Ted Benttinen: The Iceblink Book Collector

T heodore “Ted” H. Benttinen – oceanographer, financier, bibliophile and poet – had a personality like an unfolded chart. Benttinen, who passed away in 2023, lived a life fueled by curiosity for distant, untrammeled parts, particularly the polar regions, a passion that was mirrored in his collection of books, photographs and letters which is being offered at Sotheby’s in New York.

Past Auction

The Ted Benttinen Library of Exploration and Adventure

25 November–9 December 2024 | 12:00 PM EST | New York

The Ted Benttinen Library of Adventure and Exploration surveys the perpetual desire to discover untraveled territory: there are books on the Arctic, Antarctica and the far-flung corners of Scandinavia, titles that follow in the sled-tracks and wake of explorers such as Roald Amundsen, Captain Robert Falcon Scott and Sir Ernest Shackleton and volumes on pirates, meteorologists, sailors and indigenous peoples.

But Benttinen’s interest wasn’t simply theoretical, he had a practical understanding of this world. Before a successful career in finance at UBS, Ted worked as an oceanographer at the Graduate School of Oceanography, University of Rhode Island, serving as a marine technician on more than 50 voyages aboard the research vessels Trident and Endeavor. He made his first expeditions in the early 1960s. As his son, the photographer Justin Benttinen, notes: “He even looked like Ernest Hemingway.”

That roving spirit also informed his collecting. “I think Ted’s familiarity with the subject material he collected allowed him to go off the beaten track a bit with his collecting,” observes Selby Kiffer, International Senior Specialist with Sotheby’s Books and Manuscripts Department. “He added lesser-known works, second and later editions, translations and so forth, so that the impact these voyagers had in their own time can be more fully revealed.”

A highlight of the Benttinen Library, notes Kiffer, is its sub-collection (beginning with lot 105) on Sir John Franklin’s fateful expedition to survey the Northwest Passage in the mid-1840s and the search for Franklin and his crew following their subsequent disappearance. “It was remarkable how seemingly all of Great Britain rallied behind Lady Franklin and her desperate efforts to find her husband. The quality of those books – uniformly fine condition, several presentation copies – is representative of the collection as a whole.”

On the eve of Sotheby’s sale, I sat down with Justin Benttinen to learn more about his father’s escapades, both in icy waters and libraries.

Sotheby’s
Would you describe Ted as an adventurer?

Justin Benttinen
For at least a decent chunk of his life, very much, yes. He was in Antarctica, encountered a rogue wave in the Southern Ocean and, sailing on USNS Eltanin, visited the penguin colony on Deception Island. He’d been to something like 59 different countries over the years.

He once told me a story about being in some random bar in either Indonesia or the Philippines – somewhere in the Southeast Asian island – and a world-class pianist just happened to be in there playing. The pianist was escaping from the wider world to a place where people wouldn’t bother him. And I thought that was such a great story because that was the kind of stuff that he lived for, those little moments.

Sotheby’s
How defining were those early experiences on expeditions?

Justin Benttinen
I think they were some of the greatest adventures of his life. He was quite young when he went to Antarctica, 19 or 20 years old. He got to see blue whales during the time period when they were almost extinct – this is 1962 before the convention on whaling. He got to see five of them, which he never saw again for the rest of his life. Even with the hundreds of thousands of miles of ocean travel that he did, he never saw another one.

Sotheby’s
Did he miss the ocean in later life?

Justin Benttinen
I think he did, to some extent, but he also didn’t regret the choices he made because he enjoyed the challenge of his later job. One of the ways that he got into finance was that he had a little trick from being a math-science kind of guy, he would be able to multiply three-digit numbers in his head instantly. He would use that as a party trick to get people to trust him as a financial advisor, that their money would be safe in his hands.

Sotheby’s
Was his book collection a surrogate for those journeys?

Justin Benttinen
I wouldn’t be surprised. But he also got the impetus from his mother. She collected mystery novels and liked to find first editions. And I think that was an influence on his collecting, on top of his oceanographic experiences. He had a childhood fascination with the material. He was reading books about Ernest Shackleton when he was a kid in the 1950s, when stuff like that wasn’t that long ago – like how kids today might talk about people going to find the Titanic in the 1980s. Also, he was someone who just liked learning. An infinite Wikipedia rabbit-hole kind of guy.

Sotheby’s
Did he relate to a particular explorer?

Justin Benttinen
I think Shackleton was way up there. He was really into the practical heroism of Shackleton – the fact that once his mission was a failure, Shackleton’s only goal was making sure everyone lived. I think that’s part of the reason why my father was so attracted to those photographs of Endurance by Frank Hurley.

Sotheby’s
Would Ted have liked to have had a corner of Antarctica named after him?

Justin Benttinen
Yeah, he would. He had enough of an ego for that. And Benttinen Bay has an alliteration that works pretty well.

Sotheby’s
Your father was also a published poet. Was that the creative flipside to the scientific part of his character?

Justin Benttinen
I think they were related, actually. I think it’s about the observational quality of things. His poems are in the archive of the famous beat poet Denise Levertov at Stanford. She was his instructor.

Sotheby’s
And, finally, would you share one of his poems that you think illustrates his multifaceted character?

Justin Benttinen
Yes, “Coronach – Weddell Sea, Antarctica,” which he wrote in 1987. I chose it because it shows both his love of the Antarctic and his mastery of language in the same piece.

Today is Margaretmass,
your saint’s day. Up north,
a time of planning
for Midsummer Night’s games.
No moss beds here –
under the Southern Cross
it is the beginning of winter.
In the new darkness
the aurora circle overhead
like wild birds on fire.
Alone on the fantail
in the looming half-light
of iceblink, I can watch
the interplay of waters
between wake and wave.
To know you now,
I would have to slip over the stern
into the pure ice-water
of this rare sea.

– Ted Benttinen, 1987

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