A Delancey Street townhouse filled with 100,000 books is a bibliophile’s dream — and an epic estate sale

When estate sales expert John Romani walks through a house for the first time, he can tell a lot about the person who lived there by the literature that lines their shelves.

In the end, it turns out we are all open books.

But Romani encountered an enigma recently when he was hired to handle the estate of the late attorney Bill Roberts, whose private literary collection — estimated to be at more than 100,000 books — covered every room in his Rittenhouse Square townhouse and every topic imaginable, from poetry to paleobotany.

“He had so many books; he was into everything,” Romani said.

What makes this amazing athenaeum even more fascinating is that Romani doesn’t think Roberts was focused on collecting for profit or rarity, but was instead fueled by human curiosity.

“He just loved books and he loved to read,” Romani said. “He didn’t care about the condition, he cared about what was in them.”

I bookwormed my way into a tour of Roberts’ estate on the 1800 block of Delancey Street after seeing a video of it Romani posted on Instagram. It was a bibliophile’s fever dream and I wanted to be all up in that book bonanza, to study the titles, run my fingers over the spines, and smell the pages.

Romani, a retired Philly history teacher and event DJ, took over the company his mother founded, Sales by Helen, after she died in 2019.

He’s worked on many estates in the city and Main Line, including three other multimillion-dollar townhouses on this block of Delancey, one of the most historically affluent streets in Philadelphia’s wealthiest neighborhood.

Romani’s seen many collections in his time, but he’s never seen anything like Roberts’ personal library. The former general counsel at Blank Rome LLP was a modern-day Renaissance man skilled in botany, music, fly fishing, philosophy, Greek, and Latin, whose extensive library reflected his varied interests.

“He’s one of those guys you think is mythical,” Romani said.

Roberts also had multiple storage units filled with hundreds of books that were brought to the house after his death last summer. Everything in storage and in the closets has been laid out to be inventoried for possible inclusion in an estate sale later this fall.

“This is triage,” Romani said.

The first thing I noticed about Roberts’ red brick townhouse was the Franklin busybody on an outside window and the fire marks affixed to the exterior, items any good old-timey Philly house — and Philly history lover — should have.

Inside, the lovely hardwood floors caught my attention until I turned the corner and saw room after room filled with books — books on carts, books on tables, books on chairs, books on shelves, and books on books piled precariously in pillars, like paperback towers of Pisa.

Did Roberts read them all, I wondered. Could he? Could anyone?

Strewn out on a Steinway piano were dozens of maroon-and-navy-striped silk ties and blue Brooks Brothers shirts. On the wall were large, framed schematics of lutes, an instrument Roberts owned dozens of and played.

And on a nearby end table there was a coffee mug that read: “Old lawyers never die they just lose their appeal.”

Roberts’ house has four floors above ground, a basement (the walls of which had five rows of books from floor to ceiling), and an itty-bitty subbasement Roberts used as a wine cellar.

Upstairs, things got even more intense. There were massive stocked bookshelves in the halls and in every bedroom and two rooms that seemed to be entirely devoted to books. In those rooms, books line the walls in floor-to-ceiling shelves, with islands of freestanding bookshelves in the middle, all full.

Among the many titles in the collection are: The Quantum Theory of Fields, Manual of Vascular Plants, The Cambridge World History of Medical Ethics, The Art of Dying Well, Ulysses, Why Bob Dylan Matters, and Leading a Human Life.

Authors in the library include: John Updike, James Patterson, Howard Stern, Daniel Steel, Plutarch, Wallace Stevens, Annie Dillard, Virgil, W.H. Auden, Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, D.H. Lawrence, Dylan Thomas, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

And among the thousands of topics are books about: birds, philosophy, microeconomic theory, beekeeping, art, flora, fauna, friendship, fish, coal, calculus, democracy, jazz, black holes, the mind, tea, perfume, particle physics, and ethics.

There are old books with tattered covers, new books with shiny dust jackets, and a few books still shrink-wrapped in plastic.

Roberts owned multiple books about the same topic and multiple copies of the same book. One work he seemed particularly interested in was The Divine Comedy. I discovered dozens of copies of it throughout his home, including books that contained the complete version, books of the individual parts, and books about the book.

What did this 14th-century epic poem mean to Roberts? Did he have a favorite circle of hell? Did he believe in heaven or just in Dante’s writing?

By the time Romani and his team took on the townhouse a few weeks ago, the executor of Roberts’ estate had already spent months going through his belongings. It’s Romani’s job to solve the remaining problems, including how to organize what’s left, and then, how to liquidate it.

Romani’s got a guy just for the books. Each one must be gone through by hand to see if it’s signed, if it’s a first edition, or if Roberts hid any treasures within it (so far nothing yet).

“We’ve pulled out $1,000 books on a shelf with paperback books so that’s why you truly have to check everything,” Romani said.

Developing a macro-level plan is Romani’s task. He’s made a four-part system to tackle the estate.

Sales by Helen will do an online book auction for the “cream of the crop” books valued at $300 and above; the company will put 300 items up for sale in their online store; higher-end goods like valuable furniture will be sent to Briggs Auction; and Romani will hold an in-person estate sale for the rest, most likely in late November or early December (keep an eye out on Sales by Helen’s website and social media channels for updates).

As we wrapped up our tour of Roberts’ house my colleague, Esra Erol, called me over to a pile of framed art. She thumbed a few pieces back to reveal a framed quote from writer Amy Lowell’s poem “The Boston Athenaeum.”

“For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past,” it read. “The reason why men lived, and worked, and died. The essence and quintessence of their lives.”

In that moment, I think I understood a little more about why books were so important to Roberts — they helped him write the story of his own life.

Now, after his final chapter has come to a close, the books he surrounded himself with will become a part of other people’s stories, stories Roberts will never know, but that he’ll be a small part of, all the same.