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| The Book That Changed My Life |
Read an essay Nick wrote for The Book That Changed My Life: 71 Remarkable Writers Celebrate the Books That Matter Most to Them (Gotham, 2006)
Read an essay Nick wrote for The Book That Changed My Life: 71 Remarkable Writers Celebrate the Books That Matter Most to Them (Gotham, 2006).
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| Welcome to nicholasbasbanes.com, website of Nick Basbanes |
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About Nicholas A. Basbanes
 Well known for writing about books, bibliophiles, and various aspects of book culture, Nicholas Basbanes has worked as an award-winning investigative reporter, a literary editor, a lecturer, and a nationally syndicated columnist. His first book, A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction for 1995, and was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. It is now in its twentieth printing, with more than 120,000 copies in print.
Of his second book,Patience & Fortitude, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and historian David McCullough wrote that "Nicholas Basbanes has become our leading authority of books about books." Of his fifth, Matthew Price wrote in the Los Angeles Times that “Every Book Its Reader reminds us that books, in all their myriad forms, are necessary equipment for living."
Basbanes’ sixth book, Editions & Impressions.—a collection of his literary journalism over the past twenty years—was recently published by Fine Books Press, a division of Fine Books & Collections magazine. His seventh, A World of Letters: Yale University Press, 1908-2008, will be published by Yale University Press this fall. This past December, Basbanes was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in support of a book he is now writing on the history of paper and papermaking, to be published next year by Alfred A. Knopf.
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Editions & Impressions: Twenty Years on the Book Beat, by Nicholas A. Basbanes
 By Martin Rubin
Special to The Times
Los Angeles Times, February 23, 2008
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 tales, which Basbanes, with his experience covering "every imaginable kind of story as a newspaper reporter," is perfectly fitted to evoke.
The first part of "Editions & Impressions" consists of chapters with Greek-derived titles, all beginning with the root prefix "biblio," meaning -- what else? book! Two are titled "Bibliophilia," meaning the love of books, something Basbanes certainly knows all about (having written such books as "A Gentle Madness" and, most recently, "Every Book Its Reader"). Yet he is never sappy, never shows even a hint of "bibliolatry" (the title of another essay), sacerdotal worship of books or a self-congratulatory tone. And when he considers other people's love for books, particularly among collectors public and private, he tackles the touchy subject of money. Indeed, as a librarian at the Boston Public Library acquisitions department told him, "[A]fter all these years of collecting, we'd have to be rich, don't you think?" But a bookseller avers that "if you can't get a particular book for money, that's really rare." That he brings up "filthy lucre" when examining the various factors that feed people's love for books is part of what makes this book uncommonly refreshing.
There is a fascinating chapter titled "Bibliokleptomania," which reflects Basbanes' experience as an investigative reporter in the heady days after the 1972 Watergate break-in. Of "notorious book thief" Stephen C. Blumberg, who was convicted in 1991 of stealing more than 20,000 rare books and 10,000 manuscripts in 45 states and Canada, he cites the defense's argument that "a severe disillusionment disorder [forced] him to believe he must rescue the past and protect it from an indifferent environment," as well as the prosecutor's accusation that "just like any cat burglar . . . the man is a thief." A true bibliophile, Basbanes pronounces his own eminently sensible verdict: "Typical collectors, of course, preserve the relics of creativity and shared experience, and though bibliomania certainly involves obsession, it can be productive, so long as it is held reasonably in check."
Basbanes' treatment of fellow book lovers are informative and generous. From his personal collection of volumes on his beloved subject, he cites Robert Curzon's "Visits to Monasteries in the Levant" circa the 1830s as "one of the greatest accounts of bibliographical globe-trotting ever written and recently found lying in a wooden fruit box at a Massachusetts flea market."
Before he was granted entry to an ancient library in one of the monasteries on Mt. Athos in Greece, Curzon writes, the abbot in charge required him to eat a breakfast of pulverized raw garlic mixed with olive oil, sugar and a shredded cheese that "almost takes the skin off your fingers." This "savoury mess" left Curzon "sorely troubled in spirit" for years afterward. "Who could have expected so dreadful a martyrdom as this? Was ever an unfortunate bibliomaniac dosed with such medicine before?"
Such is Basbanes' gusto for books and everything to do with them that there is little doubt he would endure this rite of passage and more for a look at such a library. And, far from emerging "sorely troubled," Basbanes' exuberant spirit would be energized, as he so evidently has been in his multifarious book experiences around the world.
Martin Rubin is a critic and the author of "Sarah Gertrude Millin: A South African Life."
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Coming from Yale in October: "A World of Letters"
 Three years ago Nick was commissioned to write a history of Yale University Press on the occasion this year of its one-hundredth birthday. The book is now in production, and will be available this fall. For more information, and to pre-order a copy, click either of the following options.
