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From Our Shelves: Every Book Its Reader

by Angel Rivera on 2024-05-21T09:00:00-04:00 in Hutchins Library | 0 Comments

Welcome to another edition of From Our Shelves, where I give you a short review of a book from our collections that I have read and hope you may consider reading as well. This week we are featuring Every Book Its Reader by Nicholas Basbanes. The book is arranged in 12 chapters, and the idea for the book comes from a 1963 exhibition at the British Museum celebrating five centuries of the written word. If you are a bibliophile, you will probably enjoy the book very much. More casual readers will find a pretty broad history of books that somehow had an impact on society and/or spurred some change. This book will give you a look at the power of books and reading. Basbanes considers the following premise about studying reading and readers as a field of study:

"A basic premise each follows is the idea that it is readers, not just authors, who give meaning to texts, and that there is value in knowing how individuals through history respond to them" (117). 

If you want to learn more and/or check the book out, you can find the library catalog details below. If you want find other books like this one or for other topics, you can always visit the library's reference desk.

 

Cover ArtEvery Book Its Reader by Nicholas A. Basbanes
Call Number: Stacks 028.9 B297e 2005
ISBN: 9780060593230
Publication Date: 2005-11-29
Inspired by a landmark exhibition mounted by the British Museum in 1963 to celebrate five eventful centuries of the printed word, Nicholas A. Basbanes offers a lively consideration of writings that have "made things happen" in the world, works that have both nudged the course of history and fired the imagination of countless influential people. In his fifth work to examine a specific aspect of book culture, Basbanes also asks what we can know about such figures as John Milton, Edward Gibbon, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Adams, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Henry James, Thomas Edison, Helen Keller -- even the notorious Marquis de Sade and Adolf Hitler -- by knowing what they have read. He shows how books that many of these people have consulted, in some cases annotated with their marginal notes, can offer tantalizing clues to the evolution of their character and the development of their thought. Taking the concept one step further, Basbanes profiles some of the most articulate readers of our time -- David McCullough, Harold Bloom, Robert Fagles, Robert Coles, Helen Vendler, Elaine Pagels, Daniel Aaron, Christopher Ricks, Matthew Bruccoli, and Perri Klass among them -- who discuss such relevant concepts as literary canons, classic works in translation, the timelessness of poetry, the formation of sacred texts, and the power of literature to train physicians, nurture children, and rehabilitate criminal offenders. "Basbanes has a deep and abiding passion for books -- a joyful addiction," Dan Smith wrote in the Toronto Star of Patience & Fortitude, characterizing his body of work as "part travelogue, part scholarship, and all story." The tradition continues with Every Book Its Reader.

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