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Patience & Fortitude: A Roving Chronicle of Book People, Book Places, and Book Culture

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As he did with the first volume, "A Gentle Madness", Nicholas Basbanes has written a book for a very wide audience. "Patience And Fortitude", goes well beyond any confines that would limit the work to readers interested only in the smallest of details that would be of importance to only the most addicted of bibliophiles. This is a history book, a political science book, a work that discusses education, and a book that addresses the importance of libraries, whether it is the matter in which they are constructed or how political groups attempt to influence History. It is also about the future of books and in some cases the wholesale destruction of publicly owned library inventory and their contents.

There is also good news, for the moment The United States still has more libraries than we do McDonalds. Such may not always be the case if some of those responsible for the care of our written history are not carefully watched. The most notorious example of destruction came about in San Francisco during the transition from the old library to the new. There is no question that a library may choose to have a limited number of copies of a given book, but having the department of sanitation collect and then dump tens of thousands of volumes in to the city landfill should be criminal. There is never a shortage of interest in books. When the disposal of books became known, books that had been marked for destruction were offered to the public gratis. One woman came home with over 1200 books.

The construction of The National Libraries of England, France, and an attempt to create a new Alexandria library are also covered in great detail. England's new facility may not be a visual treat but as a repository for books, there care and distribution it works. The National Library of France would be funny were it not also ridiculous. Vertical libraries don't work very well and the new French facility has not one but four towers. Dozens of steps must be climbed to reach a common area for the towers, but if you wish to enter you must travel back down another set of stairs to gain access. The towers are made of glass. If there is anything that will guaranty the destruction of books it is sunlight. The French facility was a political project that just happened to involve books. Built as yet another architectural monument to a former president it fails from the selection of the location right through to its layout and high tech book management system that has even locked employees out of the building. A recent novel by W. G. Sebald, "Austerlitz", took the time to harpoon this facility in great detail.

The story of a new library in Alexandria, which is scheduled to open soon, is quite sad. Once the site of one of if not the greatest library in history, the new facility is wonderful but it lacks a key ingredient, books. This may sound like sarcasm but the massive core catalogue that any good library needs much less a great library can no longer be assembled. There are very finite numbers of classical rare books, and other facilities are not about to give them up.

Libraries are also critical to the success of any college or university. The author spends a good deal of time discussing the top collegiate libraries in the nation, the difficulties they face with their expanding stock, and how they deal with it. Mr. Basbanes also highlights an insidious political practice as well. UCLA was offered a 1 million dollar grant from the Turkish Government to establish a chair in Ottoman Studies, but it came with the following prohibition, no scholars would be given access to any material, "that might document the Armenian Massacres of 1915". After having taken a quarter of a million dollars from the Turkish Government UCLA was bombarded with protests and the money was returned. In Turkey education and History may be artificially and selectively constructed and taught, but in this instance at least a library in The United States took the correct path. That it had to be pushed by protests is unfortunate but not as unfortunate as the US Congress that dropped a resolution in the fall of 2000 at the request of a lame-duck president not to pass a resolution condemning Turkey for Genocide in 1915. This is not the only example of gifts with strings attached, but when compared to a string that requests a library be named after the donor of funds, it certainly is the most repugnant.

This book will take you around the world to libraries that have functioned for hundreds of years. You will visit monasteries whose collections are one of a kind and are literally irreplaceable. Mr. Basbanes also continues to introduce collectors of books as well as the creators of books from small presses staffed by true artisans. One of the book's highlights is the section dealing with the Pennyroyal Caxton Bible recently produced by the gifted Barry Moser. This work is the first completely illustrated Bible that has been produced for hundreds of years, and the story of its creation is remarkable.

Two volumes complete and one more yet to come. Mr. Basbanes has and continues to create a body of work that will become a standard not only for those who love books, but those who enjoy the history they represent and record.

If you are passionate about books, I mean really passionate, then Basbanes may have written this tome for you. He provides a 600-page history of bibliomania, the obsession with books through the centuries. But for the general reader, the non-scholar, this book is probably twice as thick as it needs to be.

The chapter, "Madness Redux," features Jay Fliegelman, a Stanford University English professor and book collector who seriously (and physically) assesses the relationships between the books he owns. "I wake up sometimes and I will go to my library and move a book from one shelf to another, because in the middle of the night I thought about certain connections between the two. I am wondering, does this author belong with this author?" The perfect image for those who live, and literally, dream books.

It is interesting to read of thirteenth century librarians chaining books to wooden cabinets in an attempt to deter thieves and vandals. Chains apparently became a basic component in the layout of medieval libraries (as replicated, too, in the recent Harry Potter movie). The Cathedral Library at Hereford, England, is currently home to the largest collection of chained books anywhere in the world.

