Volume 48, Number 20 · December 20, 2001
Mad About the Book
By Larry McMurtry
Patience and Fortitude: A Roving Chronicle of Book People, Book Places, and Book Culture
by Nicholas A. Basbanes
HarperCollins, 636 pp., $35.00
A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books
by Nicholas A. Basbanes
Henry Holt, 638 pp., $17.00 (paper)
The somewhat mole-like English bookseller Paul Minet, whose sense of duty requires him to spend a good deal of his life in dank, unlit cellars, rescuing worthy books, used to write a column in the Antiquarian Book Monthly Review called 'Book Chat,' a phrase that describes with a nice accuracy rather more than 90 percent of the large but mostly trifling literature of book collecting. If that judgment seems harsh, please note that I'm speaking only of the literature of book collecting. Serious studies of the transmission of knowledge in the early decades of printing (Adrian Johns's The Nature of the Book, Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin's L'Apparition du Livre) are not book-chat. The thousands of bibliographies crammed into the reference rooms of my own bookshops are not book-chat—they're indispensable tools. Solid publishing histories are not book-chat, though the memoirs of editors (Jason Epstein, Michael Korda, Andre Schiffrin, Diana Athill, to name some recent examples) naturally contain a good deal of publishing chat.
Review, 4059 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |