Hipster CEOs go 1880s robber baron retro by building large libraries

July 23, 2007 10:43 AM

On executives and their libraries, "C.E.O.’s are starting to collect books on climate change and global warming, not Al Gore’s tomes but books from the 15th century about the weather, Egyptian droughts, even replicas of Sumerian tablets recording extraordinary changes in climate."
posted by geoff. (41 comments total)

One suspects these are not the kind of libraries that are actually for reading.
posted by Artw at 11:06 AM on July 23, 2007

Actually form the rest of the article it seems a lot less like the excercise in illiterate dick-swingign that the quoted line suggests. But still...
posted by Artw at 11:09 AM on July 23, 2007

I was expecting the libraries to be for show as well, but now that I read the piece, I have to disagree with Artw - from the pictures, at least, the books look well-read... and many are mass-market paperbacks, not just scholarly ancient tomes. Refreshing.
posted by nkknkk at 11:11 AM on July 23, 2007

Yes, I believe it is a sincere passion for books that serve as an impetus for the libraries, but the New York Times likes to slip in little bits of consumerism wherever it can.
posted by geoff. at 11:13 AM on July 23, 2007

These are hipsters?
posted by miniape at 11:13 AM on July 23, 2007

Oh and the complete lack of Ayn Rand made my day. I am beginning to think a few flamboyant aspirational types mis-characterize businessman as a whole.
posted by geoff. at 11:15 AM on July 23, 2007

I didn't infer any illiteracy or even the presence, let alone the swinging, of dicks from that line. Old books are cool.
posted by DU at 11:15 AM on July 23, 2007

I am too important and busy to read the article, but it sounds like (from the summary) the CEOs are looking for evidence that global warming is just a cyclical thing and nothing to worry about. Is this the case or am I reading (haha) things into it?
posted by mrnutty at 11:26 AM on July 23, 2007

It's not inconceivable that these libraries are mainly for Veblenian show, much as the artwork on their walls may be (judging from the quoted estimate that "it is impossible to put together a serious library on almost any subject for less than several hundred thousand dollars," which is absurd on its face), but I have a hard time not thinking it's cool that books like these -- many of which are clearly not recent bestsellers -- have a home that's not on a shelf in a public library or a used book store.
posted by blucevalo at 11:28 AM on July 23, 2007

Books are, yes, objects, but in the hands of a reader, they are the voices of other people. You don't want to have to be invading Gaul to read Julius Caesar, you just have to be curious about what Caesar (who I'm imagining was a busy guy, what with invading Gaul and inventing a salad and writing at least two books) might have thought was worth the effort to pass down to others.
posted by newdaddy at 11:42 AM on July 23, 2007

Don't forget his work as a beautician.

As for it being impossible to put together a serious library on almost any subject for less than several hundred thousand dollars: It's easy to put together a "library" on a topic for maybe $100, as long as the library in question is just 2 or 3 really good books in your house. But if you want to build a real library, as in a collection of books that covers the wide range of thought on a topic, space to put the books, perhaps care and feeding of the books, then yes, I can see that taking $100k and up.
posted by DU at 11:51 AM on July 23, 2007

Dead tree books for private libraries are so 20th century. The new hotness is buying the rights and putting the texts online for all.
posted by mullingitover at 12:00 PM on July 23, 2007 [1 favorite]

I'm an avid bibliophile with my own library, but this whole article reads like a cross between a paean to bibliofetishism and a hymn of plutolatry.

Bully for them, but rich people reading books, and spending a lot for them, doesn't really impress me so much, I guess.
posted by darkstar at 12:13 PM on July 23, 2007 [2 favorites]

The quote about the cost of antique books is self-serving as it comes from a bookseller. That said, it really depends on the type of library you want to build. If you're looking to get first editions on a particular subject, I could see where the figure comes from.

If you're reading widely, though, a library can become a large asset but it doesn't feel like one initially as you're building it a few books at the time (think about it: $20-25 for a hardcover book * 5000 books (what a bookseller could consider a "serious" library) is roughly $100k-$125k). Also, values on books move up and down. So, for example, I lucked out in that all my Harry Potter books are first editions, which have increased in value, and didn't for hundreds of other books which have probably gone down in value. However, at the end of the day, none of those are books I bought for their monetary value.

I think that passionate people can put substantial subject-specific libraries that end up being very valuable over time (a good friend of mine, for example, has kept every computer game related books he bought since 1981 and now has a "substantial" library of such books worth millions of dollars to the right collector) but that seldom is the object.

