A literary life

A Romanian couple on their wedding day, from "Love," by Ferdinand Protzman, which features 150 black-and-white photos from the National Geographic archives. (Tomasz Tomaszewski/National Geographic)

Alexander "Sandy" Taylor, who died Dec. 21 at age 76, was an independent book publisher with an international reputation. He and his wife, Judith Ayer Doyle, founded the nonprofit Curbstone Press in 1975 in Willimantic, Conn. Over the years, Curbstone published English translations of many titles, mainly by Latino and Vietnamese authors, and launched the career of poet Martin Espada and other American writers.

Last fall PEN New England honored Curbstone with a Friend to Writers Award. At the presentation, Michael Lowenthal, a member of PEN's executive board, noted that Curbstone has released dozens of books that would have been rejected by other publishers as too political.

An English teacher for 30 years, Taylor was a poet whose work has been translated into Danish, Bulgarian, and Serbo-Croatian. He and his wife brought authors to speak at local schools as part of their mission to promote cross-cultural understanding.

A celebration of Taylor's life will be held next Sunday at 1 p.m. in the Student Center at Eastern Connecticut State University, in Willimantic.

Collected wisdom

Nicholas Basbanes, a leading authority on books about books, has interviewed scores of book collectors over the years. Many are people of considerable wealth, but at least a few started their collections on a student budget.

That's one of the lessons in Basbanes's new book, "Editions and Impressions: Twenty Years on the Book Beat" (Fine Books). Matthew Bruccoli, dubbed the "senior pack rat of American letters," began his F. Scott Fitzgerald collection with two first editions he bought for $12.50 during his student days at Yale. In 1965, educator and translator Breon Mitchell was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University when he snapped up a history of Frederick the Great once owned by Adolf Hitler.

While collectors are a major focus of the essays and articles in "Editions," Basbanes, formerly literary editor of the Worcester Sunday Telegram, also highlights a book thief, a nascent library in Iraq, and destinations for book lovers in New York as well as Germany, Sweden, and Toronto.

Crossing the line

In "ArtScience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation" (Harvard University), David Edwards argues that the divide between the arts and the sciences hampers innovation. An engineering professor at Harvard, Edwards offers stories of people, like Diana Dabby, who crossed the divide. Dabby, a concert pianist, earned a doctorate in electrical engineering and developed a new technique for musical variation.

Coming out

"By Faith Alone: One Family's Epic Journey Through 400 Years of American Protestantism," by Bill Griffeth (Harmony)

"When Asia Was the World: Traveling Merchants, Scholars, Warriors, and Monks Who Created the 'Riches of the East,' " by Stewart Gordon (Da Capo)

"The Appeal," by John Grisham (Doubleday)

"Love," by Ferdinand Protzman (National Geographic)

Pick of the week

Lynne Reed, owner of Misty Valley Books, in Chester, Vt., recommends "The Last Summer of the World: A Novel" (Norton), by Emily Mitchell: "A hauntingly beautiful story of Edward Steichen - his experiences as an aerial reconnaissance photographer for the US Army during World War I, his life in France with Auguste Rodin, Alfred Stieglitz, and others, and his doomed marriage."

Jan Gardner can be reached at JanLGardner@yahoo.com.