Available from Yale Press Here
Available from Amazon Here
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 Famous Once Again
Longfellow reaches his bicentennial; here's why his poems became perennial
By Nicholas A. Basbanes
Even in his later years, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow did not mind birthdays. He inspired others to celebrate right along with him. His 70th, for example, took on the air of a national holiday, with parades, speeches and lots of his poetry. "My study is a garden of flowers," he wrote in his journal on February 27, 1877, with "salutations and friendly greetings from far and near" filling his house in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
By then, Longfellow was a celebrity of almost modern magnitude—"the object of a national adulation enjoyed by few poets before or since," according to Andrew R. Hilen, who edited a comprehensive edition of the poet's correspondence. He was dazzlingly prolific, equally adept at prose, drama and poetry, and a scholar as well; his translation of Dante's Divine Comedy was the first in America. He also had the good fortune to come along just as the United States was forming a distinctive cultural identity. "Longfellow did as much as any author or politician of his time to shape the way 19th-century Americans saw themselves, their nation and their past," says Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Today, only people of a certain age can recall the Longfellow poetry they memorized as schoolchildren, perhaps passages from "Paul Revere's Ride" or "The Wreck of the Hesperus" or "The Village Blacksmith." Many more speak of "the patter of little feet" or "ships that pass in the night," or declare, "I shot an arrow into the air" or "Into each life some rain must fall," without realizing that those words, too, are his. If his contemporaries celebrated him as an American bard, subsequent generations pushed him to the margins as a relic.
Yet in the light of his 200th birthday this month, Longfellow is looking fresh once again. A Library of America edition of his selected writings, published in 2000, has gone through four printings, with close to 37,000 copies in print. To celebrate his bicentennial, the U.S. Postal Service has issued a commemorative stamp—the second to bear his likeness; Herman Melville is the only writer similarly honored. Longfellow was not a "stuffy Victorian," says Christoph Irmscher, curator of a bicentennial exhibit of rare books and other artifacts at Harvard University's Houghton Library. Rather, he was a highly motivated writer who "worked hard to professionalize the business of literature and to earn his status as America's first—and most successful to date—celebrity poet." In his ambition, in his approach to fame and in his connection with his audience, Longfellow can seem, even now, quite contemporary.
He could have been a country lawyer like his father, Stephen, who represented Maine in Congress from 1823 to 1825, but Henry had other ideas. "I most eagerly aspire after future eminence in literature, my whole soul burns most ardently for it, and every earthly thought centres on it," he wrote home during his senior year at Bowdoin College.
Born in Portland, Maine, in 1807, he would cite Washington Irving's Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon as the most influential book of his youth. By the time he was 13, he was reading Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, John Milton, Alexander Pope and Edward Gibbon; he had even published his first poem, "The Battle of Lovell's Pond," in the Portland Gazette. His Bowdoin acquaintances included Nathaniel Hawthorne, who would become a lifelong friend, and Franklin Pierce, who would become the 14th president of the United States.
After receiving his bachelor's degree in 1825, Longfellow spent three years in Europe learning French, Italian, Spanish, German and Portuguese, then five years teaching European languages at Bowdoin and translating scholarly texts for classroom use. He had married Mary Storer Potter, a 19-year-old neighbor from Portland, in 1831. Three years later, Harvard College named him Smith Professor of Modern Languages and of Belles Lettres.
To prepare for the job, Longfellow made another trip abroad, this time with Mary. Over the next two years he added Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Old Icelandic and Dutch to his repertoire. But he suffered a grievous loss as well: in 1835 Mary died in Rotterdam after a miscarriage. It wasn't until 1836 that Longfellow reported to Cambridge, eventually taking a room in an elegant old house on Brattle Street that had served as General Washington's headquarters during the Siege of Boston.
As he had been at Bowdoin, Longfellow was a popular teacher and energetic scholar, introducing his students to the European forms he had mastered while honing his own literary skills. In 1839, he published Hyperion: A Romance and Voices of the Night, his first collection of poetry, followed in 1841 by Ballads and Other Poems. And he married Frances "Fanny" Appleton. Her father, Boston industrialist Nathan Appleton, bought the house on Brattle Street for them as a wedding present.
In 1847, Longfellow published Evangeline, the story in verse of an Acadian woman's heartbreaking separation from her bridegroom on their wedding day. It generated six printings in six months. Other successful works followed—Kavanagh, a short novel; The Seaside and the Fireside, another collection of poetry; and The Golden Legend, a medieval tale in verse. By the mid-1850s, he was financially secure enough to leave Harvard and concentrate on writing. In 1857, The Song of Hiawatha, arguably Longfellow's best-known poem, sold 50,000 copies, blockbuster numbers for its time. A year after that, The Courtship of Miles Standish, a story based loosely on his own Pilgrim ancestors, sold 25,000 copies in the United States within two months—and 10,000 copies in London in a single day. But his sales figures only begin to suggest the impact Longfellow had on 19th-century thought; his books remained in print year after year, and many were translated into no fewer than ten foreign languages.
