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Collecting Film Books

About the Author

Stacks of archived footage
Former Director, UCLA Film & Television Archive

In addition to his long career in film archiving and curating, Jan-Christopher Horak has taught at universities around the world. His recent book, Saul Bass: Anatomy of Film Design (2014) was published by University Press of Kentucky.

"Archival Spaces" Blog - Ithaca College

Right after the UCLA winter break, I began unpacking my film book collection and putting it on shelving in our new Archive library in Santa Clarita.  The books had been in boxes in storage for more than a year, since the Archive’s move from Hollywood.  But even in Hollywood they were not accessible to staff, but rather stored in various closets.  At present, the collection consists of more than 3,200 volumes, as well as an unknown number of periodicals, amassed over a 40-plus year career of film research and archiving.  About one third of the books have already been donated to the Archive, with the remainder scheduled for donation in the next few years.  They will be integrated into the Archive’s existing modest library.  Looking over each book, monograph, and pamphlet, while I unpack and re-shelve, I’m often reminded of when I acquired the work and why, and the remembered pleasure of reading many of them.  It is a ritual I have gone through, every time I have moved the collection, which has been none too few times.

I was a sophomore in college when I took my first film course and realized that one could not only study film, but also read about them.  I had been an English and history major, but now suddenly saw a field opening up before my eyes, which was still pretty much terra incognita.  The very first two books I bought were The Emergence of Film Art (1969) and The Movies as Medium (1970), both anthologies edited by Lewis Jacobs, with Lotte Eisner’s The Haunted Screen (1969) running a close third.  All three were required texts for my intro to film course.  But even before the semester ended, I found a copy of Paul Rotha’s The Film Till Now/Since Then (1967) in the university bookstore’s bargain bin, which I bought, even though it was not a required text.  I continued taking the few film classes offered, but also started purchasing remaindered film books, in part because I loved how beautiful many of them were.  I was now officially a collector…

When I moved to Boston University two years later for a graduate degree in film, my collection had grown to a couple of boxes, but was still hardly worth mentioning.  Then it began to explode, not just because more and more was being published as film studies became a legitimate field, but also because of Boston’s legions of used books stores.  There was the Brattle Bookshop downtown off Tremont Street, founded in 1827, and in Cambridge’s Harvard Square, the Harvard Bookstore, Schoenhof’s Foreign Books, the Harvard Co-op, and several others.  Trips to New York invariably included visits to the Strand Bookstore on 12th, as well as to the old Gotham Bookshop on 47th.

And so the collection continued to grow, as I moved to Rochester, then to Germany for my Ph.D., then back to Rochester, when I joined George Eastman Museum.  Mostly, I focused on film directors, genres, and national cinemas, film criticism and theory mostly eschewing actor’s biographies, autobiographies, and the many cheap film fan books flooding the market.  After my mentor, George Pratt, retired from the Museum, he gave a large number of rare and out-of-print titles from before 1970.  Then, when I was director at the Munich Filmmuseum in the 1990s, I had access to an extensive collection of French, German, and Italian titles from a local film bookstore that was closing.

Moving the collection became ever more difficult, as it grew.  When I left Universal in 2000, I had to box up more than 75 boxes by myself (under armed guard) on a holiday and move them in a U-Haul to my garage, where they remained until I moved them a box or two at a time to the Archive at the beginning of this decade.  Now, I’m unpacking the collection for the last time.

That’s fine, because my passion for collecting has cooled, as I grow older.  In the last years, I have only acquired books I either need for work, or simply books that I have received for reviewing.  I’ve been writing book reviews for decades, because it forces me to keep up with the field, but also because I love being a life-long learner.  Unpacking the books for the last time, I do feel a bit of nostalgia as I say goodbye to them.  But then I do know where I can find them and I’m happy that the books and their knowledge will be available for the next generation.


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