While teens were ice skating just beyond their back yard this week — on what’s usually a golf course — inside Dr. Joe Pierce and his wife Aaronetta remained at work.
Their ongoing task since February 2020 has been to inventory his 6,000-plus book collection. This week, during a cold snap that crushed the state’s power grid, they did it with and without electricity.
It’s an accounting on several levels.
The books about or by African Americans cover every chapter of history you might imagine, beginning with enslavement to its most important writers.
His collection fills a small upstairs library. Other books sit in multiple, numbered bookcases throughout their home.
The Pierces — he 85, she 78 — joke that they now “live in the Pierce Library.”
Part of the collection also sits in three large storage units somewhere in San Antonio.
To catalog the collection, the Pierces gather data on each book. It’s entered in a spreadsheet containing 13 categories, from author and title to price and condition of each book.
Each volume was collected at garage sales, used bookstores, antique shops, estate sales and book fairs across the country over the last 35 years.
Pierce hasn’t read all of them but knows what each is about. Some were bargains, purchased pre-Internet. That might have been how Pierce developed a poker face.
Other were acquired after savvy deal-making, sometimes involving book trades that satisfied both seller and buyer.
Joe, a retired anesthesiologist, and Aaronetta, a longtime civic leader, are known for their collection of African American art and promotion of the arts.
It’s not a stretch to say they’re members of a U.S. Black intelligentsia. Both their parents and grandparents were intertwined by blood and/or academic and geographic association with other leading African American educators and leaders.
They’re connected to the nation’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities, HBCUs. Before he started the inventory project, he was researching the remarkable street on which he lived in Atlanta. It may become a chapter in his memoir.
From 1941 to 1948, the 2.5-block stretch of Beckwith Street close to the HBCU mecca produced four college presidents, nine doctorates — his parents’ included — and several accomplished artists, scholars, architects and sociologists.
He’ll admit to “a collecting gene” and has amassed more than 200 regimental beer steins from the 1800s and 1900s.
Pierce, who became a lieutenant colonel in the Army, was stationed at the 2nd General Hospital in Landstuhl, Germany the largest U.S. military hospital in Europe.
But the ornate steins are no match to his book collection.
At first, books were an extension of the couple’s art collection. He bought books by or about the artists. He soon learned it’s “a small field.”
But as he searched, Pierce came upon first-edition copies of works by important Black writers, including James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison and Chester Himes.
“I just couldn’t leave them there,” he said.
Some were signed by the author. Some were inscribed by famous people. Both augment a book’s value.
They have much in common.
“The nonfiction (books) are related to various problems that the country has been involved with for years and years and up to the very moment we’re living in,” he said, referring to the Jan. 6 insurrection of the U.S. Capitol and the white supremacists and Confederate supporters behind the attack.
Everything old is new again, said Aaronetta.
“Black people have written so much about these same problems, but their books haven’t been read by those who most need to read them,” she said.
So far, the Pierces have inventoried more than 5,000 books.
The bulk of them have mylar covers to protect against potential damage. That’s especially important for works of fiction, whose dust jackets can represent the greatest portion of their value.
There are so many treasures.
Pierce talks about a book of poetry titled “God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons Written in Verse,” by James Weldon Johnson, who wrote the lyrics to “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” considered the Black national anthem.
He holds up Harry Edwards’ “The Revolt of the Black Athlete” about sports figures such as Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who raised their gloved fists in a Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics and were sent home by the U.S. Olympic Committee.
He talks about “Aunt Dicy Tales” by J. Mason Brewer containing the wondrous illustrations by artist John Biggers, whose works the Pierces have collected. Only 400 copies of the book were produced.
The Pierces’ two sons will inherit the book collection. One of them has already started his own.
Two categories on his inventory sheets are just beginning to be filled. They record what he paid for each book and their estimated worth today.
It’s painstaking work, each an acknowledgment of its worth to the rest of us.
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