The most baffling book collector ...

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Beyond the impressive numbers and the excitement it generated was the fact that the Garden Ltd. collection had been built by the most baffling book collector to come along in decades. Haven O’More was a complete unknown. Even his name was a curiosity, rumored to be an anagram, for “HAVE NO MORE.”

He first attracted international attention in the fall of 1979 when he bought impressively at the London sale of an exceptional collection of books gathered over a span of forty years by Arthur Houghton, Jr., the Steuben glass heir whose most enduring monument is a special collections library at Harvard University that bears his name. “Haven basically swept what he wanted at the Houghton sale,” Stephen C. Massey, director at that time of rare books at Christie’s in New York, said. “That really is what made the Garden sale so thoroughly magnificent ten years later, that those Houghton copies—those books people thought were out of circulation for the remainder of their lifetimes—had come back once again.”

Why Arthur Houghton suddenly decided to sell his books in three comprehensive sales between June 13, 1979, and June 12, 1980, has never been fully explained. He was a principal benefactor of the Houghton Library at Harvard University and the donor of some unique John Keats material to the university as well, so many people thought his personal collection one day would go to his alma mater. Instead, while still in his seventies and a full ten years before his death, Houghton not only decided to sell his books, but he chose to sell them in England.

Whatever his motivation, fabulous treasures assumed to be destined for institutions came onto the market. O’More had been buying important books for several years prior to the Houghton sale, but most of his purchases were negotiated privately through booksellers. In 1976, for instance, he quietly paid the New York bookseller Lew David Feldman $150,000 for the 1543 presentation copy of Nicolaus Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, previously owned by Harrison Horblit. The Houghton sale, by contrast, was held in an international arena amid intense competition. Represented by John Fleming, O’More created a stir at the Houghton sale by paying premium prices for twenty-two magnificent items.

While O’More’s activity in London represented a dramatic debut, it did not come as a complete surprise to Stephen Massey, a savvy fourth-generation bookman whose great-grandfather, grandfather, and father had all been involved in the London book trade. If anything, it confirmed an urgency the auctioneer had sensed when he met O’More for the first time in April 1978. “This elegantly dressed man arrived at our Park Avenue gallery one morning and was making a scene,” Massey recalled. “Because he was demanding to see a book, I got the call to go downstairs and deal with him.” As Massey approached the disturbance, O’More shouted a single sentence: “Do you know who I am?” Massey replied that he did not have the slightest idea. “I am Haven O’More,” the man declared, “and I want to see this book.”The book in question was nothing less than a Gutenberg Bible, a superb two-volume set of the forty-two-line masterpiece printed at Mainz in Germany in the 1450s, and consigned to Christie’s for immediate sale by the General Theological Seminary of New York. Though prospective buyers were allowed to examine the lot prior to auction, there were certain rules, and since the man’s behavior that April morning was rude, Massey decided to enforce them. If Haven O’More wanted to see a catalogued item, he had to make an appointment.

“I wasn’t worried about losing him,” Massey said, “because if the book’s good enough, they will always call back—they will crawl—if they really want the book.” Once O’More backed down, though, the two men shook hands and Massey showed him the Bible after all. O’More arrived at the sale a few days later with the noted San Francisco bookseller Warren Howell and was the underbidder on the Bible, finishing second to Bernard Breslauer, who paid $2.2 million in behalf of the Württembergische Landesbibliothek in Stuttgart, Germany.

Had O’More prevailed, the Gutenberg Bible would have been included in the Garden Ltd. sale eleven years later, an auction Christie’s made a determined effort to secure but lost “in straight combat” to Sotheby’s. “I breathed a sigh of relief on that score,” Massey said. “If there had been a Gutenberg Bible in there, it would have been a thirty-one-million-dollar sale. The way prices were that night? A perfect Gutenberg Bible? Who knows. I am just thankful they didn’t have it, because that would have been unbearable!”

