Starting with music, physician Lin Hengzhe has worked tirelessly to introduce new ideas and cultural achievements to the people of Taiwan. (photo by Chuang Kung-ju)

It was a closed and somber era when Zhang Qingji, a pedicab driver and book lover, opened a second-hand bookstore in Taipei. Lin Jer-shung, one of his customers and a medical student at NTU, brought in his translations of Bertrand Russells’ Portraits from Memory and Other Essays and Alan Wood’s Bertrand Russell the Passionate Skeptic: A Biography. He asked about the possibility of publishing them under the penname Lin Heng­zhe. It prompted Zhang to found Chih-Wen publishing and publish a series of translations of famous foreign works under the imprint New Tide Library.

Some 45 years later, in late 2011, Yuan-Liou published My Time Has Come, Lin Heng­zhe’s biography of Gustav Mahler. It was a three-year undertaking, and in celebration the publishing house held a belated tea party in honor of Zhang ­Qingji and Lin Heng­zhe. If a decade constitutes an era, then Yuan-Liou spoke for intellectuals of four eras when it wrote about Chih-Wen publishing: “All of us who have enjoyed the many New Tide Library books over the years owe a debt of gratitude to Zhang ­Qingji and Lin Heng­zhe, as well as to Cao Yong­yang, who took over from them. Please accept our collective thanks!”

Whether the books were about existentialism, psychoanalysis, modern film, Russell’s liberalism, or Albert Schweitzer’s humanism, most high-school students have had at least a volume or two from New Tide in their book bags. Schopenhauer’s essays, Herman Hesse’s Demian, Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving, and Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy are like seeds that can be planted in the brain, containing what is needed to promote human growth and nourish the mind.

For classical music, Lin has long held an incredible passion that has only grown with the passage of time. For him music serves as the best form of annotation for one’s personal history, a soundtrack, as it were, for one’s life. So familiar is he with Beethoven and Mahler that they come to life in his books as if they were members of his own family.