Patience & Fortitude: A Roving Chronicle of Book People, Book Places, and Book Culture | 
 enlarge | Author: Nicholas A. Basbanes
Publisher: HarperCollins
Category: Book
List Price: $35.00
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Rating:  13 reviews
Sales Rank: 947661
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 656
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.4
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.5
ISBN: 0060196955
Dewey Decimal Number: 002.09
EAN: 9780060196950
ASIN: 0060196955
Publication Date: October 1, 2001
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Product Description
In 1995 Nicholas Basbanes introduced a resonant phrase to describe the obsessive passion people have had over the past twenty-five hundred years to possess books, a condition more commonly known as bibliomania, one he christened in his book A Gentle Madness. Reviewing the work in the Washington Post, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Michael Dirda judged it to be a gallery of wonderful characters, "each more appealing than the last."Now, in Patience & Fortitude, Basbanes continues his discursive adventures among the gently mad, expanding his focus to probe the more comprehensive concept of book culture. Visiting many key "book places" around the world, he talks with a striking variety of kindred spirits, each one a living testament to the unending relevance of these essential artifacts in our lives.Drawing its title from the unofficial names of the marble lions that guard the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, Patience & Fortitude explores the changing form of the book over the centuries and describes the nature of the institutions that have evolved to contain them, including academic, public, private, and national repositories.Using the same narrative technique that made A Gentle Madness a national bestseller, Basbanes employs a lively balance of scholarly research with investigative journalism to document many pertinent book stories that have not been told before, and offers unprecedented depth to others that have barely scratched the surface. Picking up seamlessly where its predecessor left off, Patience & Fortitude profiles the experiences and thoughts of all kinds of dedicated "book people," be they librarians, readers, writers, bookmakers, booksellers, preservationists, or collectors.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 8 more reviews...
 A bibliophage is a person who devours books September 21, 2007
This is an engaging compilation of book talk topics. Anecdotes abound. The London Library celebrated its one hundred fiftieth anniversary in 1991. Its counterparts are the Library Company of Philadelphia, the New York Society Library, the Boston Athenaeum. It is not a club. There is silence maintained in the London Library reading room. Some writers do their writing there. Penelope Fitzgerald found Novalis's letters in the London Library.
Umberto Eco has a personal library of thirty thousand volumes. The success of THE NAME OF THE ROSE enabled him to become a serious book collector. The books arts community located in western Massachusetts is described. The author uses the title 'Profiles in Bibliophagia' for one of the sections of his book.
Antiquarian bookselling is more established in Europe than in the United States. The most prominent American bookseller of the twentieth century was Dr. A.S.W. Rosenbach of Philadelphia. The very best dealers are scholars. Emigre booksellers helped create some of the great research libraries in America.
The Boston Public Library, a McKim structure, is the most notable building in Back Bay. Alfred Kazin and Richard Hofstadter began their friendship at the New York Public Library. Harold Bloom credits that library with starting his book passion. The library was a refuge for many immigrant scholars. Resident writers have included Joseph Lash, James Thomas Flexner, Nancy Milford, Edna St.Vincent Millay, Susan Brownmiller, Robert Caro. Nicholson Baker has written dismissively of the destruction of card catalogues and the replacement of them by various kinds of electronic access.
Colleges and universities continue to be judged by the strength of their libraries. Harvard may be the only library that has kept up with inflation. Other schools are buying less than they used to. The author recounts how the library at York University, (Canada), was built. About one hundred thousand books were bought from a dealer of second-hand books in Boston. Works in French were obtained from a store going out of business. York University also bought books along with the the California system of higher education. The same librarian doubled the library collection at Boston College in ten years.
Premier research institutions demand strong libraries. University libraries were able to enhance their collections under Title II, a federal program in effect from 1965 to 1982. Research universities have used book depositories for low-circulation books to avoid deaccessioning them. Cornell and the University of Michigan have joined forces to create the Making of America digital library.
The author describes the Strand and Argosy book stores of New York City. Serendipity is a term originating in a piece by Horace Walpole. It is the name of a distinguished book store in Berkeley.
Photographs ornament this excellent work.
