by beatriceotto | Nov 30, 2018 | places & spaces, print & publish
This vast languishing resource was first brought home to me in Erik Reinert’s How Rich Countries Got Rich … and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor, which highlighted a lemming-level of group-think compounded by ignorance of an entire ‘other canon’ of...
by beatriceotto | Jul 27, 2018 | judging by the cover, print & publish
This book cover and related illustrations are from a wonderful old French series of tales and stories from around the world. I keep finding them at the flea market and second-hand bookshops. Each country or region represented has a stunning set of illustrations and...
by beatriceotto | Dec 21, 2017 | print & publish, put in a good word
This lovely word is Icelandic for ‘Christmas book flood’. As you may know, Iceland is home to the world’s most committed readers and it has long been a tradition to give books at Christmas. This leads to a flood of new publications in the...
by beatriceotto | Sep 22, 2017 | print & publish
I have long put off writing this post because I have an aversion to it. A while back I bought a second hand book by Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (to be reviewed – at only 124 pages it packs in well over 124 things to think about or follow...
by beatriceotto | Sep 22, 2017 | print & publish
This lovely, zestful, imaginative novel has one of the protagonists finding a job in a bookshop. He tentatively shares with his boss the fact that he seems to be seeing things, namely a full grown living lion on the streets of a town far from any leonine landscapes. ...
by beatriceotto | Aug 11, 2017 | judging by the cover, print & publish
I grew up with Marcel. That is the French author Pagnol (1895-1974) was a part of our domestic library and vocabulary, and I remember a series of plays set in Marseille, together with his childhood memoirs, La Gloire de Mon Père and Le Chateau de Ma Mère. Redolent...
by beatriceotto | Aug 11, 2017 | print & publish
I sometimes feel like this when we go to the flea market in Geneva and survey a lifetime’s worth of books chucked into banana boxes by the house clearance company sent to empty all trace of a life lived and ended. When I find something I can cherish among the...
by beatriceotto | Aug 11, 2017 | print & publish, readers & reading
A great riposte, of course, and true to a large extent. Having dismissed a book, it sometimes happens that I come back to it later, even decades later, and wonder at how absent I must have been at the previous encounter. This quotation is echoed much later in the...
by beatriceotto | Aug 11, 2017 | places & spaces, print & publish
One of the most reassuring and surprising insights I found in reading Harold Bloom’s literary criticism, was the realization that he wrote for a hidden audience of ‘great readers’ engaged in their own intimate rituals, and that, in this, I was less...
