Nicholas A. Basbanes, About the Author: Inside the Creative Process (Durham, NC: Fine Book Press, 2010) (From "Robert Fagles" (Interviewed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on February 19, 1997, to discuss his translation of The Odyssey): Basbanes: "How did you feel when you heard in the news recently that Amherst College, your alma mater, gave an English major a degree, summa cum laude, without ever having been required to study Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, or Spenser?" Fagles: "I have been concerned by such stories. Especially about a story involving Amherst, where I went to college. I would like to ask a sneaky question, however. Did that person not read Shakespeare? Do we know that? What I am getting at is this: I checked with some colleagues in the English department at Princeton, and Shakespeare is not required in the Princeton English department. Is Shakespeare taught? Yes. Is Shakespeare enrolled well? Very well, and enrollments are rising? Is Homer required? Not exactly. But is Homer read? Absolutely. What I am getting at is something very simple, I think. Phyllis Franklin, the executive director at the Modern Language Association, said it best: Something does not have to be required in order to be read. These things, Shakespeare, Homer, they are too good to go away. Simply because something is not required does not mean that it is not being taught in courses. These things are too large, too old, too good to go away. I sense at my own university, at least, increasing interest, not decreasing interest." "There is a decrease in the number of times such things are required, but an increase in the general interest, the level of interest they arouse. Look at the sales of The Iliad and The Odyssey, for example. That is amazing. That is the most heartening thing I can imagine, These are trade book sales. It is enormously satisfying because it means that people are reading not just for recreation but to re-create themselves in some way, that there a real hunger for something they can sink their teeth into and get some nourishment." Id. at 65, 68-69.).
Nicholas A. Basbanes, Among the Gently Mad: Strategies and Perspectives for the Book Hunter in the Twenty-First Century (New York: A John Macrae Book/Henry Holt, 2002).
Nicholas A. Basbanes, Editions and Impressions: Twenty Years on the Book Beat (Durham, NC: Fine Book Press, 2007).
Nicholas A. Basbanes, Every Book Its Reader: The Power pf the Printed Word to Stir the World (New York: HarperCollins, 2005).
Nicholas A. Basbanes, A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books (New York: Henry Holt, 1995) ("With thought, patience, and discrimination, book passion becomes the signature of a person's character. When out of control and indulged to excess, it lets loose a fury of bizarre behavior. 'The bibliophile is the master of his books, the bibliomaniac their slaves,' the German bibliographer Hanns Bohatta steadfastly maintained, though the dividing line can be too blurry to discern." Id. at 9. "In a 1966 essay prepared for a psychiatric journal, the psychoanalyst Dr. Norman S. Weiner of Philadelphia described the bibliomaniac as a person with an 'inordinate desire' for books who will 'pursue a volume in an active or seductive way; he will use intrigue and stealth; he will hazard his fortune and he will journey around the world, or even marry for gain of a voted book.' On the basis of the evidence he had gathered, Dr. Weiner suggested that bibliomania is 'a problem solving complex of activity that relieves or directly gratifies certain instinctual drives." Id. at 27.).
Nicholas A. Basbanes, Patience and Fortitude: A Roving Chronicle of Book People, Book Places, and Book Culture (New York: HarperCollins, 2001) ("Any parent who has ever taken a son or a daughter off on a tour of prospective colleges learn after a while to anticipate the introductory drill by rote. A campus visit usually includes . . . an admiring walk through the library, where an estimate of the institution's total holdings is always given, particularly among the prestigious liberal arts colleges of the Northeast . . . which pride themselves in the strength of their print collection. The idea of having a library the size of a telephone booth would not be greeted with much enthusiasm by many alumni who contribute generously to their endowments, or for that matter bright young high school graduates intent on securing the finest possible education in an excruciatingly competitive world, and access to the most appealing research materials, electronic as well as print." "For institutions that direct their energy and resources to educating undergraduates, a library of 200,000 volumes is considered a respectable collection Four hundred thousand is above average, and half a million or more is excellent. Liberal arts colleges that approach the million mark represent an elite handful, and it is no coincident that institutions reporting holdings in that area are usually esteemed among the very best in the nation. A typical example is Oberlin College, a five-star institution twenty-five miles southwest of Cleveland, Ohio, with 2,900 full-time students, 2,3000 of them undergraduates enrolled in the college of Arts and Sciences, the others in the internationally renowned Conservatory of Music. Total holdings, according to Ray English, the director of libraries, number 2 million items representing all media, including uncatalogued government documents. 'Books are very much a part of the calculus here,' he said. 'We assume that very strong local collections are essential for good undergraduate work.' By 'local,' English means books that are 'in-house and immediately available to our students and faculty.' On average, Oberlin acquires 240,00 new books a year--more than half of the total holdings considered adequate at California State University at Monterey Bay after six full years of operation--and does very little in the way of discarding." Id. at 461-462. "When Minor Myers Jr. was appointed president of Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, Illinois, in 1989, he arrived in a mission to raise the school into the top tier of private liberal arts colleges in the United States. 'The first thing I saw when I arrived was a library with well under 200,000 books, and I started complaining immediately' . . . Id. at 472. 'Myers emphasized that he is not building up Illinois Wesleyan's infrastructure and print collection simply to achieve higher recognition among peer institutions. 'It's not just a matter of status, it's a question of teaching, research, and imagination. The things you have available at hand for students on an immediate basis are just as important as teaching or research. What I want is something gloriously useful that offers a dazzling source of information for students. Rather than wait two or three weeks for something to come in on interlibrary loan, I want a lot of real live books, and I want them here. Serendipity is the imagination factor I am talking about. It is the material you find in the stacks when you aren't prepared to find anything. This may sound increasingly quaint in this day and age, bur my idea of a college is a collection of students and faculty gathered around a great library, and here we will have a great reading room at the center of it all to make it happen." Id. at 474.).
