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Nicholas Basbanes on Wednesday's Access Utah

nicholasbasbanes.com

Nicholas Basbanes, author of a trilogy on all things book-related including “A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books,”  is out with a new book: “On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand Year History,” in which he considers everything from paper’s invention in China two thousand years ago, which revolutionized human civilization, to its crucial role in the unfolding of historical events, political scandals, and sensational trials: from the American Revolution to the Pentagon Papers and Watergate. 

Basbanes writes of his travels to get to the source of the story—to China, along the Burma Road, and to Japan, whose handmade paper, washi, is as much an expression of the human spirit as it is of craftsmanship . . . to Landover, Maryland, home of the National Security Agency and its one hundred million ultra-secret documents, pulped by cryptologists and sent to be recycled as pizza boxes and egg cartons . . . to the Crane Paper mill of Dalton, Massachusetts, a seventh-generation family-owned enterprise, the exclusive supplier of paper for American currency since 1879 . . . and to the Kimberly-Clark mill in New Milford, Connecticut, manufacturer daily of one million boxes of Kleenex tissue and as many rolls of Scott kitchen towels. “On Paper” guides us through paper’s inseparability from human culture. Ken Sanders Rare Books and the Utah Center for the Book are presenting a reading and book signing with Nicholas Basbanes at Ken Sanders Rare Books in Salt Lake City on November 6 from 7:00 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.

Tom Williams worked as a part-time UPR announcer for a few years and joined Utah Public Radio full-time in 1996. He is a proud graduate of Uintah High School in Vernal and Utah State University (B. A. in Liberal Arts and Master of Business Administration.) He grew up in a family that regularly discussed everything from opera to religion to politics. He is interested in just about everything and loves to engage people in conversation, so you could say he has found the perfect job as host “Access Utah.” He and his wife Becky, live in Logan.