Exactly where such an impressive buyer had come from became the subject of wild rumor. Some whispered that O’More had worked for the Central Intelligence Agency during the 1950s and had been given a new identity; others said he had once been an actor. O’More had claimed to have written numerous scholarly articles and to have prepared highly sensitive evaluations for the government that were classified top secret. To others he spoke of having invented sophisticated weapons systems for the U.S. Defense Department. O’More was also purported to be a poet, an architect, and a philosopher. Some more concrete information, known by a few, was that he was president of a foundation in Massachusetts called the Institute of Traditional Science. However, a look at its organizational papers was not overly illuminating: the foundation was committed to the transmission of “pure knowledge.” O’More had also bragged that he could read ancient manuscripts in Greek and Hebrew and was adept at several martial arts, including arcane skills once practiced by American Indian warriors in the Old West. That melodramatic pose did not seem to bother anybody much, though; what did disturb the old-line collecting community was O’More’s brazen boast—that he was the greatest book collector alive.

Thirty-four city blocks away from Christie’s, in modest offices at 104 East Twenty-fifth Street, Swann Galleries mounts about thirty auctions a year. No van Goghs or Renoirs are offered there, no Chinese porcelain, no exotic tapestries—but solid values in books, prints, photographs, and ephemera. “You walk into Christie’s or Sotheby’s this afternoon with a fifteen-hundred-dollar book, and see what they say,” Stephen Massey said. “Lovely book, they will say, but sorry, we can’t take it.” But Swann’s will be delighted to take it on consignment. “Our bread and butter is the item that sells in the area of five hundred to two thousand dollars,” explained George S. Lowry, president of Swann’s. Partly because of this lower profile, Lowry got to see Haven O’More a few years earlier than the fancier houses uptown.

“Haven O’More arrived like a fireball,” Lowry recalled, speaking of O’More’s appearance on the book-collecting scene in the early seventies. “He absolutely lit up the sky. You pay attention when all of a sudden some smartly dressed guy you haven’t seen before is sitting in your gallery and spending serious money on books. The man came in with a ton of money, collected for ten years or so, and then disappeared. I’d been head of Swann three or four years when he came in with his glamorous wife and bought up a lot of books. Nobody knew who he was. I still don’t know, but I was impressed.” Lowry maintained that in some respects, O’More actually shaped the rare-book market. “He influenced it to the extent that people were orchestrating sales and catalogues they thought would appeal to him. If you’re in the business like me, that scares you a little bit. You get scared because here you’re dealing with somebody and you have no idea what’s going through his head. But I have to say this about him. He always bought what he wanted. He didn’t come to shop. He came to buy.” (...)

In the summer of 1989, Massey was contacted by a Boston lawyer. “The man came to New York without identifying the name of his client at first, just saying he represented a partner in the Garden Ltd., and that they were looking for an appraisal prior to the dissolution of this partnership, which might require at some stage a sale of the Garden Ltd. This particular lawyer was exploring various angles about who should do an appraisal, and he came to us, among other people.” The man accepted Massey’s suggestion to assemble a team of experts that would include himself and several other specialists, and the appraisal was conducted in Boston, where the books were kept.

A terse press release announcing the sale in the fall of 1989 gave Haven O’More full credit for having “conceived and formed” the collection. However, a new player, a “private investor” named Michael Davis, was identified as the person who had “funded” it, to the great surprise of the book community. How such an unusual arrangement had come about, and what happened to break it up, remained a mystery. (...)

Up to that time, Massey had never heard anything about a man named Michael Davis. “But we heard about him pretty quickly,” he added. “Up to now, the Garden was Haven O’More.”

Added to the mystery of the man who “conceived and formed” the Garden library were the many ironies that emerged from the auction itself. Most remarkable, perhaps, was that the only time these great books were ever united as a collection was when they were about to be sold at Sotheby’s. Prior to those few exciting days, when the collection was displayed for the examination of prospective buyers, all items had been kept in two bank vaults in Boston.