There are also pages on some famous bookstores such as the cavernous Serendipity Books, Inc, in Berkeley, California (owner Peter B. Howard's only business goal is to "continue with dignity"), and both the Argosy and Strand Book Stores in New York City. The Strand also sells and rents books by the linear foot, and proprietor Nancy Bass once filled an order for customers in Miami Beach who wanted only books in the colors hot pink, yellow, and magenta.

Basbanes also tracks the antiquarian bookselling trade in Europe. German bookseller Heribert Tenschert, based in Ramsen, Switzerland, produces beautiful book catalogs which are marvels of scholarship, often more than 500 pages long. Tenschert insists that selling a book is only a small part of what he does. "What I shamelessly believe is that you have to fall in love with a book first. It is physical as well as emotional."

Patience and Fortitude in the title, if you didn't know, are taken from the unofficial names of the two lions carved from Tennessee pink marble outside the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. That library is also featured in this big book about book people.

Nicholas Basbanes has written the second of a projected trilogy about the love of his life: books. Following the wonderful "A Gentle Madness", "Patience and Fortitude" (the names of the two stone lions flanking the entrance to New York Public Library) deals largely with the storage and retrieval of books from ancient times till today. It begins with the ancient world's great library in Alexandria where the entirety of Western knowledge was stored and ends with a plan to rebuild a modern library in Egypt's second largest city: Alexandria!

The first third of the book deals with his tour of the sites of ancient and medieval libraries. My favorite is the abbey at Monte Casino; but surely any bibliophile and traveler will soon be planning his/her next European trip around Basbanes' theme. The second third of the book deals with avid private collectors and booksellers. This is, really, a reprise of his first book. The folks detailed here suffer from his aforementioned gentle madness and, uniformally, see themselves as temporary custodians of the books they love and the cultures those books represent.

In the final portion of the book Basbanes discusses libraries of today and the many challenges they face. In San Francisco there was a wrongheaded pursuit of network access, ultrmodern communication and architectural showing-off when a new building was built for the city's library. This had the horrific result of no room for the books. Thousands of volumes ended up in landfills before a few civic protestors drew attention to the disaster. At Harvard University, on the other hand, rather than destroy books they have built new, climactically controlled storage barns and maintain and grow their marvelous collection.

Dry stuff? Compared to Baldacci or King--sure. But, Basbanes is talking about the preservation of a culture and its artifacts. Pretty exciting, I'd say!

Patience and Fortitude continues the work Nicholas Basbanes began with A Gentle Madness several years ago. It is another great compilation of stories about book collectors, but it goes further by describing great libraries of the past, such as Alexandria, Pergamum, and St. Gall; and of the present, including a fascinating comparison of the new British Library in London and France's Bibliotheque National. There are also some nice portraits of great bookstores like New York's Strand and of some of the intrepid dealers who maintain the antiquarian book trade.

Perhaps the most important part of Patience and Fortitude is the section dealing with the dilemma faced by many libraries: how to adequately store their collections, identify and weed out books which are no longer of use or value, and also provide public access to high technology. Basbanes tells the sad story of San Francisco's library, which has less shelf room than the building it replaced, and contrasts it with Boston and New York's public libraries, which despite age and crowding still maintain excellent inventories; and with Harvard, which never discards books but must periodically send part of its vast collections to storage.

Patience and Fortitude is a wonderful book for anyone who still loves books. I look forward to its sequel.

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.

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.

Cattering from the huge succes he got with "Gentle Madness", Basbanes has not lost time in writting a full serie of books dedicated to books, but I am afraid with variable succes this time. This one is a case of it. It delivers, that's for certain, lot of stuff about books from many angles and with abundance of data, but that worthy scholar virtue is sorrowly asociated to a less than atractive kind of almost scholar writting. Not that Basbanes is not clear, he does not indulges in any kind of jargon, but he is only in ocasions entertainning, scarcely witty and almost never funny. To a non scholar reading this just to get fun about books and not to perform some reasearch about them, his prose is, to say it politely, indifferent. So if the stuff is not in itself warm and atractive, Basbanes does not fill the gap. OK, you pick up here and there richly people and situations, tasty histories not badly told, but also boring guys in many boring pages and so you simple ask why they are there, what they add to the narrative and what Basbanes added to add something at last. To put it short, Basbanes deliver a one volume encyclopaedia about books, right, but a big part of the time you need lot of patience and fortitude to go on.

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.

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.

This book is a sequel to "A Gentle Madness, " also about book collecting. This book deals with the great depositories, from the library at Alexandria to the monasteries in Europe to the great modern warehouses ("library" doesn't quite fit the bill when talking about these book-filled places). A bit too long at 600 pages, but still fascinating to book lovers. Recommended.