A Rare Lineup of Royal Academy Treasures

Imagine spotting an authentic Gutenberg Bible or a Shakespeare First Folio on sale in a local bookstore and holding in your hands one of the prime artifacts of Western culture. Multiply the impact of that discovery, and you’ll get an idea of the surprise and excitement of finding the most important and extensive sale of rare dance books in the last 20 years taking place right now in the heart of Hollywood.

Just down Sunset Boulevard from the Directors Guild, in the same block as the Samuel French Theatre and Film Bookshops, nearly half a million dollars’ worth of dance treasures await new owners in a combination store and gallery named the Golden Legend. Amounting to 141 separate items (some of them with multiple subdivisions), the sale consists of volumes from the library of the 80-year-old Royal Academy of Dancing, the oldest institution in Great Britain devoted to classical ballet. And many of the books come from the collection willed to the academy in 1963 by the late Philip J.S. Richardson, founding editor of the Dancing Times magazine.

To dance historians, Richardson’s bequest has long represented the touchstone of dance book collections--works dating from the Renaissance onward that in most cases are more rare than a Gutenberg or a First Folio. Consider, for example, the small, anonymous “Descriptions of Catalonian Dances,” printed in 1823, with two illustrations and French text describing Spanish folk dancing. It’s one of a kind, not listed in any dance bibliography.

Perhaps the crown jewel of the sale collection is a book that represents a souvenir program for what is thought to be the very first ballet, Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx’s multidisciplinary 5 1/2-hour French court spectacle “Ballet Comique de la Reine” of October 1581, staged to celebrate a royal marriage in the presence of King Henri III.

Printed in Paris in 1582 for the royal family to distribute as gifts, the book is a spectacular memento: a compendium of explanatory text, song lyrics, musical notation and a suite of engravings that shows the performance, sets and even the decorative medals given out to participants.

The dancing is also commemorated: “As for the Ballet,” Beaujoyeulx writes, “it is a modern invention or is, at least, a revival from such distant antiquity that it may be called modern; being, in truth, no more than the geometrical groupings of people dancing together, accompanied by the varied harmony of several instruments.”

Only four other known copies of Beaujoyeulx’s book survive, and this one--richly re-bound in green morocco during the late 19th century with the bottoms of eight full-page plates trimmed at that time--has an asking price of $15,000. The entire sale collection is valued at $450,000, and officials at the Royal Academy of Dancing originally hoped it could remain intact somewhere. When there were no takers, the items were priced individually.

But why sell the Richardson collection at all? To pay for digitizing the remaining items in the extensive academy library, explains academy chief executive David Watchman from London, and to fund scholarships for dancers, teachers and notators.

“We checked this list of [sale] books very thoroughly,” he says, “and learned they were not being used by [our] teachers or students in any way. As a matter of fact, in two years, that particular collection wasn’t used at all, and the last time a book from it was seen, it was by a researcher from Harvard University.” With the academy students and staff focused on classical ballet, books on early social dances and pre-Romantic court productions simply weren’t needed.

Once the academy trustees authorized selling the collection, Watchman consulted a number of experts on how best to proceed. “The general feeling favored placing the books on [two-year] consignment,” he says, “and the best advice we had on how to go about that came from Gordon Hollis.”

Public Institutions Declined Collection

Sitting in his Golden Legend shop amid treasures of the sale, Hollis speaks of being one of the three or four rare-book dealers anywhere specializing in the performing arts, and of offering the collection en bloc to the British Library (the equivalent of our Library of Congress) to defuse any criticism that he was running off with a British cultural monument. When it declined, he approached the Dance Collection at the New York Public Library, the Carina Ari Dance Museum in Stockholm and the Getty Center, among others. However, no single buyer emerged from his search.

That saddens him. “The collection belongs in a public institution where it can be studied and exhibited,” he argues, “but few institutions have access to $450,000, and fewer still have an acquisitions policy that encompasses old books on the art of dancing.” In addition, so few universities offer graduate degrees in dance history that “it’s very specialized merchandise, this kind of rare book. In a sense, it’s a rich white person’s hobby from the past. The energy of book collecting these days is more in 20th century first editions than in early illustrated books.”

Nevertheless, Hollis already has sold portions of the collection to a number of institutions--with UC Irvine the front-runner so far--and will issue a catalog around Labor Day to 500 or so private collectors. “I believe that every book I sell to a private collector will ultimately go to a public institution,” he says. “When he’s young, the rare-book collector looks at the cost of a book as the cost of his habit; when he’s old, he looks at it as the cost of his planned donation to a public library.”

He holds up an ornate leather-bound volume. “This is an Italian book from the late 16th century,” he says. “Who owns it--the English? They just had it for a while and I just have it for a while. You get a whole other notion of ownership when you work with rare books--a sense of how short a time you’re here and how important it is to preserve these connections to a historical past and pass them on.”

And does Hollis find it at all incongruous or uncomfortable to be selling libretti of antique court ballets and manuals on how to dance the minuet, the tatler, the allemande and the gagliarda in a media capital obsessed with wide screens, compact discs, digital imaging and tape sampling? Not a whit. This is, after all, a man who sold Marilyn Monroe’s address book in 1984 and who planned to meet a Times photographer dressed as much as possible like the bookseller played by Hugh Grant in “Notting Hill.”

“I have a theory that the world is flat,” he says with a smile, “and the place that has the most money weighs down the rest of the world and all the objects slide toward that place.” With Hollis expecting to sell at least 50% to 60% of the collection by the end of this year, the Antiquarian Hollywood Slide just might be the last dance craze of the 20th century.

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* Richardson Collection sale, Golden Legend, 7615 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood. Items range from $100 to $31,000. (323) 850-5520.