Only two sentences about O’More’s financing partner appear in the Garden Ltd. sale catalogue: “Michael Davis is a private investor. He is the sole limited partner of the Garden Ltd., and provided the funding for the Garden’s collection of rare books and manuscripts.” The three lines were printed on an otherwise blank page. Haven O’More, by contrast, submitted a lengthy statement that provided some clues about his personality, and a few facts about his life. At the top of the page set aside for his statement was the photograph of a bronze sculpture. It was a face of Haven O’More. The eyes were closed, but not relaxed in sleep; the skin was taut, the lips drawn down, as if the person was engaged in deep mediation. Beneath the photograph appeared the following:

Haven O’More was inspired from almost the very beginning of his life by learning history, the Bible, and that he is a direct descendant of three of the most illustrious men of all time. Early readings, even before starting school, of Shakespeare, Milton, and the Bible, especially the New Testament in Greek with his father and mother, trained O’More to think and to feel in terms of high endeavor and noble service. His great aunt on his father’s side was the family genealogist. She taught O’More as a child that he descends through his father from Haven O’More the 4th century Celt king, poet-scholar, and warrior. Later he learned from her he also descends through his father from the saint and martyr, Sir Thomas More. Through his mother, he learned, he descends from General Thomas Jonathan (“Stonewall”) Jackson.

O’More did not name his mother, his father, or the great aunt who served as family genealogist, and he did not say where any of them are from or where he was raised. He did not indicate where he went to school, though he did stress that for much of his life he had studied and mastered yoga, a practice which he described in some detail. He also explained that in his unremitting pursuit of knowledge, he had lived, worked, and traveled throughout the United States, Europe, the Middle East, the Far East, and Mexico. He stated that he had served two tours in the United States Army, one in Europe, another in Asia, and that he not only had worked at conceptual levels in the fields of higher mathematics and the general sciences, but in the analysis of linguistic structures as well, with special attention focused on Celtic, Middle Eastern, and Far Eastern philosophical foundations. Without naming any companies or institutions, he claimed to have worked as an engineer in the aerospace industry developing sophisticated programs of advanced computer design, logic, and general systems analysis, under the auspices of the Department of Defense.

More specifically, O’More stated that he was the founder and director of research, education, and publishing for an organization called the Institute of Traditional Science, a non-profit foundation specializing in the transmission of “pure” knowledge. He also founded SADEV, a publishing company based in New York and affiliated, he stated, with the Aperture Foundation, the well-known and widely respected publisher of art and photography. (...)

Celestial motives, O’More implied, energized his scheme from the beginning. Speaking of himself in the third person, he said he

tried never for an instant to forget that … such works are imbued with life-giving forces and intelligence: being intelligent, they stand most in the future while giving form and passion to the present, and sending a living light to the past … For many years O’More has labored to … open up the way to build a new sacred city which would serve all mankind from this time forward … O’More’s intention has always been to place the universal treasures he has collected … in a great research library. Haven O’More has … aimed that, through the library’s mind-awakening holdings and activities, mankind would be newly inspired and illuminated in the necessary and all-important-way for the coming movement toward the stars.

Davis’s and O’More’s starkly contrasting biographical statements appear at the back of the catalogue, though O’More had his say at the front as well in the form of a ten-page prefatory essay titled “On the Mystery of the Book.” There, he quoted freely from John Milton, Thomas Aquinas, Paul the Apostle, José Ortega y Gasset, John the Apostle, and Ecclesiastes. “Great or supreme works of the mind,” he intoned, are the “spiritual heart pumping a life-giving blood through the veins of mankind, a higher blood before any physical blood, a spiritual blood providing purpose and continuity of meaning.” Only by “touching, handling, reading, looking into, smelling—feasting on” the primary versions of these works is a person able to live and be one with the “very thing itself.”

O’More proclaimed in summary that the collector of great books and manuscripts is the custodian of a family of “spiritual children,” and that these blessed offspring are not merely beings of flesh and blood, but progeny conceived in the “Image of God.” These cherished treasures, he declared, constitute the most precious inheritance of all mankind, as well as their “greatest hope and guide sent from the future.” And how does one become such a collector? “More than anything, the collector is a lover,” he concluded. “The collector is in love with reality or essence.”

Apart from what one might surmise from his pomposity, his pretension, and his shaky diction, these two statements, written on the eve of the dissolution of a magnificent collection, raised in the minds of most collectors many more questions than they answered about Haven O’More. His “family of spiritual children,” the “great love” in his life, was being broken up; privately, he had told a number of acquaintances that “they are forcing me to sell my children into slavery.” (...)