Bibliomaniac Strikes again September 7, 2006
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
If you love books than you will love Nicholas Basbanes. In this installment of Basbanes ode to all things printed and bound he delves into (among other things) the world of libraries, their noble traditions as well as a few shameful failings. Implicit in every page of this and all his books is a genuine love of his topic, and this mixed with his broad scholarship and pleasant narrative make him a joy to read.
Love books? February 25, 2006
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I still have not been able to read A Gentle Madness, but from previous reviews, I can get the sense that there is a similar theme to this one.
As for Patience and Fortitude--for any book lover, you immediately become overwhelmed by Basbanes' and his interviewees' passion for books. Moreover, the more you read about some of the great collections covered in this book, the more you want to see for yourself. For me, the most intriguing element of the book was the section on the long forgotten libraries of Mt Athos, some of which maintain extensive collections from Byzantium.
I was equally interested to read how the major libraries of the world assemble collections, and attempt to maintain them, while filling the need for more computer savvy customers.
I hope to read the other books by Basbanes, but if this is the standard for the others, I am sure they will be equally as enjoyable.
 Librarianship 101 meets The Book Fan July 24, 2005
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Perhaps being a librarian meant I was always going to cast a jaundiced eye on this book but "A Gentle Madness" was so good I had to take the bait. A history of the printed word, a class in comparative librarianship and one of the history of libraries, along with "famous book collectors I have rubbed elbows with" leave little new to cover. I don't really care what the author had for lunch when he dined with Umberto Ecco and there is a lot of "me" in this books. Of course, his own column leads him to all sorts of authors but I would have preferred an objective discourse without including his own (less that original) musings on ancient libraries and the problems of libraries in the 21st century. He speaks only to the very top level librarians at usually the top libraries in the world. There is no discussion of state university libraries who face regular budget cuts, the staff who wrestle with their directors' obsessive acquisitiveness or those who face the demand of diminishing funds to heat and light the buildings not to mention keep staff. He thinks it horrid to spend money on computers and not books, while forgetting that access to those books is through the computer. For all those readers who never thought about what libraries actually do or how many dollars are spent to do it, this is a must read. We who slave away behind the scenes won't find this topic new, but there are millions of people who probably gave little thought to rare books and their delights and who should read this as an introductory to the gentle madness.
Los Angeles Central Library fire -- Biblioteca Alexandrina July 15, 2005
8 out of 10 found this review helpful
I have not finished reading "Patience & Fortitude," although it is still on my wish list as a book I would "love to have." I *have* read enough to feel justified in making two comments here, one on a matter Basbanes discusses as the worst library disaster in American history, and a scandal which occured two years after he devoted the epilogue of this book to the Biblioteca Alexandrina, widely touted as "the new 'Library of Alexandria.'"
Basbanes devotes a page and a half to discussing the diastrous fire at the Los Angeles Central Library in 1986, but he omits mention of the scandalous background which transformed a small fire into a major disaster.
The Los Angeles Fire Department had issued numerous citations to the Library Department over a period of several years because of the reckless disregard for elementary fire safety in the building. Famously, bare electric light bulbs were within inches of one stack of books which was piled almost to the ceiling. I had occasion to see "behind the stacks" of the Science and Technology department one day, in the area where patent information was stored, and I was shocked: material was stacked on top of every bookcase in sight, and the place was packed with heaps of books and documents, many of which were destroyed in the 1986 fire.
The Los Angeles City Council was well aware that the central library was a fire trap, but they refused to do anything to upgrade the library facility. Then-Mayor Tom Bradley preferred using City tax money to finance his jet-setting lifestyle of junket after junket to the Far East rather than spend money to bring the Central Library up to even the bare minimums of the Fire Code. The consensus among critics was that the City Council and the Mayor were waiting for the Central Library to burn down so that their campaign contributors could cash in on the building contracts which would be awarded after the inevitable fire.
