In the world of books, there are readers, collectors, dealers, and bibliophiles, bibliomanes, bibliomanics, and bibliophiliacs, the latter being what Basbanes refers to himself as. There “biblio” people can be collectors or dealers but they are lovers of the physical printed books. I am a “biblio” person, but I am not sure what category I choose to fall under. Nor that it matters.
I read my first Basbanes book in 2002, the second in 2003 and the third On Paper starting next month. I just acquired this book two days ago, which prompted this musing. Basbanes is an incredible writer and raconteur, coming from an incredible knowledge base of the printed word. He is on the same level as John Carter, whom I often refer to.
Here is what Wikipedia has to say about Nicholas Basbanes:
“Nicholas Andrew Basbanes (born May 25, 1943, in Lowell, Massachusetts) is an American author who writes and lectures about authors, books, and book culture. His subjects include the "eternal passion for books" (A Gentle Madness); the history and future of libraries (Patience & Fortitude); the "willful destruction of books" and the "determined effort to rescue them" (A Splendor of Letters); "the power of the printed word to stir the world" (Every Book Its Reader); the invention of paper and its effect on civilization (On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History) and an exploration of Longfellow's life and art (Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow).”
“Basbanes' first book, A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for
Books, was published in 1995. The topic was originally dismissed as too arcane for a general readership by many New York editors who had passed on the opportunity to publish it, but the book later found sizable success with multiple printings. Michael Dirda of The Washington Post called it an "ingratiating and altogether enjoyable book" praising the book's "wonderful gallery of modern eccentrics" despite its occasional lapses in literary history. A Gentle Madness was named a New York Times notable book of the year and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction for 1995. In 2010, Allison Hoover Bartlett writing for the Wall Street Journal named it one of the most influential works about book collecting published in the twentieth century.”
“By 2003, with the publication of A Splendor of Letters, Basbanes was already acknowledged as a leading authority on books and book culture. One reviewer commented, "No other writer has traced the history of the book so thoroughly or so engagingly" and Yale University Press chose him to write its 2008 centennial history.”
“Basbanes' ninth book, On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History, is not only a consideration of paper as a principal medium for the transmission of text over the past ten centuries, but also a wider examination of the ubiquitous material itself. The eight-year project, which was released in October 2013, was supported in part by the award of a National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship in 2008. It was named a notable book by the American Library Association, and was one of three finalists for the 2014 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.”
A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books; Nicholas A. Basbanes; Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1995. First edition, signed.
From the blurb – The passion to collect books has never been more widespread than it is today; indeed, obsessive book collecting remains the only hobby to have a disease named after it. A Gentle Madness is an adventure among the afflicted. Richly anecdotal and fully documented, it combines the perspective of historical research with the immediacy of investigative journalism.
Above all, it is a celebration of books and the people who have revered, gathered, and preserved them over the centuries. Basbanes offers a gallery of revealing profiles of living collectors and presents exclusive examinations of the great contemporary stories – the rare-book thefts of Stephen Blumberg; “institutional bibliomania” at the University of Texas; the mystery man who used $17 million of another person’s money to gain recognition as the greatest book collector alive.
Patience & Fortitude: A Roving Chronicle of Book People, Book Places, and Book Culture; Nicholas A. Basbanes; HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 2001. First edition.
From the blurb – In 1995, Nicholas Basbanes introduced a resonant phrase to describe the obsessive passion people have had over the past twenty-five hundred years to possess books, a condition more commonly known as bibliomania, one he christened in his book A Gentle Madness. Reviewing the work in the Washington Post, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Michael Dirda judged it to be a gallery of wonderful characters, “each more appealing than the last.”
Now, in Patience & Fortitude, Basbanes continues his discursive adventures among the gently mad, expanding his focus to probe the more comprehensive concept of book culture. Visiting many key “book places” around the world, he talks with a striking variety of kindred spirits, each one a living testament to the unending relevance of these essential artifacts in our lives.
On Paper: The Everything of its Two-Thousand- Year History; by a Self-Confessed
Bibliophiliac, Nicholas A. Basbanes; Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2013. First edition.
From the blurb – A consideration pf all things paper – its invention that revolutionized human civilization; its thousandfold uses (and misuses), proliferation, and sweeping influence on society; its makers, shapers, collectors, and pulpers – written by the admired historian and author of the trilogy on all things book-related: “A Gentle Madness; Patience & Fortitude (How could any intelligent, literate person not just love this book)” – Simon Winchester); and “A Splendor of Letters (“Elegant, wry, and humane” – Andre Bernard, New York Observer).
Nicholas Basbanes writes about paper, from its invention in China two thousand years ago to its ideal means, recording the thoughts of Islamic scholars and mathematicians that made the Middle East a center of intellectual energy; from Europe, by way of Spain in the twelfth century and Italy in the thirteenth at the time of the Renaissance, to North America and the rest of the inhabited world.