One level above the gallery, in a cubicle that overlooked the proceedings, Haven O’More sat behind a tinted window and watched as his “family of spiritual children” was sold off. At the front of the hall, just a few yards away from chief auctioneer John Marion, a young man—Michael Davis— kept a running log of the results as they were displayed on the scoreboard.

Sotheby’s had projected gross receipts of $9 million, but those giddy estimates were rendered irrelevant in fewer than sixty seconds. The very first lot that came up, an Egyptian papyrus scroll containing three chapters from The Book of the Dead and featuring a stunning illumination of Osirus, sold to H.P. Kraus, Inc., of New York, for $187,000, almost four times above the upper estimate; O’More had bought the three-thousand-year-old panel from Colin and Charlotte Franklin of Oxford, England, in 1982. In lot after lot, similar contests were joined, with similar results. David Redden’s optimism had been justified; there was tremendous enthusiasm and the mood was, indeed, electric.

The four Shakespeares were sold for $2.1 million to the New York collector Richard Manney—a million dollars above the upper estimate. Enthusiastic rounds of applause broke out as that gavel and the one concluding the auction sounded. In each case, Michael Davis stood in the front row and led the ovation. Later that night, he celebrated by throwing a party for his friends high above Manhattan in the elegant Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center. (...)

Massey shrugged. “Say what you will about Haven,” he said, “but he bought only the best.”

Colin Franklin, a prominent publisher in London for twenty years with Routledge and Kegan Paul before deciding to become a full-time antiquarian bookseller in 1970, has written extensively on printing and fine-press works. Unlike most booksellers, he collects for his own pleasure. “Everything I sold Haven, except for one Yeats manuscript which he asked me to get for him at an auction, I had owned privately,” Franklin told me.

As O’More bought more and more material from him, a friendship developed. Franklin recalled that Haven and Lorea O’More were “very kind” to him and his wife, Charlotte. “We enjoyed their hospitality in Acapulco, and at their home in Arkansas.” He had taken note of O’More’s philosophical aspirations. “It was important to him to project that, and I have no doubt that his greatest satisfaction would have been to be accepted as a man of deep wisdom,” Franklin said. “The interesting thing about him was that, as we now know, he was a man who pretended to some extent. Though I’m not dismissing him as a pretender in philosophy because I’ve had many talks with him—philosophical talks, if you like to use a grand phrase. I would find him stimulating but totally exhausting, and so vain as to be totally impossible and ridiculous. But of course it was very important for him not to seem ridiculous. To be taken totally seriously was very important in his life.” Yet Franklin was always willing to give O’More the benefit of any doubt. “From his conversation you would imagine that he read Plato in the original with some ease, and Homer, and so on,” he said. “Now, it would not surprise me at all to learn that he didn’t know Greek at all. But I may be wrong,” he hedged.

Though Franklin thought he knew O’More well, he too said he was surprised to learn that there was a silent partner. He had never really probed him about the source of his wealth, but O’More had given him the impression that he was a self-made man with a genius for investment. “He mentioned something he’d invested heavily in. It may have been totally fiction, or it may have been true. I have no idea. In other words, he gave the impression he was buying with his own money. And he lived fairly high, but you don’t have to be rich to live fairly high.”

Franklin acknowledged that when he learned at the time of the sale that O’More had been “using somebody else’s money” to build the Garden collection, “it was a little disillusioning” because what had intrigued him most about the man was his attitude toward money. “The impression he gave was an interesting one; the reality turns out to be not so interesting. The impression he gave was that he was a kind of philosopher-king, a person who had the ability to think when he chose, and live the philosophical life, and then, when he chose, to turn that off, and to turn on the money-making tap. If he needed another supply of money, well, he would just tune in to that wavelength, and make what money he needed. And then he would turn it off again, and come back into the philosophical mode, and buy what books he wanted. It was an impressive scenario, and I believed in it.”

