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...
Hoovering up ideas
There's such a zest to this account of the Armenian approach to dealing with invaders: translate everything you can get...
Arthur Ransome – beautiful cover illustrations
If you've been following WritingRedux, you may have noticed a number of pawky playful gems from Arthur Ransome's children's books. While...
Department of Exceptions
‘All good publishers have a department of exceptions.’
Perhaps any institution worth its salt should have a department of exceptions:...
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...
My publisher, falsely so called…
I loved this drawn out account of Thoreau's dealings with a publisher wanting to clear out his cellar of Thoreau's...
On the culling of books
I have long put off writing this post because I have an aversion to it. A while back I bought...
Books hidden, books found
Armenians seemed to be particularly adept at averting bibliocide. Some cultures, threatened with bibliocide, committed books to memory. The Armenians,...
Culling of books …
I sometimes feel like this when we go to the flea market in Geneva and survey a lifetime's worth of...
Book as mirror I
A great riposte, of course, and true to a large extent. Having dismissed a book, it sometimes happens that I...
The delusional business of book selling
This lovely, zestful, imaginative novel has one of the protagonists finding a job in a bookshop. He tentatively shares with...
Rules and readers
Many of us have been in situations where vague ‘conventions’ are cited, the unwritten rules governing this or that realm....
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