"Conan The Librarian" wrote in message
...
Wolfgang wrote:

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.

Oh please do. :-) From what I've read about him, it appears that
above all else he was determined to bring immediate academic credibility
(similar to an "instant classic" :-) to the center and the university. He
was ruthless, calculating, driven, eccentric and possibly a bit mad. In
other words, he was the perfect man for the job.

Basbanes was much kinder (while giving good account of Ransom's critics),
but that's about the gist of it. I can't really give you much more from
memory and, as I guessed, you already appear to know more about him than I
do.

[little snip]

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.

...he somehow manages to botch the one REALLY scandalous case he deals
with in detail......the notorious case of Stephen Blumberg....

How does he botch the Blumberg case? I would think that's one case
that is pretty open and shut (so to speak).

Poor phrasing on my part. Basbanes actually did a good job of reportage on
Blumberg. What he really botched was the inclusion of Blumberg's story in
this book. In retrospect, it looks to me like Basbanes couldn't decide what
he wanted to do. In the first place, the word "madness" in the title
suggests that he is going to treat bibliomania in the sense of
pathology....a ripe field as anyone who pays much attention to books and
bookish people knows. As I stated, he glosses over this with little more
than a nod and then goes on to a relatively brief look at serious collectors
through history, finally settling on an in depth examination of (mostly)
nineteenth and twentieth century American and British collectors, with a
great deal of emphasis on their relations with dealers and the ultimate
disposition of their collections. And then, at the very end of the book, he
includes this Blumberg stuff. It's looks very much like Basbanes, a: is
saying "I know that a lot of this is boring and it's not what I promised,
and, b: decided on including Blumberg because he was available (and a pretty
hot topic in the book world) and would jazz the whole thing up a bit. The
whole thing is a discordant note in what is otherwise a competent (if
unexciting) look at modern book collecting on a grand scale and/or a tacit
confession that he hadn't done what he led the reader to believe he would.

{**} 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.

Thanks for the citation. And as to your previous point: There is
another option. You can love *and* hate them. I love them for what they
contain, but I hate them because I can't resist being immediately drawn to
their content; I always jump directly to the footnote.

Yeah, I was aware of that third option, but the whole love/hate thingy gets
messy......not the sort of thing we want to go into in depth in a family
newsgroup.

*"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]

I *must* read that book, thanks.

It should come as no surprise that Zerby appears entirely unapologetic about
making it a tricky read.

{***} 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.

I already knew that. :-)

Masochist.

Wolfgang