An avid bibliophile pages his way through history

FOR some years now, Nicholas A. Basbanes has been chronicling the consuming passions of bibliophiles. An ardent bibliophile himself, Basbanes knows firsthand the lengths to which book lovers will go to track down a rare edition, a specially bound volume or, in some cases, entire libraries.

Bibliography, let’s face it, isn’t the most exciting discipline in the humanities, but Basbanes’ curiosity and insight give his works -- among them “A Splendor of Letters” and “A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books,” a National Book Critics Circle nominee -- a warmth and intimacy lacking in drier academic studies.

Basbanes’ latest, “Every Book Its Reader,” gives us a peek into the reading habits of the likes of Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, Thomas Edison, Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski, and many other figures from history and literature. Along the way, Basbanes ponders how the books his subjects read shaped their sensibilities. For Basbanes, books are a crucial marker; knowing individuals’ reading habits grants us “privileged access to their deepest interests and predilections, even their dreams, needs, and anxieties.”

Less a sustained narrative than a grab bag of observations and interviews with scholars and writers, “Every Book Its Reader” is marred at times by feel-good nostrums about the “therapeutic power of reading” that don’t rise much above the level of afternoon TV. Still, Basbanes has many good and interesting things to say about his topic.

Take Shakespeare, for example. A scholarly debate has long raged about how the perfunctorily educated son of an illiterate glove maker could produce works that display a sublime command of ancient Greek and Latin, medicine and law, and much else besides.

Little is known about how he obtained this formidable knowledge, and Basbanes conjures an imaginary scenario in which authors would have a chance to ask Shakespeare just one question. Naturally, Basbanes wants to know what he read. An answer to this question might settle the long-simmering dispute over whether Shakespeare was a first-class genius or, as a controversial theory holds, the assumed name of a formally educated nobleman.

As for the highly educated and perversely articulate Kaczynski, whose choice of reading was subject to forensic scrutiny, he only proves that all the book learning in the world can be put to nefarious ends.

At the extreme end of this line of inquiry, Basbanes takes a chilling glimpse into the books Adolf Hitler owned. They reveal a man obsessed, not surprisingly, with military campaigns, but also with spiritual questions. His large collection of volumes on Eastern mysticism and the occult fed his megalomaniacal dream of becoming, Basbanes writes, the “Immortal Hitler.”

Basbanes is impressively catholic in his bibliographic excursions.

His rarefied discussions with Harold Bloom about the Western canon or with Helen Vendler about the mysteries of poetry might give you the impression that Basbanes is a bit of a snob. This is not the case. He also gives due consideration to middlebrow reading guides and the lost bestsellers of yesterday. More interestingly, he contends that self-help books such as Benjamin Spock’s 1945 “Baby and Child” -- arguably the granddaddy of the genre -- and William Griffith Wilson’s “Alcoholics Anonymous” deserve our attention, if only for the counsel they have provided to millions.

Other of Basbanes’ encounters have a whiff of fetishism about them. A visit with University of South Carolina professor Matthew J. Bruccoli -- a one-man literary bandwagon who has written on and extensively edited the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald and others -- bogs down in pointless minutiae such as the alleged importance of an old leather briefcase Fitzgerald owned. How this helps us understand his work is beyond me.

But I shouldn’t quibble too much. “Every Book Its Reader” reminds us that books, in all their myriad forms, are necessary equipment for living. They set some on the wrong path, but, as the majority of Basbanes’ studies attest, these bookish inspirations have been mostly for the good.

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Matthew Price, a journalist

and critic, is an occasional contributor to The Times’ Book Review section.