Joshua Bodwell at the LARB:
JOHN MARTIN NEVER smoked cigarettes. He did not use drugs or drink alcohol. Martin’s vice was book collecting, which he began in earnest in the late 1930s after he dropped out of UCLA. His enrollment was brief: he left when he discovered that his favorite modern authors, such as Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, and Wallace Stevens, were not on the curriculum.
Over the next decade and a half, Martin built a ranging collection of several thousand books—predominantly first editions of British and American fiction and drama, as well as contemporary poetry. In this massive collection, there was not, Martin said, “a single book that I would take out and say ‘No, this isn’t good.’ I had everybody from Henry James to Allen Ginsberg.” He collected pre–World War II books and postmodern literature with equal interest. Work by William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson sat on his shelves alongside a complete run of all 13 issues of poet Ed Sanders’s short-lived and scarce 1960s mimeographed zine Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts. Through his friendship with Henry Miller, begun in the 1950s, Martin gathered a unique assortment of the author’s work. Most impressive of all was Martin’s D. H. Lawrence collection, which he believed was one of the finest in private hands. It included not only first editions and special editions but also original manuscripts and paintings by the author.
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