I first read about you in Daniel and Susan Cohen's book "Where to Find the Dinosaurs." It said that you have the largest collection of dinosaur stuff anywhere. What exactly do you collect? I'll have to correct the Cohens! First of all, no private collector can compete with the major museums when it comes to dinosaur skeletons. And Don Glut — the noted writer and lecturer who single-handedly started this whole modern dinosaur craze with his 1972 book "The Dinosaur Dictionary" — has an entire house full of dinosaur collectibles in California. What I MAY have is the largest dinosaur-related PAPER collection. I live in a NYC apartment, so I can only massively collect flat stuff: prints, art, posters, yellow journalism, letters, autographs. (Of course, there's no way to NOT collect books, so I make an exception there.) When Don first visited me in 1987 he inscribed a copy of his "Dinosaur Scrapbook" by writing "I hereby declare officially that your dinosaur paper collection is the biggest and most complete in the modern world." I'll defer to his opinion on this. Of course, John Lanzendorf has spent much more money on his hand-picked collection of original paintings and sculptures than I have on my stuff — but he and I have very different esthetic sensibilities. He's a very generous and warm human being, by the way. When did you start collecting? When I was a little kid my dad took me to see "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms." When the "rhedosaur" showed up I got so excited that I ran to the men's room and threw up. I guess I've been star struck ever since. We started going to the American Museum of Natural History every Sunday and I'd beg to add another pamphlet or paperback to my growing collection of natural history literature. The one I really longed for was the paperback edition of The Origin of Species. I couldn't understand it but I knew it contained an explanation for just everything. It was somewhere about this time that I started reading the dictionary for pleasure — I guess you could say I didn't have much of a social life! — and started using long words like "paleontologist" to confound my friends. I also memorized Bert Leston Taylor's funny 1911 lyric "Behold the Mighty Dinosaur" and amazed the hell out of my third grade teacher by reciting it at Show and Tell. Once I started getting a weekly allowance I'd spend my measily dollar every Saturday the same way: 15 cents on the subway going from the Bronx to the Fourth Avenue booksellers between 14th and 8th streets, 25 cents for a hot dog, 45 cents for used books, 15 cents for the ride home. That's how I found Roy Chapman Andrews' "Ends of the Earth" — all 35 cents worth — the very first book I ever read, which described the discovery in the Gobi desert of protoceratops eggs. And since I enjoy writing, I find myself even today making up words like dinosaurabiliac and sauropodiatry. How about "polypteradactylism: a rare condition in which an adopted pteradactyl is named Polly"? I also indulge in limericks, but I'll spare you those! What if any is your most prized piece in your collection and why does it have that distinction? Around 30 years ago I was amazed to learn that Charles R. Knight's daughter was living in NYC and didn't know any fans of her dad's work. We soon became famous friends and she told me many stories about her father's stormy relationship with Henry Fairfield Osborn. I was eventually fortunate enough to acquire over 200 original sketches of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals that had lain in the Kennedy Gallery vaults for half a century. These alone are worth more in every sense than the entire rest of my collection put together. What I like best about them is that they're not finished works but rather let one into the mind of the artist as he tries out various interpretations of body posture and even facial expression. I also have two oils, one of which is shown in his biography, "Dinosaurs, Mammoths and Cavemen", and several mixed media studies. Wow! You primarily collect books on dinosaurs correct? How large is your library at this time? I own about 2,000 books on prehistoric animals, including children's books, biographies, science fiction, and museum guides. All in one NYC apartment with 6,000 more books on other topics. Help! As a primary collector of dinosaur literature do you share that unique library with anyone or any institutions? I'm thinking about how John Lanzendorf has had some of his incredible dinosaur art collection exhibit on display at the Field Museum in Chicago. Have you had opportunity to share your goodies as well? It's difficult for me to loan out even individual books to institutions, since complete strangers are going to need to touch them — and break their delicate spines! But I'm very open to people visiting and looking things up as long as they're not simultaneously eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I'm in the NYC phone book so people know how to contact me, and I get visitors from as far away as Australia. Inviting people over to see what my friends call the "Metropolitan Museum of Mesozoic Memorabilia" is a lovely excuse for me to open up the Knight portfolios and lovingly drink in each masterpiece. He made genius look so effortless. With a few carefree lines he could capture the soul of a Brontotherium. You would believe that he had actually seen these beasts, they seem so massive and dangerous. I gently discourage most parents, however, who only want to rest their feet while Junior gets to wreck my toys. These days, with the internet, I'll be able over time to share much of my treasures with collectors all over the world, even those who can't visit museum exhibits. The