continent and every genre of scholarship, including gossip, he said.

The point was easy to illustrate. Dutton dug into one of the boxes.

Out came two dogeared pamphlets called, “Masters in Art” and “American Art Student, 1925.”

Next came “Great Lives, Great Deeds” from the Reader’s Digest.

“Now we hope the Durants didn’t use too much of that material,” Dutton said.

Letters of Marchioness

In another box he found four volumes of “Letters From Marchioness de Sevigne to Her Daughter the Countess du Grignan.”

Then Dutton leafed through “The Military and Religious Life of the Middle Ages,” commenting almost unconsciously upon it:.

“A rather large, and handsome octave volume,” he said to himself. “And in the corner we have, either Will’s or Ariel’s hand, a note.”

Beside it he picked up “The Poems of Catallus.”

“Each book has a little notation generally on the title page,” he said.

A third box produced the Loeb series of histories.

“I think they have got every Loeb History series ever published,” Dutton said.

Valued Source Material

Quickly assessing his purchase, Dutton guessed that it might have value merely as the source material for the Durants’ famous opus.

Individually, however, that distinction may not add to the books’ value, for the Durants showed no inclination toward treasuring the books as antiques.

“This was a working library,” Dutton said. “They used the books. They marked them. They opened them wide. They cut the pages.”

On top of that, he said, they didn’t even put their names in a nameplate, as book collectors are accustomed to do.

In spite of their significance as a whole collection, Dutton thinks the books will eventually be sold one at a time, primarily for the information they contain.

“You could make a good case for just dispersing the library and letting it separate, go out into the world,” he said. “I think we need to feed intellectual development by getting books out into the world.”