Scope and Contents

This essay deals with book collecting. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents L.A. Times: "If anyone in the United States is truly a book person, surely it is Nicholas A. Basbanes. For two decades, the literary critic and columnist has cast a fond, even loving eye, on the culture of books, their substance, their wider meaning in society and the people who -- in ways similar and markedly different -- share his passion. His intense engagement with all things bookish shines from every page of his new collection of journalistic pieces, each one sparkling with insights born of total immersion in his beloved subject. Basbanes already has written a handful of indispensable books on this topic, but, as he makes clear in his introduction to "Editions & Impressions," he selected these particular essays "precisely because they are not replicated in any substantial way" in his other published work. The essays are radiant with his joy in discovering and exploring the byways of the book world. And what a world it is, full of fascinating characters and interesting...

Scope and Contents L.A. Times: "If anyone in the United States is truly a book person, surely it is Nicholas A. Basbanes. For two decades, the literary critic and columnist has cast a fond, even loving eye, on the culture of books, their substance, their wider meaning in society and the people who -- in ways similar and markedly different -- share his passion. His intense engagement with all things bookish shines from every page of his new collection of journalistic pieces, each one sparkling with insights born of total immersion in his beloved subject. Basbanes already has written a handful of indispensable books on this topic, but, as he makes clear in his introduction to "Editions & Impressions," he selected these particular essays "precisely because they are not replicated in any substantial way" in his other published work. The essays are radiant with his joy in discovering and exploring the byways of the book world. And what a world it is, full of fascinating characters and interesting...

Scope and Contents DAVID WALTON Review on interent: Nicholas Basbanes is an especially congenial writer, a quality he displayed memorably in A Gentle Madness, his 1999 history of book collecting and collectors. He does it again most pleasurably in On Paper, a wide-ranging investigation into the "everything" of that ubiquitous and indispensable construction of cellulose fibers whose history paralleled "” and made possible "” the rise of civilization.On Paper, true to its double-duty title, isn't a history of papermaking, though Basbanes tracks the process from its discovery in China a century or two B.C., east into Japan and Korea, west in the eighth century to Arabia, where the Koran had been recited from memory for a hundred years, to Spain in the 11th century, to Italy in the 13th, where it spurred the Renaissance, then to North America in 1690 "” and now, everywhere.As a prism into history, the role of paper offers a unique and often defining perspective. For example, at the start of the Civil...

Scope and Contents Publishers Weekly review. "A sequel of sorts to Basbanes's earlier A Gentle Madness (on the manic nature of bookselling and book-collecting), this copious volume takes its title from the formidable lions guarding the entrance to the main branch of the New York Public Library in Manhattan. Opening with the great libraries of the past, from Alexandria to Pergamum and Glastonbury, Basbanes, former literary editor of the Worcester Sunday Telegram, segues into such venerable active libraries as those at the Vatican, Wolfenbuttel and the universities of Durham, Leiden and Oxford. He visits with shrewd, sometimes eccentric book dealers who happily recount tales of bygone bibliophiles, and llustrates a variety of collections, from illuminated medieval manuscripts to volumes more valuable for who owned them than for binding or content. "I absolutely insist on keeping the same crummy look," a bookshop owner tells him proudly. "Every time I make the place too neat,...

Scope and Contents

This catalogue features feminist, political literature. It lists Arion Press' "Shaped Poetry" held by the Sackner Archive. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.