In Evangeline, Longfellow created a character whose experiences were based on the expulsion of French-speaking Acadians from modern-day Nova Scotia by the British in 1755; inspired by the wanderings of Homer's Odysseus and Virgil's Aeneas, he gave an epic structure to a local theme. Similarly, Miles Standish and Hiawatha brought a human dimension to the lives of the continent's European settlers and its indigenous people—and let Longfellow achieve his goal of explaining America to Americans through poetry.
Moreover, he proved to be a shrewd manager of his literary properties. He insisted that inexpensive paperbacks be made readily available and that his poems be widely reproduced in newspapers and on posters. His image appeared on cigar boxes, beer bottle labels, inkwells, bookends, lithographic engravings, even fine china. His house became a tourist magnet; he kept a stack of autographed cards handy to distribute to the hundreds who came to call. "There is never an hour in the day, when someone is not pounding at the brass knocker of my door," he wrote in a letter to the poet Paul Hamilton Hayne, "never a moment when some unanswered letter is not beckoning to me with its pallid finger."
That grumbling notwithstanding, Longfellow scrupulously answered his mail, sometimes writing up to 20 responses a day. (More than 5,000 were gathered in six volumes published between 1966 and 1982.) He also knew the value of a fascinating new medium, photography: 12,000 images, including many of him and his family, are among the some 800,000 documents, household items, artworks and furnishings maintained by the National Park Service, custodian of his home, called Craigie House, since 1972, when his descendants turned it over to the nation.
Among luminaries to drop by over the years were Mark Twain, Julia Ward Howe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Anthony Trollope, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oscar Wilde and singer Jenny Lind; even Dom Pedro II, the emperor of Brazil, came calling. In 1867, Charles Dickens, the most famous novelist on either side of the Atlantic, spent Thanksgiving Day with Longfellow, renewing a friendship they had established 25 years earlier, when Dickens first visited the United States.
Dickens wrote in a letter to his son that Longfellow "is now white-haired and white-bearded, but remarkably handsome. He still lives in his old house, where his beautiful wife was burnt to death. I dined with him the other day, and could not get the terrific scene out of my imagination."
Dickens was referring to Fanny Longfellow's shocking death six years earlier, apparently after her dress was ignited by candle wax as she was sealing an envelope containing a snippet of hair from one of her six children. Longfellow's white beard hid scars from wounds he suffered while trying to smother the flames.
Longfellow and Dickens met again the following year, in England, where the American's whirlwind itinerary included stops at Oxford and Cambridge universities to receive honorary degrees, a stay at the home of Alfred Tennyson, breakfast with Prime Minister William Gladstone and tea at Windsor Castle with Queen Victoria.
"I noticed an unusual interest among the attendants and servants," Victoria later confided to her husband's biographer Theodore Martin. "When [Longfellow] took leave, they concealed themselves in places from which they could get a good look at him as he passed. I have since inquired among them, and am surprised...to find that many of his poems are familiar to them. No other distinguished person has come here that has excited so peculiar an interest."
After his death on March 24, 1882, at 75, dozens of memorials were erected throughout the United States. A national campaign was launched to fund a statue to be unveiled in Washington, D.C. In England, Longfellow became the first American to be honored with a marble bust in Poet's Corner at Westminster Abbey. "Never had a poet been so widely loved," Charles Eliot Norton declared in an essay that commemorated the centennial of Longfellow's birth, "never was the death of a poet so widely mourned."
Widely, but not forever. Longfellow seems to have understood the vicissitudes of fame as well as anyone. His first book of consequence, the travelogue Outre-Mer: A Pilgrimage Beyond the Seas, concluded with a prophetic riff: "Dost thou covet fame?" he asked. "This little book is but a bubble on the stream; and although it may catch the sunshine for a moment, yet it will soon float down the swift-rushing current, and be seen no more!"
Still, Longfellow did what he could to hold the sunshine as long as possible. When he died, he even left behind a collection of pencil stubs wrapped in pieces of paper identifying, in his handwriting, the works that he had composed with each one.
"Above all, Longfellow wrote poems that were meant to be enjoyed," says Christoph Irmscher. "Storytelling, unfortunately, goes against the modernist belief that in order to be any good a poem has to be concise and compressed, and difficult to figure out."
Perhaps Longfellow provided his own best summary in "A Psalm of Life":
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.
Published in Smithsonian, February 2007.
Nicholas A. Basbanes' several books include Every Book Its Reader (2005).
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| Fine Books & Collections |
Nick's featured column, "Gently Mad," appears in every issue of Fine Books & Collections magazine; to subscribe Click here
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