Nick Basbanes Goes to Missouri

While many of us in the antiquarian book world will descend upon New York City next week, our columnist Nick Basbanes will be giving the keynote at the University of Missouri's Library Society dinner on Friday, April 13. He'll be talking about his life as a reporter and writer, about the "special place in his heart" for his first book, A Gentle Madness, and about his upcoming book, Common Bond.

He recently told MU Libraries' Connections newsletter about the new book, set to be published by Knopf next year:

The latest book, Common Bond, is what I am loosely describing as a cultural history of paper and papermaking. It is a story that covers two thousand years but, consistent with the way I do things, is pretty much an exercise in storytelling. I go where the good stories are. In this case, I traveled to China and spent three weeks along the Burma Road in Yunnan Province, because that's where papermaking started. I went to Japan, because that's the only place I could meet with a Living National Treasure papermaker. I went to the National Security Agency, a supersecret facility in Landover, Md., because that's the only place I could see millions of high security documents pulped. That book took me six years to research and write. And like the earlier ones, I enjoyed it enormously.

You can read the entire article by going here and clicking on Winter 2012 issue.