And that's just on the book end. Think of the space to store books and rent/cost related to that. We recently moved and one of the stipulation I had made when we were looking at the new place was that I get a place to store my books. The end result is a 100 sq. ft "library" in our NYC apartment. Other people would have probably made a different choice in terms of using the space but I decided this would be a library. That, in itself, probably goes a good portion of the way towards a $100k cost but I don't look it as such. I look it as a place to honor my own history (as I see every book I read as not only the paper and content itself but its place in my own life and a reminder of what was happening to me at that time) and the cost of something like that is, to me, probably much higher that the actual $$$ I had to spend on all this.
posted by TNLNYC at 12:14 PM on July 23, 2007 [2 favorites]

Interesting, but fluffy article. The lead in quote for this post is incredibly misleading, however.
posted by The Light Fantastic at 12:22 PM on July 23, 2007

To get back to the FPP:

"C.E.O.’s are starting to collect books on climate change and global warming, not Al Gore’s tomes but books from the 15th century about the weather, Egyptian droughts, even replicas of Sumerian tablets recording extraordinary changes in climate."

So CEOs are collecting books that might be used to refute current warnings about global warming. Interesting. Shall we discuss that?
posted by davy at 12:23 PM on July 23, 2007

It's essentially a lifestyle trend article suggesting that old-school libraries are the new cool for the wealth conscious. Given the trends in the art world I am surprised the book world has not gone the way of the comic book world, into the stratosphere - although I did see a Shakespeare First Folio go for $3m recently. There are some interesting opposing forces, the Bill Gates of the world buying up the classic Da Vinci texts, and the abebooks.com making middle range books more available and cheaper.
posted by stbalbach at 12:29 PM on July 23, 2007

So CEOs are collecting books that might be used to refute current warnings about global warming. Interesting. Shall we discuss that?

So CEOs are collecting books that might be used to understand what happened to the earth in previous instances of climate change. Interesting. Shall we discuss that?
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 12:34 PM on July 23, 2007

Previous instances of climate change that were caused by what?
posted by davy at 12:36 PM on July 23, 2007

stbalbach: Book collecting is actually something that can be quite cheap because that run-up hasn't happened. Just keep it to yourself (oh, and a couple of other MeFiites :) ) because those of us buying this stuff don't want the prices to run up ;)
posted by TNLNYC at 12:40 PM on July 23, 2007

There are at least two people in this thread that are pissed off we won't get into another global warming screaming match.

The referenced article really had nothing to do with climate change. It was about rich people being able to afford, surprise, surprise, cool things. And some of them find books cool.
posted by PissOnYourParade at 12:42 PM on July 23, 2007

So CEOs are collecting books that might be used to understand what happened to the earth in previous instances of climate change. Interesting. Shall we discuss that?

Because questions of hard science were best studied before the invention of the scientific method.

I hate to feed into a derail, but this was just asinine.
posted by uri at 12:49 PM on July 23, 2007

stbalbach: Strand Books has been catering to the home library crowd with its Books by the Foot service. You can specify the category, relative age, and/or overall appearance, and they'll draw from their new and used stocks to suit your interest. Given the obsessions over information-gathering and archiving, it was only a matter of time before bespoke tastes turned to bookshelf spaces.
posted by Smart Dalek at 12:51 PM on July 23, 2007 [3 favorites]

Faust. Nice to see a photographer with a sense of humor.
posted by Smedleyman at 1:02 PM on July 23, 2007

Previous instances of climate change that were caused by what?

By any number of things. The fact that previous instances of climate change were not caused by man does not mean we can't learn from them, nor apply that knowledge to our current situation. If we discount previous instances of climate change as being totally irrelevant to our current situation on the grounds that previous climate changes were not man-made, and this one was, we'd have to ignore thousands of years worth of evidence that global temperatures are strongly correlated with CO₂ levels!

Because questions of hard science were best studied before the invention of the scientific method.

So evidence gathered before the invention of the scientific method cannot be used for any scientific purpose?
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 1:23 PM on July 23, 2007

I suspect it's more of a talking point, intended to suggest that the owner of the tablet has a deep and profound knowledge of sumerian culture and of climate change, than that they actually read the things.
posted by Artw at 1:31 PM on July 23, 2007

Seriously, geoff, what did you mean by posting that snippet as a FPP?
posted by davy at 1:36 PM on July 23, 2007

Not really related to this story, but I once had my hands on a signed (by the author and publisher) first edition of The King in Yellow by Robert Chambers.

If I were the type to have a fancy personal library, that would have been a good start, but I didn't remotely have enough money at the time to buy it.
posted by empath at 1:44 PM on July 23, 2007

So evidence gathered before the invention of the scientific method cannot be used for any scientific purpose?

This isn't even remotely what I was suggesting.

