I found a wonderful book in the library here, and I’m rolling through it as quickly as I can: Basbane’s Patience and Fortitude which has the wonderful subtitle: “Wherein a Colorful Cast of Determined Book Collectors, Dealers, and Librarians Go About the Quixotic Task of Preserving a Legacy.”

A completely dry and boring description would say that it is a book about the history of libraries. In fact, it’s much more like an adventure story.

Nicholas Basbane, through research for his earlier book A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes and the Eternal Passion for Books, began to realize that books – by which he means both the physical object and the knowledge or perspective that it communicates – really have a fragile trajectory through time. None of us, today, think anything of it when we read Plato, the Bible, or even the works of obscure medieval mystics – usually in a relatively inexpensive paperback edition that we can pick up easily.

How easily any of these manuscripts could have been lost – some actually were for hundreds of years. Librarians and archivists are the heroes and heroines in a series of adventure stories that highlight manuscripts hidden and recovered, libraries burnt or spared, and the constant interplay between the desire for private ownership and the importance of open access – especially during the time of hand-copied manuscripts.

Patience and Fortitude (the lions outside the New York Public Library) is an excellent book for monastic readers. Monasteries, of course, had a major hand in the copying and transmission of books for much of the medieval period. Moreover, some of the most remote monastic locations – Mount Athos in Greece, for instance – have often been the place where some now-valued manuscript has been carefully kept – sometimes by monks who did not really know what they had – for centuries.

For anyone who, like me, has a large and growing appreciation for the importance of libraries – a ready education available to all, the preservers of knowledge even when its use cannot be foretold – this is just a wonderful book to read. ( )

Books > History/Books and reading > History/Book collecting > History/Libraries > History

love it love it love it - I can't get enough of the stories about books and the people who live in the book world ( )

Has vignettes of the first librarians bringing order out of chaos in collections of scrolls, illuminated texts, incunabula and books.

Inspired by this book, I am cataloguing my own manuscripts, articles, illuminations and books. ( )

It is fitting, perhaps, that my first review of 2007 is a book I should have read long, long ago. Nicholas Basbanes' Patience and Fortitude is the author's second book after the wonderful A Gentle Madness, and it does not disappoint. Basbanes, as always, covers a significant amount of ground in this volume, but I found it nearly impossible to set this book down even for a moment or two once I started reading.

Taking its name from the pair of stone lions who guard the entrance to the New York Public Library's main building, Patience and Fortitude shows through countless examples how those two virtures are essential to the selection, creation and maintenance of great libraries (in any form, although it must be noted that having a little money doesn't hurt either). Basbanes takes his reader on a marvelous tour through the great libraries of the past (Alexandria, Glastonbury, Pergamum) to those of the present day (Harvard, Library of Congress, British Library, etc.) with his characteristic style and wit. Through interviews with book people of all stripes, Basbanes brings the culture of books alive - who can resist the lure of the printed page when it is described by such a master?

The dramatis personae of this book are far too varied and numerous to list, although I found the sections on Barry Moser, Umberto Eco, and the many emigre booksellers who came to North America before and during the second world war most personally intriguing. Basbanes' treatment of the great San Francisco library controversy of the 1990s is focused and fair, and his discussion of the role that technology and digitization will play in the library of the future is among the best I've read. While I read it straight through from cover to cover, the organization of the book is such that you could easily read a section here or there as your interests led (but you'll be sucked in, of that I have little doubt).

As always, I will issue my perennial quibble that the notes are not indicated in the text, although they are excellent and accompany a tremendous bibliography (from which I've just made a list of a number of books that I need to read). But this is another great offering, and one any book-lover should not let sit on the "to be read" shelf any longer.

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2007/... ( )