Jim Cummins ’64

A Rare Path

After more than 50 years in the business, bookseller Jim Cummins ’64 still relishes the hunt for the valuable and unusual.

BY KATE DUNLOP

Soon after “On the Beach” was released in 1957, a pre-teen boy in Morristown, New Jersey, read the post-apocalyptic novel. That tale of nuclear war sparked a love for book collecting that led the boy down a path his physician parents never imagined — right to the door on Madison Avenue that opens to James Cummins Bookseller.

Jim Cummins ’64 founded the business in 1978 and deals in a broad selection of fine and rare books, autographs, manuscripts and works of art. He buys voraciously, filling the store, his house and three warehouses with 400,000 books, authors’ manuscripts and letters. He’s long been one of the leading antiquarian booksellers in New York City, but that authority grew out of uncertainty and a touch of serendipity.

After graduating from Boston University, where he won a book collecting prize, Cummins began a Ph.D. program in literature at Northwestern University. He studied with renowned Herman Melville scholar Harrison Hayford, who was also a book dealer on the side. Together, they would scour the many Chicago bookstores that stayed open late.

“I started seriously collecting books; I’d buy them low and try to sell them high. I loved it. I still love it,” Cummins says. “After a couple years, Hayford said, ‘You know, there aren’t any jobs in English literature coming out of here, and you’re a so-so scholar. But you love books and you’re really good at it.’ I never finished the Ph.D., which is just as well.”

Despite Hayford’s prophetic encouragement to make his living through books in a different way than he had envisioned, Cummins left Chicago for Boston with no clear plan. He drove a cab and waited tables before drifting to New York City, where a friend, who happened to be a book dealer, mentioned that Brentano’s was looking for an assistant. Cummins landed the job, and within two months, his boss in the rare books department quit.

“I didn’t know what I was doing, but I learned on my feet and ran that department for five years,” Cummins says. By then, he was poised to strike out on his own.

The first big collection he bought was from a dealer who, for 50 years, had taken home the best and most rare books he found, accumulating a treasure trove. Cummins borrowed $75,000 to buy the lot. Six months later, he bought the coveted library of former SPS trustee Bill Moore ’33 of Morristown. Since then, James Cummins Bookseller has overseen the flow of countless titles, including all those in the Washington Cathedral’s rare book library, into private collections as well as institutions such as universities and the Library of Congress. Recently, they sold an archive documenting the life and work of poet Sylvia Plath to Yale, and they’re working to place an Anne Sexton collection.

Cummins confirms the old adage is true: oftentimes, the most valuable books are very insignificant looking. One such example is a religious book he sold, the first published in Hawaii, that is a “tiny little thing” and currently valued at $100,000. Another that’s passed through his hands is Edgar Allan Poe’s “Tamerlane and Other Poems,” arguably the rarest book in American literature; according to Cummins, the half-a-million-dollar piece “looks like nothing.”

Two titles with ties to the Form of 1964 hold a special place in his heart: “Pontiac,” a novel by his best friend Jim Schultze ’64 about Third Form boys at a New England boarding school, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” Formmate Thomas “Tim” Addison was Fitzgerald’s grandson.

“That is a book that resonates all the time, and in terms of literature, it’s iconic,” Cummins says. “‘The Great Gatsby’ is a quarter-of-a-million-dollar book in a dust jacket, or more, depending on how good the dust jacket is. Without a dust jacket, it’s less than $10,000. If it’s inscribed, and we’re trying to buy one now that’s inscribed, it could be anything depending on who it’s to.”

When it comes to guiding new collectors, Cummins has simple advice: “Collect what you really care about. Don’t collect for money,” he says. “I collect things that I love, that I have an affection for, either as literature, or because it’s beautiful or it’s what I collected as a young man.”