This article is in two parts. The written portion is three pages. The second part is a video. Links to the video are provided here and at the end of the article.
Fifty years of book collecting has brought me to this. I collect books as avidly as ever but these days collect subjects rather than books and do so with a precision and efficiency that was, until ten years ago, unimaginable. I still buy books but today see them as one thread in a tapestry of images, paintings, pamphlets, ephemera, documents and manuscripts that, taken together bring knowledge, insight and abiding satisfaction. Since 1990 I have increasingly added paintings, photographs, maps and broadsides to what was previously a collection of books and have found, in the changing mix, a collecting metier. This month I write about a single wall of material that, framed, hung together and always changing, give my collection of the Hudson River and the Hudson River Valley a vitality that books do not by themselves achieve.
Note that the numbers following descriptions refer to the attached diagram of my living room east wall.
