Hoovering up ideas
There's such a zest to this account of the Armenian approach to dealing with invaders: translate everything you can get...
Books hidden, books found
Armenians seemed to be particularly adept at averting bibliocide. Some cultures, threatened with bibliocide, committed books to memory. The Armenians,...
A wilderness of books
This vast languishing resource was first brought home to me in Erik Reinert's How Rich Countries Got Rich ... and...
Department of Exceptions
‘All good publishers have a department of exceptions.’
Perhaps any institution worth its salt should have a department of exceptions:...
Stash it in the safe
The business model of publishing doesn't seem to have been very attractive then, whatever you think of it now. Thoreau...
Fuel for the body or mind?
Book burning, or bibliocide, is usually something we associate with ideologues, political or religious, fearful of the free flow of...
My publisher, falsely so called…
Listening time: under 3 minutes.
I loved this drawn out account of Thoreau's dealings with a publisher wanting...
Book as mirror I
A great riposte, of course, and true to a large extent. Having dismissed a book, it sometimes happens that I...
A capacious book thief
Steinbeck and Robert Capa spent a month in the Soviet Union. It took some time for Steinbeck to cotton on...
Rules and readers
Many of us have been in situations where vague ‘conventions’ are cited, the unwritten rules governing this or that realm....
Tales from Australia and Oceania
This book cover and related illustrations are from a wonderful old French series of tales and stories from around the...
Marcel and me – memories of childhood
I grew up with Marcel. That is the French author Pagnol (1895-1974) was a part of our domestic library and...
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