Robert Alfred Jump Wilson was born in Baltimore, Maryland on April 1, 1922. He received a bachelor's degree in English and American literature from Johns Hopkins University in 1943. During World War II, he joined the Army and served in the Battle of the Bulge. He received a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. He joined the diplomatic corps after the war and worked briefly as a translator at the Nuremberg war crimes trials before being posted as a secretary at the embassies in Warsaw, Poland and Pretoria, South Africa. He was working as the office manager in a cuckoo-clock factory when he bought the Phoenix Book Shop in Greenwich Village. He turned it into a sanctuary for new poetry and an… important trading post for first editions. He wrote several books including Modern Book Collecting and Seeing Shelley Plain: Memories of New York's Legendary Phoenix Book Shop. He closed the bookstore in 1988. He died on November 29, 2016 at the age of 94.
Nicholas A. Basbanes has worked as an award-winning investigative reporter, a literary editor, and a nationally syndicated columnist. The author of five books, he also writes a regular column for Fine Books & Collections magazine and lectures widely on book-related issues. He and his wife, Constance, live in Massachusetts.