first things that go up will be the Knight sketches. As you continue to collect is there anything you are still searching for? Has any prize eluded you thus far? Yes! Around the turn of the century the American Museum was selling copies of Charles Knight's dinosaur sculptures in the gift shop for $5 or so. I've seen pictures of these and even heard of one or two people who have seen and touched them. Yet I can't find any! But in a larger sense, I guess you could say I'm still looking for all those oddities that I simply am unaware of and so can't describe yet. I just know they're out there: the 1911 novel about the Chicago paleontologist and part-time crime solver, the 1946 comic about Roy Chapman Andrews, the lost Dadaist poem about T.Rex, Rembrandt's fabled sketch of dragon bones. These things, or things very much like them, must exist, no? I would love to learn about them and catalog them on my web site for the benefit of other collectors. In looking over your web site I noticed that you also collect quotes. I most enjoyed the section on quotes that you thought should be on t-shirts. One in particular caught my attention as I prepared to talk to you, a grand collector of things, "He who has the most toys dies anyway." What do you plan/hope to have done with your collection once you are, well, dead? It would be nice if everything were kept together as the "Dean Hannotte Dinosaur Collection" but I don't think it's important enough. My heirs will probably let it go in pieces, and it's really up to them. I can't think of any institution I'd like to give it to. The American Museum would toss most of it in those large dumpsters they keep out back. (I can't tell you what kinds of invaluable rarities staff members find just by peeking into those dumpsters!) It might be wiser to let each piece go to whoever would really give it a home for the next 20 or 30 years of its natural life. Is there, er, anything you'd like in particular, Tony? I didn't mean to sound "buzzardly"! Oh, I have nothing against scavenging. To evolution, a buzzard is a masterpiece of adaptation. And I can't tell you how many hours I've spent scouring the 100 or so used bookstores that are in Manhattan alone. And there's something especially buzzardly about collecting personal letters, isn't there? I have letters from Mrs. Roland Bird from when she was still editing her husband's autobiography — at least these were addressed to me. But I also have some letters by James M. Allen, who did watercolors for Sinclair Oil, and some letters by L. P. Gratacap, a nutcase from the American Museum who wrote wacky paleoanthropolical fiction — such as his 1906 "A Woman of the Ice Age." And speaking of wacky, please forgive me if I mention the little known fact that Charles H. Sternberg — yes, the famous fossil collector who spent years walking around the badlands that were "bad" in every sense — used to publish unintentionally humorous doggerel about the lives of the dinosaurs he was discovering. He wrote a 19-page masterpiece with the memorable title, "The Permian Beds of Texas". I only found my first copy last year. You say on your web site, http://www.hannotte.com, that you are more fascinated by man's interest in dinosaurs than the animals themselves. In your collecting and fascination, have you any insights as to why people of all ages from all around the world are so taken with these extinct creatures? Yes! They are gods come to earth. Primitive man objectified powerful forces into deities of various kinds, and monsters. He did this for so many thousands of years that E. O. Wilson, the Harvard sociobiologist, believes we may have a built-in genetic tendency to think this way. European pre-scientific theorists deduced the existence of dragons from dinosaur bones and cyclopses from mammoth skulls. When paleontologists told us that the object of our fears and dread were real animals from the past ages that could become a matter of objective observation, we became hooked. Not only were these "monsters" real, but they were safely dead and gone — thus children can enjoy their awe without fear. The discoveries of paleontology have filtered down to our "inner child" more in American than Europe, by the way, for the simple reason that our very own Cope and Marsh were big news on this side of the Atlantic for decades. For every European juvenile book about dragons there is an American juvenile book about dinosaurs. The dinosaur is America's mythic beast, just as Godzilla has become Japan's. It's also amazing to me how each age interprets the nature of these beasts within the framework of its own "zeitgeist". In a military culture, they are seen as warlike predators. In our laid-back post-modern hippie culture, they become John Horner's "good mother" Maiasaurus. I find especially curious the evolution of the first malevalent Godzilla into the friendly rubber squeeze toy he became a few years later. You have lectured and been a consultant to a couple of museums. What have you lectured on, consulted on, and how did these things come to happen? The Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia heard about my collection when they were designing their new Discovering Dinosaurs hall in 1982 and asked me to serve on their advisory committee. Since they had a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to spend they had to have some "humanities" input to the process — and I qualified because I wasn't a professional scientist and I read a lot of comic books! Since I was a software architect by day I wrote a proposal to develop educational computer games that would use biosimulation algorithms to bring these beasts to life, but they clearly couldn't afford a project like that. All