Beyond Market Value
Beyond Market Value
A Memoir of Book Collecting and the World of Venture Capital
Beyond Market Value chronicles Annette Campbell-White’s remarkable life, from a childhood spent in remote mining camps throughout the British Commonwealth, where books created an imaginary home; to her early adulthood in London, where she first discovered a vocation as a book collector; to Silicon Valley, where she built a pioneering career as a formidable venture capitalist. She recalls the impulsive purchase of the first book in her collection, T. S. Eliot’s A Song for Simeon, and her pursuit of rare editions of all one hundred titles listed in Cyril Connolly’s The Modern Movement. Campbell-White’s collecting and career peaked in 2005, when she acquired the last of the Connolly titles and was first named to Forbes’ Midas List, the annual ranking of the most successful dealmakers in venture capital.
In 2007, out of concern for their preservation, Campbell-White rashly sold the Connolly titles she had spent more than twenty years assembling, leading to a new appreciation of what remained of her collection and, going forward, a broader focus on collecting modernist letters, manuscripts, and ephemera. Beyond Market Value is both a loving tribute to literary collecting and a telling account of the challenges of being a woman in the male-dominated world of finance.
A pleasure to read.
Annette Campbell-White was the first biotechnology analyst on Wall Street and the first female partner at Hambrecht & Quist, a leading investment banking firm. She founded MedVenture Associates, a venture capital business that, over time, created more than $5 billion in cumulative value. She appeared on Forbes’ Midas List from 2005–2007. She is a committed supporter of the arts, having established the Kia Ora Foundation in 1997.
- Prologue: Random Reflections on Collecting and Collectors
- An Auction at Sotheby’s
- First Acquisition: “A Song for Simeon”
- Books of Childhood
- Palgrave’s Golden Treasury
- Growing Up
- Early Collecting
- California and Collecting Detours
- Finding a Focus
- Ulysses
- The Importance of Cyril Connolly’s Modern Movement List
- Beginning the Connolly Collection
- Venture Capital Investing
- Books, Book Dealers, and Literary Associations
- The French Modern Movement: Du côté de chez Swann
- Friends of Cyril Connolly: Sir Harold Acton
- Literary High Spots, The Great Gatsby, and the Modern Book as Currency
- Buying at Auction: The Anthony Hobson Sale
- Terre des hommes: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- The Turn of the Century and the First Dot-Com Bubble
- French Bibliomania and the Rise and Fall of the Société Aristophil
- Acceleration: Completion of the Connolly List
- Hubris
- The Sale
- The End of the World?
- New Horizons
- Epilogue: The Point of It All
- Appendix
- Index
