Editions & Impressions: Twenty Years on the Book Beat - Hardcover

Nicholas A. Basbanes

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9780979949104: Editions & Impressions: Twenty Years on the Book Beat

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0979949106 ISBN 13: 9780979949104

Publisher: Fine Books Press, an imprint of OP Media, LLC, 2007

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Editions & Impressions: Twenty Years on the Book Beat collects thirty-three of Nicholas Basbanes's most engaging articles grouped into three sections: Book Culture; People; and Places. Mr. Basbanes writes passionately about bibliomania, bibliokleptomania, and biblioclasms, as well as book people like Otto Bettmann, Tom Wolfe, Michael Zinnman, and others. He travels the world, visiting and reporting on libraries in Sweden, Germany, Iraq, and New York. Mr. Basbanes selected the essays in this collection precisely because they were not replicated in substantial ways in his other books. More than one-third of the essays in Editions & Impressions are published here for the first time in their full, uncut versions, and one essay and the introduction have never been previously published at all. Most of the essays include an endnote, telling the behind-the-scenes story about the article and bringing the subject up to date. There is much new for Mr. Basbanes's fans to enjoy. A second volume, collecting the best of Nicholas Basbanes's one thousand author interviews, will be published in the fall 2008.

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From the Inside Flap:

Decades before he began writing A Gentle Madness and the other volumes in his acclaimed series on book collecting, libraries, and reading, Nicholas A. Basbanes got his start as a journalist. His experience as an investigative reporter, literary editor, and columnist makes Basbanes unique among the many chroniclers of book culture, creating a body of work that led two-time Pulitzer prize–winning historian and biographer David McCullough to call him “the leading authority of books about books.” Editions and Impressions: Twenty Years on the Book Beat brings together the best of Basbanes's book journalism. Here, he reports first-hand on a nascent library springing up on the battlefield in Iraq. He describes putting hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line at a New York auction on behalf of a friend and placing bids that, in some instances, exceeded his annual salary. In Sweden, he writes about a seventeenth-century palace library left unfinished when builders walked off the job three centuries ago. He recalls meeting with one of the most prolific book thieves of the twentieth century, and considers instances of the tragic destruction of books and libraries. Basbanes often says that he is a collector of collectors, and this book also brings together many profiles of fascinating rare-book aficionados, from the extremely wealthy who can buy almost anything they want to collectors who have built marvelous and important collections on limited budgets. Most of these pieces are significantly revised and expanded from their original appearances in print, and throughout the book, Basbanes has added notes to bring the stories up-to-date. These essays, collected from two decades worth of magazine and newspaper appearances, establish Basbanes as one of the leading book journalists of our time.

About the Author:

Nicholas Basbanes was literary editor of the Worcester Sunday Telegram from 1978 to 1991, and for eight years after wrote a nationally syndicated column on books and authors. His first book, [i]A Gentle Madness[/i], was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction for 1995 and was named a NY Times Notable Book of the Year.

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