Nicholas A. Basbanes

Nicholas Andrew Basbanes (born May 25, 1943, in Lowell, Massachusetts) is an American author who writes and lectures about authors, books, and book culture. His subjects include the "eternal passion for books" ('' A Gentle Madness''); the history and future of libraries (''Patience & Fortitude''); the "willful destruction of books" and the "determined effort to rescue them" (''A Splendor of Letters''); "the power of the printed word to stir the world" (''Every Book Its Reader''); the invention of paper and its effect on civilization (''On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History'')Martin A. Hubbe,"On Paper - A Celebration of Two Millennia of the Work and Craft of Papermakers," ''BioResources,'' 8(4), 4791-4792, November 201

/ref> and an exploration of Longfellow's life and art (''Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow'').

Early life and education

Nicholas Basbanes is the son of two first-generation Greek-Americans. He graduated from Lowell High School (Massachusetts), Lowell High School in 1961 and earned a bachelor's degree in English from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine in 1965. Following a year of graduate study at Pennsylvania State University, he did research for his master's thesis in Washington, D.C. then entered U. S. Navy Officer Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island. He attended the Defense Information School in the spring of 1968 and earned his master's degree in journalism in 1969 while serving aboard the aircraft carrier during the first of two combat deployments he made to Yankee Station in the Gulf of Tonkin, off the coast of Vietnam.Chauncey Mabe, "The Book On Books: Nicholas Basbanes Brings a Journalist's Training and Sensibility to Writing About, well, Writing, and Books," ''South Florida Sun Sentinel'' (Fort Lauderdale, FL), March 14, 2004

/ref>

Career

Early journalism

Discharged from active duty in 1971, Basbanes went to work as a general assignment reporter for ''The Evening Gazette'' in Worcester, Massachusetts, specializing in investigative journalism. In 1978, he was appointed books editor of a sister publication, the Worcester ''Sunday Telegram'', a full-time position that included writing a weekly column for which he interviewed more than a thousand authors over the next twenty-one years.

Due to cost cutting measures, the ''Telegram'', then known as the ''Telegram & Gazette,'' removed its book section in 1990. When Basbanes left the newspaper later in 1991 to complete his first book, he continued writing the column and distributed it through Literary Features Syndicate, an agency he formed that placed it in more than thirty publications nationwide.

He writes the "Gently Mad" column for ''Fine Books & Collections'' magazine and lectures on book-related subjects.

Books

Basbanes' first book, '' A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books'', was published in 1995. The topic was originally dismissed as too arcane for a general readership by many New York editors who had passed on the opportunity to publish it, but the book later found sizable success with multiple printings. Michael Dirda of ''The Washington Post'' called it an "ingratiating and altogether enjoyable book", praising the book's "wonderful gallery of modern eccentrics" despite its occasional lapses in literary history. ''A Gentle Madness'' was named a ''New York Times'' notable book of the year and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award

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