NICHOLAS BASBANES

Nicholas A. Basbanes is the leading authority of books about books. He is the author of Every Book Its Reader: The Power of the Printed Word to Stir the World, which explores what books have most influenced our culture through interviews with several of our most accomplished bibliophiles. In addition to his books about books, Basbanes has written for numerous newspapers, magazines, and journals, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Smithsonian, Civilization, and New England Quarterly among them, and lectures widely on book-related subjects. In 2004, he began writing a bi-monthly column, Gently Mad, for Fine Books & Collections magazine.

His first book, A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction for 1995, and was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; now in its sixteenth printing, it has recorded sales of more than 100,000 copies. The release in 2001 of a companion volume, Patience & Fortitude: A Roving Chronicle of Book People, Book Places, and Book Culture, prompted the two-time Pulitzer Prize winning biographer and historian David McCullough to write that “Nicholas Basbanes has become our leading authority of books about books and this, his latest, is a jewel.”

A native of Lowell, Massachusetts, Basbanes graduated from Bates College in 1965, received a Master of Arts degree from Pennsylvania State University in 1968, and served as a naval officer aboard the aircraft carrier Oriskany in the Tonkin Gulf in 1969 and 1970. An award-winning investigative reporter during the early 1970s, Basbanes was literary editor of the Worcester Sunday Telegram from 1978 to 1991, and for eight years after that wrote a nationally syndicated column on books and authors. He is a former president of Friends of the Robert H. Goddard Library of Clark University, which has established a student book collecting competition in his honor.

With his wife Constance Basbanes, he writes a monthly review of children’s books for Literary Features Syndicate, which they established in 1993. They are the parents of two daughters, Barbara and Nicole, and live in North Grafton, Massachusetts.