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The Dean of Books About Books: A Profile of Nicholas Basbanes
Your guide to the history of the book
If you’re a reader, and since you’re reading this you clearly are, it’s likely that you are a book lover as well. If you’re a book lover, you either do or at least should have some interest in books as objects rather than just as conveyors of stories or information. And if you have interest in books as objects, then it’s important to know some of the history of those 500-year-old marvels that no amount of technology will ever be able to surpass.
That was a long-winded way of introducing the man who has forgotten more about the history of the book than most of us will ever know. Let’s meet Nicholas Basbanes, the Dean of books about books.
Nick Basbanes was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, on May 25, 1943. After graduating from college he served in the U.S. Navy, including two combat deployments in the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of Vietnam. After leaving the Navy in 1971, Basbanes began work as a reporter for the Evening Gazette in Worcester, Massachusetts; seven years later he was named the Books Editor of the Worcester Sunday Telegram, writing a weekly column about books. Over the next 21 years, he interviewed over 1,000 authors.
