George. He was a complete surprise to me. Maybe I’d been expecting a tall, skinny academic who still wore his rimless glasses on a ribbon. Richard was much more down to earth and easy to talk to. Over a beer in one of the nearby colleges, he told me that of all the dealers in the country, Moore seemed to have attracted the most dogged and tenacious of the local book collectors. Wells Dalton, for instance, was a successful businessman--a millionaire and on some twenty boards of directors--and at the same time he was a writer, a historian and a collector of Victorian toys. He had one of the finest bunch of toy banks in North America. Dalton turned his controversial business ethics and practices to his growing collection of rare books. His collection began with a Shakespeare folio. It was only a Fourth Folio, but he wasn’t twenty when he bought it. Older dealers with more sedate manners deeply resented him. Aaron Kurian, on the other hand, was a droll, amusing and softspoken old goat, who won out not by business tactics but by sheer knowledge of the field.