Nicholas A. Basbanes, A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World (New York: HarperCollins, 2003) ("In 1962, John Rader Platt (1918-1995), a University of Chicago physicist .... wrote an informed essay for the scholarly journal Horizon in which he speculated on the imminent arrival of a 'universal library' made possible by scientific breakthroughs, though today's reader would be perplexed to learn that the computer did not figure at all in the scenario he felt was just around the corner, nor was there any apparent movement toward the 'spoken book' championed by Guido Biago half a century earlier. 'Physicists these days are discussing a question that is going to be of interest to every literate person,' Platt began. 'How small a book can we make--and still read?'" "Platt projected the development of a microscopic process that would allow for what he called creation of a 'pinhead library' in which countless numbers of books could be stored in a minimum of space, and not just by libraries and institutions, but by individuals eager to have access to 'everything.'" [] "With the prospect of having 'all the world's literature and learning' at his fingertips, Platt had little room for romantic notions regarding the enjoyment of handling a real book, anticipating similar arguments pitting the advocates of content against the champions of artifacts that would emerge four decades down the road. 'We must remember that what is precious is not the physical "artifact" of a system of writing but the "metafacts," the human communications they contain,' Platt wrote, 'When our books change into new forms, children brought up to love the things of the mind will come to treat these forms with the same feeling or respect and familiarity and pleasure that we have had for the old ones.' To ease things along, he suggested that creation of ' complete Library of Congress within reach of every student and teacher and scientist might be comparable to the value of our great highway systems, and the initial development might be deserving of similar government support." Id. at 324-325. QUERY: But, are not America's highways, bridges, railroads, and overall infrastructure in gross disrepair and much in need of maintenance, repair, upgrade and replacement? Why would one expect the American taxpayers to have the will to maintain such a universal library when it cannot even maintain its transportation system?),
Nicholas A. Basbanes, A World of Letters: Yale University Press, 1908-2008 (New Haven London: Yale U. Press, 2008) ("In his interview with me, [Robert] Baldock [managing director of the London division of Yale University Press] touched on what he feels are the principal differences between New Haven and London. . . Baldock said that the London editors also are looking for books that tend to be more European in their scope, 'and that maybe is the big difference' between the lists. 'A lot of New Haven's books look at the U.S. experience in the world, and like every other American press, it publishes endless books on such subjects as the American Supreme Court, and things like that, which we can't sell here. Right now [2004] is an interesting time because just above the post-9/11 moment, Americans are looking at themselves and wondering why everybody dislikes them. So New Haven is producing more books about American concerns just at the time that the rest of the world is not buying them. I have great trouble telling American colleagues that this is in fact the truth. America is big and rich and important and wealthy, and yes, it can do what it likes, and in terms of book publishing, it publishes lots of books about itself. But then they are mildly surprised that the rest of the world doesn't want to buy them.'" Id. at 116-117. QUERY: Might this last comment suggest, more broadly, that America (and, by extension, Americans) may be able to do what it wants because of size and wealth, but that it does not follow that the rest of the world is going to take their clues from America (or Americans). Being the biggest, wealthiest, and most powerful (militarily), etc., does not necessarily mean that one is the leader and that others will follow. Perhaps it is time for America (and Americans) to reconsider its role in the world.).
Jonathan M. Bloom, Paper Before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in he Islamic World (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2001) ("The transfer of paper and papermaking technology from the Islamic lands to Christian Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries prepared the way for the European print revolution of the fifteenth century.Yet Gutenberg's invention might never have taken off it he and his followers had been limited to printing books on parchment. Gutenberg is thought to have printed 200 copies of his bible, 35 on parchment and 165 on paper, although only 40 copies survive altogether. Early printers used moveable type to produce editions of one hundred to two hundred, but by1500 print runs of one thousand or two thousand copies--the print run of modern scholarly titles--were not unusual. . . . All this printing required enormous quantities of paper and papermills throughout Europe struggled to meet demand." Id. at 203. Of course, one could be on the same page as, for example, Congressman Steve King. At the 2016 Republican National Convention he said, "This whole white people business, though, does get a little tired," "I'd ask you to go back through history and figure out where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you are talking about. Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?" Oop! Where would western Europe and American be but for paper technology. Get out of the bubble.).
Paul Buckley, ed., Classic Penguin: Cover to Cover, illustrated by Matt Vee, foreword by Audrey Niffenegger, preface by Elda Rotor (New York: Penguin Books, 2016).
Christopher de Hamel, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts (London: Allen Lane/Penguin Books, 2016).