As it turned out, the fire was a huge windfall for the real estate developers and building contractors who bankrolled our last Mayor, for the City financed the new structure by selling off the air space above it to real estate developers who then applied the "space" they had purchased to erect skyscrapers around the new library to heights which would have been prohibited had the new library not been built. The result was a glut of office space, much of which went empty for a decade or more, and a skyline which no longer included either City Hall or the Central Library, formerly the tallest buildings in their neighborhoods by municipal ordinance. In 2004 it was revealed that the new skyline also made the neighborhood of the new Central Library the #1 target of al-Qaeda in Southern California, ahead of even Disneyland -- a fact which the City and the falsely so-called "Department of Homeland Security" kept secret from the residents and businesses of Los Angeles for three years.
Basbanes was not writing a political diatribe, but I think he did the readers of this book a grave dis-service by allowing them to think that a lone arsonist was solely responsible for the disaster which was the 1986 fire. Tom Bradley and the City Council deserve the blame for creating the conditions which turned a small fire into a hectacomb of books which destroyed a gem of Art Deco architecture. Basbanes quotes Lawrence Clark Powell, former librarian of UCLA, to the effect that the building itself was insignificant. On the contrary, the interior was covered with murals and much statuary and other art graced the building -- much of it totally lost now.
If such compelling information is omitted from the discussion of a library with which I am very familiar, I wonder how much crucial information has been left out of sections about libraries with which I am unfamiliar.
Basbanes cannot be faulted for omitting mention of the scandal which has destroyed the reputation of the Biblioteca Alexandrina, to which he devotes the epilogue of "Patience & Fortitude" -- the events took place two years after the first edition of this book was published. One hopes that future editions will devote considerable space to the scandal.
How unexpected the shocking story turned out is demonstrated by the fact that it happened less than a month after Umberto Eco, whom Basbanes interviewed, gave a speech at the BA. The timing was ironic, for the scandal hinged upon a book which Eco had discussed at length in "Foucault's Pendulum," which prompted him to lead the international crusade against the institution which had played host to him so recently.
In December 2003, less than a month after Eco's speech there, the Biblioteca Alexandrina launched a prominent exhibit of "Monotheism," and the book which they choose to place alongside the Hebrew Talmud was not the Septuagint -- the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, which had been written in Alexandria -- but "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion."
For those unfamiliar with it, "The Protocols" is, as Eco had pointed out years earlier in "Foucault's Pendulum," an anti-Jewish Tsarist secret police forgery purportedly containing the details of a plot by "the Learned Elders of Zion" to conquer the world. The book fueled Russian pogroms and Nazi genocide of the Jews, and today it is used by neo-Nazi and radical Moslems alike to stoke hatred of the Jews. As an anti-Jewish book it is sold by neo-Nazi groups in the 21st century and is a best seller in Moslem countries, helped in no small part by the authority of the Biblioteca Alexandrina.
What makes the display of the "The Protocols" such an outrage is that there is no longer any question that the book is a total fabrication. Not only was it a Russian forgery, but it was an almost word-for-word copy of a 19th century German plagiarism of a French novel satirizing Napoleon III and the Second Empire. Its roots may be traced to a novel by French Author Eugene Sue, who outlined a *Jesuit* plot to take over the world. The evidence of this is incontovertible -- today's text of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is a "Jewified" version of 19th century French novels which originally made no mention of Jews, Zionists or otherwise.
Nevertheless, the Biblioteca Alexandrina chose to display "The Protocols" next to the Talmud, and no amount of back-pedaling by director Yousef Ziedan changes the fact that more than $100 million of international funding was ultimately used to propagate a hateful anti-Jewish forgery as a legitimate "religious" text of Judaism (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000183.html).
Basbanes ends the first edition of "Patience & Fortitude" on the hopeful note that, "the Biblioteca Alexandrina ... has the promise of genius." Sadly, it proved its moral bankruptcy less than two years after this book was published. Basbanes owes it to the world to write a revision of "Patience & Fortitude" describing how the high hopes which so many of us had for the "the new 'Library of Alexandria'" were utterly dashed.
I give this book only four stars because I am know that Basbanes omitted information which I think he should have revealed, and I suspect that he did it more than once. If future editions fail to discuss the scandal at the Biblioteca Alexandrina my opinion of the book will plummet.
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