O’More also led Franklin to believe that he had written a hundred or more learned manuscripts over the previous twenty to twenty-five years. Nothing seemed to be published, though. O’More had shown Franklin a slim book of poems, entitled Sacrificial Bone Inscriptions, and there were a few short pieces in some photography books. “It amounted to but one slender thing, really, and he showed it to me with such great pride. I think that he had considerable fear of going into print and of not being recognized as the guru he would have us think he was. And that’s why he wouldn’t go into print,” Franklin speculated charitably. “Perhaps he felt that anything printed and subject to public scrutiny would show him to be the man he didn’t wish to seem.” (...)

Another New York City bookseller, Fred Schreiber, a dealer in early printed books, told me about an April day in 1979 when Haven O’More called to ask if he could see two items that were listed in his recent catalogue. “I was working out of my house in the Bronx at the time,” Schreiber said. “Everyone in the business was talking about this man, and I agreed to meet him.”

About six hours after O’More said he would arrive, the doorbell rang at Schreiber’s house. A woman said, “Dr. O’More is outside in the limousine. Can he come in and see the books?” Schreiber said he could, and the woman, O’More’s wife, Lorea, returned to get him. “O’More came into the house holding my catalogue, rolled up, and slapping it in his palm. He then started jabbing me in the chest with it. ‘Do you know who I am?’ he said, ‘I am Dr. O’More,’ and he was emphasizing the Dr. ‘Do you know what I do?’ he went on. ‘You are a book collector,’ I answered. ‘I am not just a book collector, I am the book collector.’ ”Schreiber then showed O’More the books he had requested. One was the first printed edition of Aristotle’s works in Greek, 1495, which he had listed in his catalogue for $4,500; the other was a second edition of Plato, 1534, printed in Basel, for $1,500. O’More said he wanted them, but insisted on a 40-percent discount. Schreiber refused and reached out to retrieve the books from O’More. “It was like a tug of war,” he said. “I’m holding them, he’s holding them, we’re pulling back and forth. Then he said, ‘All right, all right 30 percent. Give me 30 percent, and you also get my good will.’ I asked him what that meant. He said, ‘I am the greatest book collector in the world. My good will is important to you.’ Finally, against my better judgment, I agreed to give him 10 percent.”

When their business was concluded, O’More asked to see Schreiber’s stock of books, which was kept in a converted attic. The Ph.D. diploma in classical philology Schreiber received from Harvard in 1970 was hanging on the wall. “ ‘Oh, Harvard,’ O’More said when he saw it. ‘I’ve gone beyond Harvard; I’ve got three Ph.D.s myself.’ I was mildly curious about this, and I asked him what his degrees were in. He said the classics, physics, and some other field that I can’t remember. Then he said that he spoke twenty languages fluently. Being a philologist, I was interested in this as well, and I asked him which languages. ‘Which ones do you know?’ he said. When I replied, ‘Naturally I know Greek and Latin,’ he interrupted me and said, ‘I never studied those,’ and changed the subject. When I heard that, I knew something wasn’t quite right because a Ph.D. in classics presupposes fluency in Greek and Latin.”Ten years later, when Schreiber read O’More’s preface to the Garden Ltd. catalogue, he was amused to see his suspicions confirmed. O’More’s opening sentence involved a “contemplation of three words”—the Latin phrase magnae mentis opera—which he translated as “great or supreme works of the mind.” O’More called it the “underlying principle controlling the inception and guiding of the formation” of the Garden collection. The only problem is that he got the Latin wrong. “What the phrase actually means is ‘works of a great mind,’ ” Schreiber said.Sacrificial Bone Inscriptions, a slim book of poetry written by Haven O’More, was published by SADEV, the imprint of the Garden Ltd., in 1987, and distributed by the Aperture Foundation. (The Aperture Foundation was established in 1952 by a group of leading photographers, Minor White, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams among them, to publish their works and to serve as a forum of ideas.) It amounts to a preface, seventeen compact poems, and a coda. It had been offered for sale in several Aperture catalogues as a SADEV book under a New Age category. Printed in Verona, Italy, by the noted firm Stamperia Valdonega, and with type designed by Giovanni Mardersteig in an edition of 750, O’More’s modest collection of verse is a handsome production, flush with revealing, if rather disturbing, poetic sentiments.

