Nicholas Basbanes, _A Gentle Madness_
Feb. 24th, 2002 11:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eubThis is the gift I mentioned, a book about book fiends. It had some intriging incidents and characters. Its weakness is the author's apparent need to fit every bit of his research into the book, even the bits that petered out two paragraphs long or with no story to them. And I personally got rather tired of the parade of rich people collecting what is popular to collect, the "high spots".
But it had some great bits. The murdering monk Don Vincente, who said "Every man must die sooner or later, but good books must be conserved." The Count Fortsas auction of books "unknown to bibliographers", including curious philosophical disputations and scurrilous memoirs such as My Campaigns in the Low Countries, with the List, Day by Day, of the Fortresses That I Have Lifted to the White Arm, by the grandfather of the princesse de Ligne, which she ordered her agent to "Buy, I conjure you, at any price" -- the entirety of which was a hoax. The National Yiddish Book Center, which rescues Yiddish books thrown out by younger people who can't read the language. Stephen Blumberg, who stole spectacularly from libraries but was not detected for years, who preferred to live in a cocoon of Victorian interiors nabbed from houses condemned and scheduled for demolition.
Anyone know a good book about Petrarch and Boccaccio's classicist adventures? Or 15c publishing in Venice?
(On my page of notes I also wrote the lone word "samelsurium", which is a word only by courtesy. It does appear to be a word in German, or perhaps a misspelling. Babelfish can't translate.)
But it had some great bits. The murdering monk Don Vincente, who said "Every man must die sooner or later, but good books must be conserved." The Count Fortsas auction of books "unknown to bibliographers", including curious philosophical disputations and scurrilous memoirs such as My Campaigns in the Low Countries, with the List, Day by Day, of the Fortresses That I Have Lifted to the White Arm, by the grandfather of the princesse de Ligne, which she ordered her agent to "Buy, I conjure you, at any price" -- the entirety of which was a hoax. The National Yiddish Book Center, which rescues Yiddish books thrown out by younger people who can't read the language. Stephen Blumberg, who stole spectacularly from libraries but was not detected for years, who preferred to live in a cocoon of Victorian interiors nabbed from houses condemned and scheduled for demolition.
Anyone know a good book about Petrarch and Boccaccio's classicist adventures? Or 15c publishing in Venice?
(On my page of notes I also wrote the lone word "samelsurium", which is a word only by courtesy. It does appear to be a word in German, or perhaps a misspelling. Babelfish can't translate.)
