A Gentle Madness by Nicholas A. Basbanes

Perhaps that’s what’s missing from his impeccably researched history-some personal sense of the bookman’s neurosis. They’ll know.īasbanes never takes us inside his own library, although he’s obviously proud of it or he wouldn’t be posing in it on his book jacket. Yes, thanks to a corner of my collection, future scholars won’t have to wonder just what cheesy pseudonymous thrillers Michael Crichton wrote to put himself through medical school back when he could really write, or have to guess which late-20th-Century magazine journalists felt obliged to rattle the potsherds of Thomas Pynchon’s extra-literary life. This technique would have better served Basbanes’ fundamentally sound thesis: If not for these mostly benign obsessives, many beautiful books and ideas might have wound up kindling something other than the light of learning.Īt this point, it’s probably time to turn over all the cards and reveal that I am one of these obsessives. Just pick a book or manuscript and follow it from author to collector to executor to dumpster to savior, down through the centuries. It might have been fun to follow the books more often, instead of the collectors. Likewise dozens of bibliophiles, -manes, -klepts, -clasts (who destroy books) and -phages (who eat them), most of whom trundle into view, acquire this or that volume, surrender it and disappear. Rosenbach with evident fondness, quoting his amiable correspondence and invoking his redoubtable reputation, but the man never comes anywhere near alive. Author Nicholas Basbanes returns several times to 20th-Century Philadelphia book dealer A.S.W. Blumberg is the closest thing to a fully drawn character in “A Gentle Madness,” and that’s a pity.

A Gentle Madness by Nicholas A. Basbanes