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...
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...
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...
Moth-ridden masterpieces
The Shadow of the Wind assembles a posse of 'bibliophile knights' who hang out in cafés to save the moribund...
Of books and life
This describes the reading philosophy of a Jewish village school teacher in Russia during the war. One of Vasily Grossman's...
Greek Myths and Legends
These enchanting, sunlit illustrations of a French children's rendition of Greek Myths delighted me. They are part of a series...
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...
Intimate and familiar
A striking idea, that in being true, a book will feel intimate and familiar to all men. 'True' surely means...
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,...
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 spirit of a book
I like that the spirit of the book lives as much in the readers as in the writers. When I...
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