Man, he declared in his preface, “must submit to sacrifice” in order to have “existence in the first place.” Elsewhere, he asserted that to “taste death’s full sweetness” there “must be life’s fire on blood and flesh.” In the coda, he declared that only “by killing all that is appearance and dying to it is death fully tasted.” Life, he insists, must “be chewed to the limit” in order to “possess death—the gateway to eternal life.”

When SADEV published the poems, it also issued a nineteen-page pamphlet entitled Delighting All Who Pay: An Essay on Haven O’More’s “Sacrificial Bone Inscriptions,” by David Waxman. The essay gushed with praise for O’More the poet. “It is hard to resist poetry of such sinuous elegance,” Waxman wrote. “We are dealing with a mystery: poetry at once dense and fluid, a synaesthetic breath-canvas f lashing with the spectrum of tone and mood and color— but focusing to what?” The collection is “deeply pensive,” “nobly high-minded,” “thoroughly oracular,” “totally original,” filled with “charm and genius,” “triumphant,” and “transcendent.” It is, Waxman asserted, a “textbook of Sacrifice” in which “we are necessarily forced to energy.” Understanding the message is difficult but challenging nonetheless: “If you would really get at Sacrificial Bone Inscriptions, then memorize it ! Inscribe its pattern in your bone; let its poetry dwell and speak within you.” Extracts from the essay were printed in Aperture catalogues and appeared on the dustjacket of the book.The other SADEV publications mentioned in Aperture’s New Age backlist were two books of photographs. One, by Marilyn Silverstone, an ordained Buddhist nun, was described as “visions of India and the Himalayan Kingdom.” Titled Ocean of Life, it was issued in 1985 with the help of a grant from the Institute of Traditional Science. Markings, published the following year, featured “sacred landscapes from the air” by the noted aerial photographer Marilyn Bridges. Haven O’More wrote prefaces for both.David G. Waxman is a bookseller in Great Neck, New York, whose business card once stated his specialty as “the best minds in the best editions.” He acknowledged in an interview with me that he wrote the essay at the request of O’More, but his “only regret is that I didn’t make it stronger, that I might not have done the work sufficient justice.” Waxman’s friendship with O’More began in the early 1970s, when he was a student at Brandeis. He said he knew Michael Davis during that time as well, having “had some interaction with him,” but knew nothing of his partnership in the Garden Ltd. “One should not think that O’More was a man without accomplishment prior to this partnership,” Waxman stressed. “It was my understanding that he was an accomplished man, and he was a book buyer in advance of this partnership.” He said he believed O’More lived “somewhere in the Midwest” before moving to Massachusetts in the late 1960s or early 1970s.

Waxman acknowledged that SADEV is Vedas—the ancient ritual and philosophical treatises of India written between 1500 and 500 B.C.—spelled backward. Regarding the given name of Haven O’More, Waxman said: “I would say that what is essential here is not the personal details; what is essential is what he tried to do in forming this library, and the great intellectuality which lies behind it. Now, you can get caught up in gossip mongering, but all that is basically irrelevant. What is important is the fact of his collection, the fact that he was trying to set an example for the book-collecting public and what it means to be a book collector, the kinds of things it is important to get involved in.”

Despite all the unexplained contradictions that subsequently surfaced about O’More, Waxman said he still “cannot emphasize too much that I consider him a very great writer,” even though O’More had published only one book and written a few forewords for photography collections that have been underwritten by the Institute of Traditional Science. “People apparently don’t really understand where he is coming from, what he is trying to do. Sacrificial Bone Inscriptions, let me say, for those who will work with it, evidences the very highest level of intelligence. It is not what it may seem on first reading. It is really exquisite, and poetry of the highest intelligence” (...)

