A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books Jan Susina (bio) Nicholas A. Basbanes. A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books. New York: Holt, 1995. Depending on your attitude, one of the great joys or curses of doing scholarly research on children’s literature is the need to become a book collector. Since few academic libraries have, until recently, devoted much shelf space to children’s books, those who work in the field have, by necessity, accumulated their own private collections. Indeed some of my most pleasurable and scholarly afternoons at the Children’s Literature Association or the Modern Language Association conferences have been spent in the company of other children’s literature scholars as we make the rounds of the local secondhand and antiquarian bookstores. It is a sight to behold when three or more children’s literature specialists swoop down on some unsuspecting bookstore and begin to rummage the stacks looking for hidden treasures. If you are the sort of person who has Interloc or Bibliofind bookmarked on your office computer or would rather spend a Friday afternoon in a secondhand bookstore than in a bar or playing softball, then Nicholas Basbanes’s Gentle Madness is required reading. Basbanes is a regular contributor to Biblio, the general interest book collecting magazine, which appears on the counters of antiquarian bookstores. While not a scholarly text, Basbanes has written a lively social history of book collecting in the United States using a series of narratives that suggest “how collectors through history have been responsible for the preservation of knowledge” (239). Though the Book of Ecclesiastes proclaimed “[o]f making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh,” that warning has never stopped a serious book collector. Basbanes charts the history of a number of distinguished rare book libraries in the United States, including the Rosenbach Library in Philadelphia; the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts; the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York; the Huntington Library in San Marino, California; and the Harry Ransom Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Suggesting that book collecting mirrors the personality and character of the collector, Basbanes records the fascinating stories of the men and women who helped to create these wonderful cultural repositories. Although his study does not focus specifically on children’s books, a [End Page 376] number of the book collections discussed, such as the Ruth Baldwin Library at the University of Florida, do specialize in children’s literature. Other book collections examined by Basbanes that focus on children’s literature include the Elizabeth Ball Collection at the Lilly Library at Indiana University, the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books in Toronto, the Iona and Peter Opie Collection of Children’s Literature at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, and the Betsy B. Shirley Collection at the Beinecke Library at Yale. Ruth Baldwin and her impressive collection of children’s books, which were eventually housed at the University of Florida, is emblematic of Hanns Bohatta’s observation that “the bibliophile is the master of his books, the bibliomaniac their slave” (9). Baldwin earned a doctorate in Library Science at the University of Illinois where her father, Thomas W. Baldwin, was a professor of English and a book collector. Thomas Baldwin taught Shakespeare and his collection of fifty-five hundred texts that were available during Shakespeare’s lifetime and which might have influenced his writing form a respectable collection at the University of Illinois. During one of his many book-buying trips to England, Thomas Baldwin purchased several chapbooks for his daughter and offhandedly suggested to her that collecting children’s books “might be a nice little hobby for a woman” (369). Ruth Baldwin seems to have taken up her father’s challenge with a vengeance, and when she died in 1990, she had amassed a collection of a hundred thousand nineteenth- and twentieth-century children’s books. Although Baldwin sold her books to the University of Florida, where she worked, they clearly still remained hers. She was legendary for controlling her collection with an iron fist, and if she didn’t think...