print & publish, readers & reading
Virginia Woolf’s comment on second hand books is for all those of you who love the look and feel of them, the randomness and surprise of finding them in old boxes, or lined up in a charming bookshop. I hope that, like me, you also enjoy second guessing the...
judging by the cover, print & publish
With a nod to the British Library which introduced me to the idea of the ‘shelfie’, a photo featuring a shelf’s worth of books, here is one to celebrate the 5th anniversary of WritingRedux. It features most of the books I’ve celebrated on...
podcasts, readers & reading
Listening time: 13 minutes. One of my top two children’s books of all time, I first read Elizabeth Goudge’s Little White Horse as a grown up. That didn’t prevent my being enchanted and strengthened by it. Thinking which of the WritingRedux book...
podcasts, print & publish, writing & writers
Listening time: under 3 minutes. I loved this drawn out account of Thoreau’s dealings with a publisher wanting to clear out his cellar of Thoreau’s unsold books, which Thoreau had in any case had to pay for. So he gets them sent to his house, schleps them...
print & publish, readers & reading
Steinbeck and Robert Capa spent a month in the Soviet Union. It took some time for Steinbeck to cotton on to the fact that his travelling companion was a closet biblioklept. I love the blithe insistence of innocence in Capa, even when caught book-handed, with that...
print & publish, readers & reading
An idea so intrinsic to reading books, particularly those you love and remember, that I had never consciously thought of it. Here, Michael Rosen describes his first encounter with a children’s classic, and it made me recall early encounters with some beloved...
places & spaces, readers & reading
Antonio La Cava, a retired school teacher, converted a quintessential Italian vehicle, the three-wheeler micro-van, into a travelling library.For 20 years he’s been visiting remote villages and hamlets in his home province of Basilicata to bring books –...
judging by the cover, just my type
The finest book cover illustration I’ve seen for this slim, timeless, moving book, wrapping around the back cover and even into the back flyleaf. Oddly, there is no mention of who designed the jacket. The colours and lines are marvelous.And that font!...
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...