the ideas I wrote about became reality a decade later when Jurassic Park hit the screens. Also, one year the Dinosaur State Park in Connecticut asked me to give a slide talk for one of their Dinomania Festivals. And I've appeared several other times in other venues, but always in a very minor capacity. I prefer giving talks to children down the block from me at a little children's clothing store called "Dinosaur Hill." Pam, the owner, named it that because she grew up a few miles from Dinosaur Park in Rapid City, South Dakota where there are large dinosaur sculptures on a hill. Besides clothing, she sells dinosaur toys, dinosaur books, dinosaur games and dinosaur puzzles. Just my kind of place. What has been the greatest dinosaur reference book or any dinosaur book to come out in the last 50 years? Don Glut's are the best popular reference works, especially for the collector. His "Dinosaur Scrapbook" is a "must-read". But the last 50 years would also net Knight's "Life Through the Ages", the fantastic trilogy by William E. Scheele — "Prehistoric Animals," "The First Mammals," and "Prehistoric Man and the Primates" — as well as all those coffee table books illustrated by the Czech master, Zdenek Burian. The 50's were something of a golden age, for this collector at least. I interviewed Dr. Colbert late last month and we discussed the fact that so many of the ideas getting press attention over the last few years are really rehashed (and sometimes not rehashed) old ideas. A lot of newer books are the same in that way to I think. What do you see future dinosaur book authors writing about? I couldn't agree more. The guys who write a lot of today's books are just rehashing what some other guy also rehashed. I actually had one art dealer try to sell me a photorealistic oil painting of a dinosaur. There was one problem. The "dinosaur" was an exact copy of the old Aurora T. Rex. The artist hadn't the slightest interest in the actual animals themselves, and certainly didn't want to inject any interpretations of his own — he was just ripping off some other artist. Don't get me wrong, I'm fond of the Aurora models as kitsch, but do I need expensive paintings of them? On the other hand, I especially liked Colagrande and Felder's "In the Presence of Dinosaurs." There's an example of a great dinosaur book. Like "Walking with Dinosaurs", the emphasis here is on bringing these creatures back to life, not arguing about paleotrivia. A few years ago I was thrilled to be able to acquire Felder's highly original oil of a baby parasaurolophus. I call this piece "Duckling Bill". Of course, when it comes to future books I wouldn't mind seeing some novel science fiction, too. Did you know that the Smithsonian is revamping their Triceratops? They had a name the Triceratops contest for kids — winner to be announced in May with the kid whose name they chose to be there for the unveiling — I had some of my students enter the contest with the suggestion of the Triceratops that is on your collector's business card — Uncle Beazley from "The Enormous Egg". I read that book to my kids every year and they love it. I'm anxious to see if the real thing will bare the name of the Triceratops that went to Washington. This is so ironic, Tony. For most of its life, the Smithsonian trike WAS named "Uncle Beazley". I have newspaper clippings somewhere identifying him as that. Guess they think nobody understands the reference anymore! Did you know that "The Enormous Egg" was an attack on McCarthyism? I met Oliver Butterworth before he died and he explained that he was making fun of the stuffy senators in Washington in the scene where they call Uncle Beazley an "un-American" animal. I told him a plot of a sequel I wanted to write and he gave me verbal permission to go ahead. And, yes, my sequel was to have been titled "Uncle Beazley". Oliver was an old English professor at a girls school by the time I met him. Much more interested in Francis Bacon and the origin of scientific method than dinosaurs per se. Have you met many authors of dinosaur material? Who did you enjoy most and why? I met Colbert briefly in the 80's and correspond with several others, but I can't claim intimate familiarity with any of them. I'm open to it, of course, but I seem to have more in common with collectors than PhD.'s. I CAN tell you that there are clearly two different kinds of paleontologists — those that approve of me, and those that playfully compete with me. Some of them take no joy whatever in their work and find it offensive that I read comic books about a serious scientific discipline. Whenever I'd visit Donald Baird at Princeton, however, I'd bring a shopping bag of treasures to show off. He'd have a similar hoard marching across his desk to best me. What fun we had! Do you have plans to write a book yourself? I have outlines of a number of books I'd like to write, but no time to work on them. I've been a webmaster in the dot-com world lately, and that means 50 work hours per week. I would mostly like to do a definitive bibliography called "The Amazing Story". And it would be about? If there is any single amazing story, surely the origin and evolution of life on earth is it. Most textbooks completely leave out the "amazing" part, though. Fortunately, the awe felt by non-scientists trying to share and understand these discoveries has left a "fossil" record all its own. I've read all of Prehistoric Times interviews with collectors of popular paleontology and, sadly, they only talk about the handful of books that are easy to find. For every book usually mentioned, there are a dozen glittering gems on my shelves that cry out to be better known. Maybe someday I'll have time to catalog them all.