James Prestini, during the last thirty years of his life (he lived until the age of 84), devoted a large part of his time to researching, reading, and collecting books. He was in touch with most of the major book businesses in the United States and was well known by virtually all of the book dealers, large and small, antiquarian and contemporary, in the San Francisco Bay Area. He was also known to the fine arts, environmental design, and rare books librarians at the University of California at Berkeley. Many, many people in Berkeley remember "Pres" (pronounced "Press") making his rounds, on foot, of the bookstores, the libraries, and the outdoor cafes, intent on his collecting and purchasing activities.

From his Berkeley apartment, where he stored his book collection, he kept in touch with suppliers and other book people all over the world, by telephone and by letter, typed on his Royal Portable typewriter. His original book catalogue, which included not only most of the approximately 13,300 books now included in the library but also a very large number of periodicals and about 3,000 jazz recordings, was done on index cards by his own hand, with occasional help from friends or students, and stored in his tiny office at the back of his apartment.

Pres's collecting reflected his aesthetic and political interests, and the intellectual and philosophical links he made between subjects. He had a consummate interest in art and artists, and assembled books, monographs, biographies, and writings of the artists themselves about artists in every time period and from every region of the world-his regional art collection alone is outstanding. He was also deeply committed to collecting exhibition catalogues and to studying the collections in museums. He had lived in Berlin and studied the Bauhaus, and consequently his book collection about the Bauhaus, about Bauhaus artists, and by prominent Bauhaus figures, is unusually complete.

Aligned with the Bauhaus collection are smaller sub-collections on decorative art, art nouveau and art deco, folk art, and the art of craft and the arts-and-crafts movement in Europe and America.

Philosophically aligned with the aesthetic values of the Bauhaus, he was a great lover of commercial and industrial design and collected many books on these subjects, including a premier section on designed objects, A to Z, and also on design materials, including ceramics, glass, metals, and plastics. He also loved vehicles and made a home for a huge number of books about vehicles, particularly automobiles, but also airplanes, trains, boats, and ships. And with another part of his mind, he embraced nature and saw nature as a basis for all design, thus including in his library many books on animals, plants, and flowers. His interest in nature is also vividly reflected in the photography collection, which, while including many monographs and written works by photographers, also includes a large number of nature photography books.

"Pres" was interested not only in architecture, in the design and construction of buildings, but also in the research that lies behind the ability to produce buildings, and consequently collected books on engineering and technology, operations research and systems research, cybernetics, history of science, and philosophy of science; he was also deeply interested in the contexts of buildings and collected books on landscape architecture, gardening, and city planning. Pres's sculpture collection, somewhat smaller than the art collection, is nevertheless wonderfully representative of many types of sculpture and sculptors worldwide. But, of course, his first love was sculpture in wood, and he put together an extensive collection on woodworking, wood turning, furniture, and a specialized furniture collection on chairs.

Finally, Pres attended to his love of ideas, philosophy, and literature by collecting many volumes of philosophy, politics, sociology, psychology, and history. His fascination with life itself, and how people live it, attracted him to many volumes of biography and autobiography. Finally, he served his literary interests by collecting novels and poetry, classic, romantic, and modern.

Please peruse the next six pages of our web site to absorb more details about each section of the library and to get a feeling for the whole. If you are interested in helping us find a charitable donor or a foundation who could purchase the library and donate it to an educational institution of their choice (the University of California at Berkeley would like to make it the center of their new Fine Arts Library), please contact Executive Drector Phyllis Greenwood, Creators Equity Foundation, 2324 Blake Street, Berkeley, California, 94704, or at cef@dnai.com. The proceeds from the sale of the library, as well as the sale of various art work from CEF's collection, go to our endowment to fund our grants, programs, and operating costs. Thank you.