"Conan The Librarian" wrote in message
oups.com...

Please tell me more.

Well, first of all, Bill was right.

Looks like I was wrong about Basbanes. The only mention of Dobie in "A
Gentle Madness" (at least, according to the index) is on page 346, in a
chapter titled "Instant Ivy," wherein Basbanes mentions Dobie as one of
nineteen notable people (including Erle Stanley Gardner, John Foster Dulles
and the Hoblitzelles) for whom rooms in the HRC at Austin are named. I
won't bore you with the details of what Basbanes has to say about H.H.
Ransom and the HRC......you probably know a great deal more about it than I
do......or than Basbanes, for that matter.

As for "A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion
for Books," the subtitle says it all.......well, or SHOULD anyway. In a
book of 533 pages (minus what Kevin Jackson refers to as "invisible
forms"{*}), you'd think a competent and conscientious author could pretty
much cover the material. Unfortunately (at least from my perspective),
Basbanes restricts himself, with one glaring exception, to serious
collectors of means and purpose. Aside from brief mentions of a few
noteworthy examples, he mostly ignores the crackpot TRUE bibliomanes (not to
mention bibliphages) in favor of a fuller treatment of those who have
collected with a passion, more or less good taste, and a good deal of focus.
The intriguing and adorable basket-cases who are found rotted or dessicated
under a collapsed stack some two to five years after their last sightings by
the neighbors are given short shrift. To give him his due, Basbanes does a
good job with the material he covers, but I was hoping for more of the lurid
stuff.

That said, he somehow manages to botch the one REALLY scandalous case he
deals with in detail......the notorious case of Stephen Blumberg. I'm going
to guess this name is already familiar to you, in which case I don't need to
elucidate. If not, I won't spoil the surprise. Suffice it to say that the
interjection of Blumberg's story in this volume is something akin to jamming
a bit of Stravinsky into Mozart......or vice-versa. I don't know what
Basbanes was thinking......and I suspect he doesn't either.

Chuck Vance (and if that sort of thing interests you, you should
check out Mody Boatright; my mom took classes with him at the U of T,
and got to know his daughter, and she says they were a delightfully
disfunctional family :-)

Boatright......o.k., that's a new one for me. I'll be watching for him.


He's not as well-known as Dobie, but he holds his own as a
folklorist. Here's a little more about him:
http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/...s/BB/fbo1.html

Wolfgang
great......that's all a ****in' junky needs.......another pusher!


I can't speak for Claspy, but I'm just trying to help.


Chuck Vance (yeah, I know ... that's what they all say)

Yeah, that's what they all say.

Wolfgang
{*}"Invisible Forms: A Guide to Literary Curiosities", Kevin Jackson, Thomas
Dunne Books, St. Martin's Press, 1999. [From the dust jacket fly-leaf:
"Dedications, titles, epigraphs, footnotes{**}, prefaces, afterwords,
indexes{***}, these and other 'invisbile' literary necessities form the
skeletons of many a book..."]

{**} If you love footnotes.....or hate them.....(it's one or the
other.....or you are no real bibliophile), you might want to have a look at,
"The Devil's Details: A History of Footnotes* Chuck Zerby, Invisible Cities
Press, 2002.

*"Being a concise and definitive account of the footnote, from its murky
birth to its fertile middle years to its endangered present, beset as it is
by careless writers and indifferent editors and thoughtless readers and
penny-pinching publishers, an account, moreover, enhanced by copious
documentation, enlightened by countless quotations from wise councilors,
lightened by many passages of delightful humor, and yet entirely unafraid of
either controversy or sex." [this footnote appears on the front of the dust
jacket]

{***} EVERY book should have an index! "Winnie the Pooh" should have an
index.....fukkin' phone books and dictionaries should have indexes!

p.s. Bill was right.