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In A Splendor of Letters, Nicholas
A. Basbanes continues the lively, richly anecdotal exploration
of book people, places, and culture he began in 1995 with
A Gentle Madness (a finalist that year for the National
Book Critics Circle Award) and expanded in 2001 with Patience
& Fortitude, a companion work that prompted the
two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and biographer
David McCullough to proclaim him "the leading authority
of books about books."
Basbanes now offers a consideration of the
many pressing issues that surround the role of books in
contemporary society, such as the willful destruction of
books and libraries in Sarajevo, Tibet, and Cambodia, and
the spirited efforts to restore them. The matter of "discards"
at various libraries takes on an entirely new dimension
as well, with fully researched stories about the kind of
attitudes that may lead to the loss of "last copies"
of important works.
In vivid detail, Basbanes examines the many
materials that have been used over the centuries to record
information -- among them clay tablets, papyrus scrolls,
slabs of stone, palm leaves, animal skins, and hammered
sheets of gold and copper. Also discussed are the various
debates that continue to rage about preservation, which
may mean saving and storing books on paper indefinitely,
or as electronic data, which are by nature ephemeral.
In this beautifully packaged edition, Nicholas
Basbanes brings to a close his wonderful trilogy on the
remarkable world of books and bibliophiles.
Nicholas A. Basbanes was born in Lowell,
Massachusetts, in 1943, graduated from Bates College in
1965, and received a master of arts degree from Pennsylvania
State University in 1969. He served as a naval officer aboard
the aircraft carrier Oriskany during the Vietnam
War and made two combat cruises to the Tonkin Gulf. An award-winning
investigative reporter during the early 1970s, Basbanes
was literary editor of the Worcester Sunday Telegram
from 1978 to 1991, and for eight years after that wrote
a nationally syndicated column on books and authors. He
is a former president of the Friends of the Robert H. Goddard
Library of Clark University, which has established a student
book-collecting competition in his honor. He is also the
author of Among the Gently Mad, a book on collecting.
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