Don Conner's Fine Books Estate Sale

Don Conner's Home, the most honored I have ever felt to give a sale...we are in the presence of greatness and should feel blessed to be within reach of his possessions.
“In a good book-room you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.”
― http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1244.Mark_Twain
1558

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/13755.Marcus_Tullius_Cicero

Don Conner; antique book dealer, collector,  appreciator, scholar, gentleman, and  giant. I loved his laugh, smile and sense of humor. Don was one of the few dealers you would see that always taught you something new each and every time they spoke to you. If you were open to it, he would sit and talk for hours...walking you through the ins and outs of history, botany, fishing, travel, science, California fact and fiction, every little bit of Ephemera he was drawn to and more. Don was a rare bright colored stone on a mundane tan colored beach.

Don was such a pleasant companion. It surprised me he never married for a long period of time but rather engulfed himself into his books, his passion, his love. Don was ambitious, interesting and insatiable when it came to his books and paper. He even went so far as to turn each and every one of the 8 or 9 rooms in his small Curtis Park house into a library filled floor to ceiling with interesting books, magazines, Ephemera and information. We are all lucky to be a part of this collection as well as to touch his life later this week. We hope you will spend many hours digging through this rare and delightful mountain of paper this coming week.

On a personal note, this is the most enriching estate sale I have ever had the pleasure to spend time at. I will not be gone one minute from the property. There is no chance of missing me. If it were possible, I would spend a month on the floor reading his notes and pawing over his family photos trying to garner one more minute of his company to keep, if only through his possessions. It is hard not to cry as I type this invitation, as Don was such a dear human being, just imagining the dispersing of his great library, makes his being gone a reality and hard to deny.

I love the smell of a book or book-room. There is no denying the texture and feeling you get when you peel away the pages of an old book worn from others enjoying the same page and lingering on the same word or sentence.

The feeling you get when you sneak a paragraph just before you nod off via candle-light or moonlight, book-light or bright sunshine on a beach. There is no doubt that one can learn and read from a computer, notebook or phone. The truth is that for some of us who were lucky enough to actually 'steal' a book from a parent or neighbor as children...wanting so badly to garner the secrets it held.

There is no true replacement for an actual pulp made book that has a binding and girth we can hold onto; feel and touch...nothing short of it will ever satiate the deep desire within to read just that...a book...plain and simple.

The smell of tens of thousands of old and musty, loved and adored hard bound treasures such as this library holds, is just the most incomprehensible bounty you can ever imagine. This is not a pretentious arrogant man's book shelf. This is a deep and loving troubled soul's passion; wrapped up in a perfectly content loner's life rich enough to last forever.

My one regret is that we have to sell a single one of these books and that we cannot manage to make a monument of his collection instead, allowing folks to check these rare treasures out one at a time, and enjoy them for the rest of eternity. In lieu of that grand task, we will instead liquidate don's library, albeit his life.

Please take a moment to watch the video slideshow or poke through the photos which will be updated every couple of days until the entire library fits on his shelves rather than the floors below. Here's to you Don Conner, we will all miss your gift of "true presence".

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3565.Oscar_Wilde
Thanks for the read.
Jen and crew
“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”
― http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1461.Gustave_Flaubert
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“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”
― http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1455.Ernest_Hemingway