Book Madness
A Story of Book Collectors in America

Name: Book Madness
Brand: Blackstone Audiobooks
Availability: InStock
Author: Denise Gigante
ISBN: 9798212183888

Author: Denise Gigante

Narrator: Elisabeth Rodgers

Unabridged: 12 hr 39 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Blackstone Publishing

Published: 11/01/2022

Categories: Nonfiction, Literary Criticism

Synopsis

The fascinating history of American bookishness as told through the sale of Charles Lamb’s library in 1848Charles Lamb’s library—a heap of sixty scruffy old books singed with smoke, soaked with gin, sprinkled with crumbs, stripped of illustrations, and bescribbled by the essayist and his literary friends—caused a sensation when it was sold in New York in 1848. The transatlantic book world watched as the relics of a man revered as the patron saint of book collectors were dispersed. Following those books through the stories of the bibliophiles who shaped intellectual life in America—booksellers, publishers, journalists, editors, bibliographers, librarians, actors, antiquarians, philanthropists, politicians, poets, clergymen—Denise Gigante brings to life a lost world of letters at a time when Americans were busy assembling the country’s major public, university, and society libraries. A human tale of loss, obsession, and spiritual survival, this audiobook reveals the magical power books can have to bring people together and will be an absorbing read for anyone interested in what makes a book special.

About Denise Gigante

Denise Gigante is Sadie Dernham Patek Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University. She is the author of The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George and Taste: A Literary History.

About Elisabeth Rodgers

Elisabeth Rodgers is an actress and AudioFile Earphones Award–winning narrator. After graduating from Princeton University, she completed a two-year program at William Esper Studio, where she studied with Maggie Flanigan. Her audiobook narration training came from Robin Miles, who has also directed her in several productions. She has recorded dozens of books for a multitude of publishers.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Mandy

One for all bibliophiles and book collectors, but perhaps not one for the general reader. I found it interesting enough – indeed fascinating at times – but overall quite heavy-going and certainly not a light read. It tells the history of book collecting in America through the dispersal of Charles La......more

Goodreads review by Dan

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Yale University Press for an advanced copy of this history on America in the 1840's and the rise of book collections and libraries. Every day I accept the fact that I will never read all the books I want to read. Gradually I am accepting the fact that I......more

Goodreads review by Theediscerning

After managing to absorb two or three good books about book trading – not those diaries of that bloke in Scotland, with his acerbic look at his customers, staff and profit margins alike, but more high-end – this one defeated me. It’s concerning what we can learn from the people who bought, traded in......more

Quotes

“Absorbing and brilliant. A remarkable piece of book history and a vividly entertaining portrait of a cast of characters to whom books were, in Gigante’s words, ‘a real way of life’.” Seamus Perry, University of Oxford

“This book is a complete delight. In Denise Gigante’s most capable hands, the sale of Charles Lamb’s library is the starting point for a dizzying, enlightening, and often hilarious journey into a lost world of bibliomaniacs.” Sir Jonathan Bate, Arizona State University

“In this fascinating, original, and elegantly written book, Denise Gigante traces the stories of Charles Lamb’s books and how they caused a sensation in America, creating the strange book madness of America’s nineteenth-century bibliomaniacs.” Nicholas Roe, University of St. Andrews

“Noted Romanticist Denise Gigante uses the sale of Charles Lamb’s library as a hook on which to hang larger questions: What did English books signify for collectors on the other side of the Atlantic? How did public libraries and university libraries draw on, and differentiate themselves from, gentlemen’s private collections? And most timely of all in the age of the ebook and the audiobook, what attaches us to particular copies of books rather than, or in addition to, the words that they contain?” Leah Price, author of What We Talk About When We Talk About Books