William H. Gass is director of the International Writers Center at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the recipient of two National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. The New Republic called Gass’ first novel, Omensetter’s Luck, "The most important work of fiction by an American in this literary generation." And a reviewer for The Los Angeles Times Book Review called his latest novel, The Tunnel: "The most beautiful, most complex, most disturbing novel to be published in my lifetime." The following interview took place at the International Writers Center in St. Louis, Missouri.

Chris Orlet: I’d like to start by asking where you first gained your love for books? Was it from a parent or a sibling?

William H. Gass: Books didn’t figure in my family very much. My father was an athlete, fundamentally, and a baseball coach. And then, because he was also a failed architect, he taught mechanical drawing. But he wasn’t bookish at all. However, my grandmother’s attic was full of old, old books — kids books mostly — Horatio Alger and The Motorboat Boys on the Columbia River. Series stuff and a lot of English novelists. In the summers we would go to North Dakota to visit her, and I would get in that attic and read everything in sight. That’s when the passion started. I was maybe eight or nine. But I didn’t own books. It wasn’t until early high school that I started collecting pocket books when they were a quarter each. Later I took some of my books with me in the Navy. I carted them all over the Pacific in a duffel bag.

CO: Do any of those titles stay with you?

WHG: Treasure Island was one. There were a few I picked up on the way. I picked up the Golden Bough in San Francisco waiting to ship out. And I found a pirated edition of Hemingway in Shanghai. And a pirated edition of Ulysses, which I still have. The sort of treasures that are probably worthless on the market. In Japan, I picked up a few Japanese books, so I finally started to mail some back because I simply didn’t have space aboard ship.

CO: Could you describe your library for us? How large is your collection and what do you enjoy collecting most?

WHG: My library is an accumulator’s library. I have one room in my house devoted to the French and one to the German. I live in a rather large house, thank God. One room is devoted to Latin America, one bookcase for the Irish, and so forth. I’ve quite a lot of books on Japanese, Chinese, Philippine literature. Since I’ve been to some of these places, I’ve gotten a line on what’s going on, and I buy what I can. The collection is largely in world literature — in translation, mostly. Then there is the philosophy collection, which I have slowed down on. I’ve run out of room, and, since my retirement [from teaching], I wasn’t so sure I’d being using new stuff. I also have a large criticism and linguistics collection. And my wife (the architect Mary Gass) and I have a huge architecture collection. I don’t know how many books I have. Certainly over fifteen thousand.

CO: What criteria go into choosing the books for your collection? Are you partial to first editions? Author signatures?

WHG: I’m not interested in that at all. First of all, I’m interested in cheap. I like to get bargains. But I’m basically interested in the text. It is very nice to have a good edition of the text, and it’s nicer yet if it’s older and valuable and a first edition, but it doesn’t make my heart beat faster to have a first edition. And I use my books. I work with them. Used for me is better — as long as it’s not broken to pieces. The more signs of previous ownership the better. I often pick up things for practically nothing that I don’t think I’ll ever use, but after fifteen, twenty years I usually end up getting some use out of them. I picked up this book on histology — it was fascinating, with all kinds of drawings of internal organs and such — and I needed a particular image for The Tunnel and got a cross section of the rectum out of it after maybe twenty years of having it around. So I believe in the off-chance.