The Great Paper Chase

Among the consuming interests of Britain's Isaac Foot were politics, Methodism, temperance and his eminent sons.* But none of these could compare with books.

The onetime leader of Britain's Liberal Party bought an average of three or four books every day of his life. He once went off on a sea voyage with seven suitcases full of books--and came back with 21.

Books jammed his 20-room Cornwall house from attic to basement. When his wife developed bibliophobia, he diverted the delivery of books to his stable and sneaked them into the house when she was out. Even when he gave books away, he was likely to "borrow" them back later, and when he died at 80 in 1960, Foot's collection had reached 80,000 volumes--probably the biggest private library ever assembled by one man.

A fortnight ago, the University of California bought Foot's collection for $140,500. Last week the university's Santa Barbara campus put in shelving to receive the 40-ton trove, which will later be divided among all eight of California's campuses. Among the choicest Foot items: at least 2,250 books on Lincoln, rare items of Cromwelliana and 1,000 Bibles in languages from Arabic to Welsh, plus Martin Luther's copy of St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, and a grab bag of 19th century first editions, from Dickens to Conrad, Thackeray and Oscar Wilde.

The Foot coup was fresh evidence of the growing competition among U.S. universities for rare books and manuscripts.

The young schools of the West and Midwest would dearly love to emulate such Eastern rare-book lodes as Harvard's renowned Houghton Library. In the process of trying, universities have almost completely replaced private collectors as lavish buyers, and cash is flowing from surprising sources.

Library with Friends. In the last academic year, 28 campuses had library book budgets of more than $300,000. Predictably, they included Yale's $993,400 and Harvard's $926,500. But the Illinois budget, for example, hit $705,400, more than double what it was in 1947. At Kansas, the budget rose sevenfold in the same time to $337,200. The impetus may be a single huge gift, such as the windfall of 20,000 first editions that Indiana got in 1956 from drug-manufacturing Millionaire Josiah K. Lilly. Having become a rare-book center, Indiana went on to such purchases as Chicago Printer George Poole's Gutenberg Bible (price undisclosed), one of three then privately owned.

Most voracious of all is the University of Texas, which has not only $966,000 budgeted for books, but a torrent of cash gifts from anonymous "friends of the library." Last year it acquired perhaps $2,000,000 worth of rarities, and probably topped all other universities, even when their gifts are thrown in. Last month the "friends" promised to raise their giving to $9 for every $1 of state money, a rate that will yield at least $4,000,000 a year.

The Texan who spends the cash is Chancellor Harry Huntt Ransom, who in recent years has made Texas the terror of the book market. Ransom constantly flies around the U.S. and Europe to work on famed novelists and playwrights. Recent prizes: E. M. Forster's manuscript of A Passage to India, Christopher Morley's collection of 10,000 volumes, the papers of C. P. Snow and Lillian Hellman, and the 40,000 rare books of New Orleans Bibliophile E. A. Parsons.

Cheap at the Price. Tactically, Texas goes in heavily for inviting authors down to lecture and, in the process, winding up with their papers. Dame Edith Sitwell got this treatment; it worked with Poet Stephen Spender; and the flattery of being made an honorary captain in the Texas Rangers is said to have moved Erie Stanley Gardner into giving Texas his own fine criminology collection, including all his secret plot methods.

Texas' great rival is California, which also has an intramural war going on among its eight campuses, notably between Berkeley (with a budget of $978,-100 last academic year) and U.C.L.A.

($959,200). Berkeley boasts the world's top collection of Mark Twain, the best history-of-science library, and all of Milton in first editions. But U.C.L.A. in Librarian Lawrence C. Powell has a collector as agile as Ransom of Texas.

It was Powell who first suspected Isaac Foot's riches some 20 years ago, when he met Foot on a train in Southern California. Foot was carrying six suitcases, containing one shirt and scores of books.

Ever after, Powell kept his ears open for a deal. Last year he heard from the Foot estate, and a California agent was dispatched. He almost failed. An Illinois agent also turned up, reportedly offering $168,000. But Powell's man clinched the first option, and California got the prize.

It was cheap at the price: some experts value the Foot collection at $200,000--and even Texas conceded that California's coup was hard to match.

* Including Dingle, 56, a prominent barrister; Sir Hugh, 54, former governor of Cyprus; and Michael, 48, Labor M.P.

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