For aspiring book collectors, Bruce Whiteman, head librarian at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, has some simple advice: Let your passion and your pocketbook be your guide.

Keeping an eye on the pocketbook is important for reasons that go beyond avoiding financial catastrophes, he said.

"If you start by collecting books beyond your range, you're going to always be disappointed and frustrated when you go to build on the collection," Whiteman said. "That will diminish your staying power."

For the past five years, the 22-year veteran of rare-book libraries has been in the enviable position of spending the Clark's annual book-acquisition budget, which hovers around $400,000.

"It's wonderful that people pay me to buy books," Whiteman said of the Clark, which specializes in 17th- and 18th-century European literature. "Every time I get a shipment, it's like Christmas."

In the past 12 months, Whiteman has written checks for 550 rare books as varied as a 1660 mathematical treatise and an 1860 bachelors' cookbook.

These and his other buys will go on display from 2-5 p.m. May 6 at An Afternoon of Acquisitions, an annual fund-raiser for the re-nowned 1926 repository in the West Adams District.

And this weekend, along with a team of book appraisers and personnel from the Huntington Library, Whiteman will offer free informal assessments of old books at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books in Association with UCLA.

As a library student at the University of Toronto, the Canadian native discovered the charms of pre-19th-century books - hand-set type, manually printed pages, woodcuts and engravings for illustrations - by following his favorite professor's admonition: "Go look at the books."

At the Clark and at home with his wife, Deborah, a fellow UCLA librarian, he still follows that advice. By day, he scours catalogs from booksellers for literature from the era when Charles II and Queen Anne held sway.

By night, Whiteman, a poet whose 14th volume rolled off the presses last fall, collects books on Canadian poetry and Canadian 19th-century illustrations, 19th-century English novelist George Meredith and manuscript and literary forgery.

Buying books that you love to read seems obvious, but many collectors don't follow Whiteman's rule.

"Too often, people decide they're going to collect something just because it's fashionable or obscure," he said. "Then they find they don't have the interest to fuel the collection on a long-term basis."

And with any printed material, condition is king. "No matter how rare, if books are incomplete or falling apart, their value is substantially reduced," he said. "And, yes, that means keeping track of the dust jacket."

To attend An Afternoon of Acquisitions, call (310) 206-7660. A suggested $25 donation will be applied to recent acquisition scholarship.