Michael E. Hoffman, for many years the executive director of the Aperture Foundation, told me that he allowed the Garden Ltd. to use Aperture’s address in Millerton, New York, as a “courtesy” to O’More. Though now based in New York, Aperture was formed in the rural town, and continued to maintain an office there on Elm Street. Hoffman made the oblique comment that the nature of O’More’s business in Millerton probably was “a banking interest.” In addition, “Mr. O’More supported several extraordinary Aperture books and wrote a text for one or two of them.” But there was “no formal relationship” between the two groups. The foundation depends to some extent on contributions, he said, and by financially supporting some of its projects, O’More was able to get his SADEV books distributed by Aperture.

Hoffman added that he had known O’More for at least twenty-five years, and he had “a remarkable record of doing some rather significant work, and we certainly knew about him and his collecting, and we knew about some of his accomplishments.” For example, through the Institute, O’More had supported the scholar J. A. B. van Buitenen’s new translations of the Mahabharata and the Bhagavad-Gita, later published by the University of Chicago Press, and had appeared in a film about transcendental meditation, Hatha Yoga Darshana. “These are some of the most important things that have been done anywhere,” Hoffman said, though he was unable to say where a copy of the film could be located.

Though Hoffman said he was familiar with O’More’s “incredible background,” he declined to describe it. “I’m not sure what he’s willing to put into print. He’s an extremely discreet person and is not very happy with notoriety. This of course has led to misunderstandings regarding him in the past,” he added mysteriously. “You’re going to find yourself getting into things that may surprise you, and are over most people’s heads, frankly,” he warned. “And that’s one of the reasons he doesn’t explain himself.”

What, I wondered, about O’More’s autobiographical statement to Sotheby’s? “I think that Sotheby’s thing was a smoke screen,” he replied. “I don’t think he has any interest in exposing himself. I can’t say that’s a good thing to do, but that’s how he did it. But if you are able to find his actual work, and if you look at the books he supported of Aperture’s alone, the text he wrote, you’ll see you’re dealing with some person of considerable ability.” O’More was the “kind of person who just hates gossip and hates rumors and doesn’t particularly want to be talked about,” especially since he was “involved in a lot of esoteric work” that consumes most of his time. “It’s not ordinary work. And it has taken him outside the realm of ordinary life. So he operates in a very different way than most people. And it’s very hard to comprehend it partially for that reason.” He added that anyone unfamiliar with hatha yoga “can’t deal with O’More on any level, you can’t comprehend what he is doing.” Haven O’More “is one of the most accomplished yogis in the West.”

Thus trying to explain O’More’s professional activity in straight-forward terms is a pointless exercise. “Certain works are there and available for people who understand them and not available for people who don’t,” Hoffman said. “It’s that simple. He’s not out looking for the press. He’s not out looking for praise. He’s not out looking for students or disciples. He’s doing a very special kind of work which requires his full attention. And that’s a very traditional way of working in the higher areas of certain esoteric practices.”

Hoffman offered the opinion that Leonard Davis, the father of Michael Davis, was behind the breakup of the Davis-O’More partnership. “He was attempting to really blaspheme O’More and destroy his credibility and character in order to win the allegiance of his son, who had become allied with O’More over a multiyear period. There was a great deal of money involved and the father decided that he was going to try to destroy O’More, who had become a sort of father figure for his son. It was a very outrageous suit without any justification which was eventually settled and that was the end of it. But O’More was totally blameless in this and there was never any proof of wrongdoing whatsoever.”

I mentioned to Hoffman that Michael Davis had executed a power of attorney to Haven O’More that turned over complete authority of a family fortune that totaled more than $17 million. “I don’t know all that,” he said. “But Michael Davis was a free agent and O’More literally saved his life many years ago. This guy would have been on the street somewhere.” Michael Davis would have been on the street, homeless, even though he was worth millions? I asked.

“That’s right. His whole life was given purpose by his work with O’More.” (...)

How this enigmatic man came so close to building a great library on Garden Street a stone’s throw from Harvard Yard with somebody else’s money is still a mystery, and as long as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts keeps the contents of Davis vs. O’More sealed, it will remain so. In the end, Haven O’More was to “have no more” of his “spiritual children.” The “universal treasures” he once hoped to place at the “heart-core” of a “sacred city” ultimately did move on to other places and to new owners.

A Gentle Madness

Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books

Nicholas A. Basbanes