Collecting Churchill - The Rake's Progress

Hi. My name's Dave and I'm a Completist.

I suppose I'm pretty much the same as anyone else who stood up here and said his name. There's nothing very different about my story, but I want to tell it anyway. Maybe it'll help some of you, one way or another, but it'll certainly help me.

I've always been fond of books. Some people say it's inherited, others not. I couldn't say. My father was never much of a one for reading but my mother's been hooked most of her life. Myself, I started accumulating books when I was in my early teens. I say accumulating because it was nothing you could really call collecting. There was no theme to it, no focus. Mainly I bought fiction and a little history, some of it bad and a lot of it remaindered. The fiction I read, the history I didn't.

I stayed in control for many years. The accumulation grew. The amount of history increased, and by now some of it was getting read. And then suddenly, when I was in my late thirties, something happened and the inexorable slide began. One evening I was browsing through the shelves when it struck me that I'd put together a sizeable collection of Churchill books - at least six or seven of them. I couldn't imagine there was enough different to say about one person to justify the quantity, but it looked impressive. Were those volumes by, or about, Churchill? I really don't remember after all this time, and it really didn't seem to matter at that time - what was important was that the hook was in and the barb had gone deep. From that day on I couldn't go into a bookshop without looking for more Churchill. New or used. By or about. It didn't matter.

Even then it was all still under control for a while. I needed everything, but I only needed one copy of it. That meant a lot of volumes about Churchill but obviously a much smaller number by Churchill. If I could have stayed that way things would have been different. One of everything really wasn't too much, I would tell myself. But I was a fool to think I could stay that way. Gradually I started finding nicer editions, then just different editions - and somehow they too ended up on the shelves. What harm could one more copy of 'Great Contemporaries' do? After all, I could give it up any time I wanted to.

As the collection grew my interest in the weaker 'about' books diminished slightly, and I focused more and more on the real thing - the books 'by' Churchill and as my need intensified I became more adept at sniffing them out. Before long I had stripped clean the shelves of every local bookstore, and the bookstores of every city that I visited regularly. I turned to dealers, experts who could supply much of what I needed and then I found the doorway to global trafficking - the Internet

I sometimes think the situation could have been saved even then if I hadn't started on the translations. Like every step along the way it happened gradually, insidiously. I began with a few French volumes - a language that I at least felt comfortable with but, as with everything else, that too spiraled out of control until I reached the point where I am today - helplessly scouring the booksellers of the world for Czech, Korean, Russian, everything I can get.

It's the translations that get the strangest reactions - the looks that say I've hit rock bottom. I'm told I'm crazy - that I'm buying books I can't read. I'm OK with that. I'm in good company. I know philatelists who can't post a letter with their entire collections and numismatists who can't buy a loaf of bread with theirs. But as long as I have a single dog-eared English paperback of 'My Early Life' then I can read it any time I care to. And I can revel in every other copy as a bibliographic work of art.

I don't know where I go from here, but I'm quietly optimistic that there's no cure for my condition. There will always be more bibliographic avenues to explore, editions and impressions to unearth, and shelves to fill.

My name's Dave and I'm a Completist.

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