I'm very happy to have landed in the Gulch...At 16, I landed in the class of Mrs. Johnston, a talented but demanding high-school English teacher at St. Mary’s Catholic High in New Jersey. All I’d known of Mrs. Johnston is that she was very attractive and rather demanding. I could not have known that she’d influence the rest of my life.
After a week of forty literary terms Mrs. Johnston assigned (onomatopoeia, alliteration, and others I still remember), Mrs. Johnston assigned The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, a 700+ page novel I had no intention of reading. By Monday, I’d completed The Fountainhead (scoring 100 on my test) and knew that I was on the verge of a lifetime of meaning.
I started reading Atlas Shrugged the next day. Within a few months, I’d collected paperback editions of all Rand titles and all back issues of Objectivist periodicals. A few months later, I met Ayn Rand after a talk she gave in Boston, where she signed my copy of one newsletter in her own pen, the Pen Ultimate.
Since that time, I have collected Ayn Rand First Editions, books and other materials Inscribed by Ayn Rand, books favorably reviewed or recommended in her publications and journals.
Today, PEN ULTIMATE RARE BOOKS houses the world’s largest collections of Ayn Rand manuscripts, signed and inscribed Rand titles, and books recommended by her. We also carry a number of scarce first and Limited Editions on the Holocaust, literary landmarks, signed modern firsts, and English grammar. We have helped build some of the world’s largest Ayn Rand rare book collections.