If you go back to the original quote, these collections contain 15th century books about climate change in lieu of, not in addition to modern studies. Supplanting current research for ancient anecdotal accounts strikes me as a poor method for understanding climate history.
posted by uri at 1:47 PM on July 23, 2007

I didn't say it was a good method for understanding climate history. I'm saying that my (admittedly unlikely, and admittedly not supported by any evidence) hypothesis that CEOs are buying these to understand climate change is at least as likely as davy's equally unsupported hypothesis that they're buying these to deny climate change.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 2:06 PM on July 23, 2007

even replicas of Sumerian tablets recording extraordinary changes in climate

Fortunately any hitherto unrecovered and uncatalogued Sumerian tablets have been ground to powder beneath our mighty tank treads or broken up to make fill for our airstrips and pleasure domesembassy buildings, so there'll be no more of this sort of nonsense.
posted by George_Spiggott at 2:07 PM on July 23, 2007

davy: Prior climate change caused by reckless human agriculture and clearcutting in the middle east. It wasn't always desert. (Thanks, Phoenicia!)
posted by absalom at 2:16 PM on July 23, 2007 [1 favorite]

empath - DO NOT READ THE BOOK!

(loses 1d6 SAN points)

(goes mad)
posted by Artw at 2:22 PM on July 23, 2007

Many of the people in this thread assume that signed first editions are expensive but truth be told, they can be real bargains: just look at the author's reading calendar in your town and show up. You can generally pick up their book and get it autographed on the spot.

Because book readers are a rare breed (and getting rarer, it seems), authors actually do travel far and wide to market their books.

Of course, most of those authors will NOT be the next big thing but one can luck out. As a general rule, I try to go to 1-2 readings/signings a quarter and have picked a few cool books that way for the regular price of a book. But the best part is sometimes the story relating to how I "discovered" an author that eventually became famous before the crowd...
posted by TNLNYC at 2:25 PM on July 23, 2007

Seriously, geoff, what did you mean by posting that snippet as a FPP?

I don't know, it was a terrible snippet to use. Momentary lapse of reason.
posted by geoff. at 2:25 PM on July 23, 2007

A more interesting question is, exactly which ceos are buying the fifteen century books on climate change?

I wouldn't read into the purchase an intention to use them as a basis to refute climate change, any more than purchasing renaissance medical texts (for which there has long been a rich, if cultish market) presupposes a belief in the four humors. People buy them as artifacts, largely for the woodcuts. Moreover, chances are pretty good that most of the current buyers do not read the Latin in which, I'm guessing, the books are written. Ditto the Sumerian tablets.

(Some titles would have been welcome, alas. Any suggestions?)
posted by IndigoJones at 2:28 PM on July 23, 2007

TNLNYC: what kind of books do you target? The problem with books like comics is there are so many worthless ones and condition is everything.
posted by stbalbach at 6:54 PM on July 23, 2007

stbalbach: Generally, fiction is my beat. Some of my "finds" include lucking out into the Harry Potter phenomenon (Joanne Rowling was pitching it in 1997 in a bookstore when I happen to be around, and I ended up with a signed first edition) and a series of very fortunate events that ended up with my owning a signed copy of "Breakfast of Champions" (a story really too long to type but with the same kind of serendipity as the JK Rowling one)...

Of course, for those rare fiction books that are now considered amazing finds, I probably have 10s if not hundreds of signed copies that are worth less than what I initially paid for them but that's the luck of the draw.

I am also a bit of a completist when it comes to authors I like so I try to build first edition collections for those. At the current time, I have complete first edition sets of every Umberto Eco book, for example.

As with comics, book condition is everything. However, an "expensive" book can be had for less than a thousand dollars (for example, I bought a first american edition signed of "The Name of the Rose" for about $300 a decade ago). With the Internet, sites like abebooks.com and alibris.com are very useful in trying to sort a lot of that stuff out.
posted by TNLNYC at 7:09 PM on July 23, 2007

refutation blah. can't you be interested in reading books about historical examples of climate change to see how people adapted, what social and political and economic shifts occurred, et cetera, in order to draw lessons for the current age? the smart businessman isn't going to be concerned about why it's happening so much as what to do about it "going forward" (to use one of my favorite bizzy terms).
posted by zerolucid at 8:56 PM on July 23, 2007

"Prior climate change caused by reckless human agriculture and clearcutting in the middle east. It wasn't always desert."

And then big disruptions like the Mongol invasions ruined the old irrigation works. I know. We've got something similar going on today in the Sahel, which is why I favor relocating the people who live there to North America someplace. (How would they do in North Dakota?)
posted by davy at 10:30 PM on July 23, 2007

davy: So the mongols turned the middle east into desert? Cos I'm pretty sure that a couple of thousand years before then, the Sumerians wrecked their land because salt from excessive irrigation ruined soil conditions. I mean, Plato wrote about that. (Speaking of the Sumerians, remember the part in Gilgamesh where he's sent into a majestic, untouched forest. In Iraq? Never struck you as a little odd? Now you know.

Not to mention, in order to build all those ships of the ancient seas, the ancient Phoenicians ended up clearcutting modern day Jordan, which used to be covered in cedar trees the size of California redwoods.

So, in short: humans alter environment is not exactly a new idea.
posted by absalom at 4:52 AM on July 24, 2007