Jeremy Goldstein

Roger was 34, working in construction and looking for things to do in his spare time.

And one day he noticed this plate he'd been given by his grandmother, a plate from a 1905 fair celebrating the centennial of Lewis and Clark's expedition to explore the western frontier.

He looked at the plate and wondered if there was anything else left from the fair still around.

It turned out there was a lot, and he started buying it up.

So in 1984, he went to a book dealer in Vancouver and picked out an 80-year-old set of books that chronicled Lewis and Clark's expedition.

The price?

$695.

As strange as it may sound, this is all it took to send Roger on his path of amassing, in just 14 years, what did become the largest known private collection of Lewis and Clark books in the United States.

And all this time he kept working in construction, excavating landscapes, laying pipes for sewers and paving roads.

A decent living, but it was never enough.

At one point, Roger had 12 credit cards.

And then, of course, I had a house I could refinance, which I did three times.

This actually points to one of the strangest things about Roger's relationship with his collection.

He knew all about the different Lewis and Clark books, marbled endpapers, obscure hand-tinted plates, and the value of original boards.

But Roger never became an expert on what was inside the books.

He didn't collect books to read them.

He just wanted to own them.

It turns out that your life can be changed by books you didn't even read.

In fact, Roger had never been a reader of books.

He didn't read books as a kid, he didn't go to college, and his reading habits didn't change as an adult, when his house was full of books.