WSJ. MAGAZINE 65WHAT’S NEWSWITH WSJ.Three book dealers who source vintage volumes and create custom libraries for high-profi le
clients share the things that are dear to their bibliophilic hearts. —Mark Yarm- What library do you
fi nd the most inspiring?
New York’s Morgan Library
& Museum. - What’s a favorite book
you’ve read recently?
Proust’s Duchess: How
Three Celebrated Women
Captured the Imagination
of Fin-de-Siècle Paris, by
Caroline Weber. I knew it
was a work of genius when
I read the sentence (about
Mme. Straus) “Nobody put
Bébé in a corner.” - What museums do
you most like to visit?
The National Portrait
Gallery in London
and the Rijksmuseum,
in Amsterdam. - What are your favorite
works of art?
George Stubbs’s
Whistlejacket and J.M.W.
Turner’s The Burning
of the Houses of Lords and
Commons [s how n]. - What’s the rarest book
you’ve ever handled?
The 1855 fi rst edition of
Walt Whitman’s Leaves
of Grass, one of the copies
typeset and printed by
Whitman himself. - What are your true
indulgences?
A hamburger and a martini. - What’s your signature
accessory?
Alden cordovan loafers.
I’ve been wearing them
since I was born. - What’s your favorite
restaurant?
One of my recent discover-
ies is Via Carota in NYC. - What’s the one book
everyone should have?
The Oxford English
Dictionary. It is the princi-
pal historic dictionary
of the English language.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s,
Kinsey Marable was working as a banker
at Goldman Sachs, spending a week out
of every month in London. “Walking
around there, I found out-of-print-book
shops, a phenomenon I’d never really seen
before,” he recalls. “It really captured
me.” Marable left his fi nance job in 1992,
subsequently becoming a curator of
private libraries, with clients such
as Donna Karan, Tory Burch and Oprah
Winfrey, for whom he put together a
library of fi rst-edition Pulitzer-winning
fi ction. Now based out of a farm in
Charlottesville, Virginia, the 63-year-
old Marable rejects current trends like
color-coordinating books on the shelf
or displaying volumes backward so the
spines are hidden. As far as the literature
he selects goes, it doesn’t necessarily
have to be rare. “I want all the libraries
to have a high level of integrity,” Marable
says. “They’re going to be books that I
personally would be happy to have. It gets
very personal.” privatelibraries .comKINSEY
MARABLE
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IXEL/SHUTTERSTOCK; COURTESY
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