The Cemetery of Forgotten Books
The whole intricate plot of Ruiz Zafón's Shadow of the Wind begins with his father taking him to this labyrinthine...
A sunny spot to read
I fell in love with this room when I saw this sunlit painting. The Victorian artist has captured a perfect...
Of boats and books
Another example of Steinbeck's search for a perfect writing spot, in different houses, places, times of his life, as described...
How to build a library … Alexandrian style
The Library of Alexandria had 30-50 state-funded scholars and agents scouring the Mediterranean for new books. It's believed that...
A beautiful reading room
When visiting Leeds, my original university town, I decided to drop in on a few libraries, including the hulking Victorian...
A visit to the Brontes
When I read the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth I had a yearning to visit the Wordsworth homes in the Lake...
The perfect spot, finally
From the multiple versions described by his wife, it seems it took many years and experiments for John Steinbeck to...
A wilderness of books
This vast languishing resource was first brought home to me in Erik Reinert's How Rich Countries Got Rich ... and...
Pencil and paper
Steinbeck wrote with pencil on the ubiquitous American yellow pad. Computers and word-processing came too late for him, and so...
Visit to the Leeds Library
By luck, a short visit to Leeds coincided with a monthly guided tour of the Leeds Library, one of the...
Of centuries and cows
These quirky comments by Steinbeck charmed me - first his reaction to the first room he chose to work in,...
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