Pages & Proofs

If you love physical books, and bookshops too, then you will love this video. You may have seen it before – it was posted in January and now has more than three million views. Not bad for a clever little video from a bookshop in Ontario.

Right off the bandwagon – an interesting Christmas present!  The 50 Shades of Grey party game. “A romantic, liberating party game that’s designed to entertain, surprise and reveal how you see your friends and how they see you. Laughter, smiles and occasional winks are all a part of the fun. For Ages: 18 – Adult […]

Poor novellas. They are the middle-child, of the book world, always struggling to be noticed between their bigger and littler counterparts – too short to be novels, too long to be short stories. Overlooked in many lists of excellent literature, novellas just don’t get their due, and some readers might not even realise that some […]

More authors should pose with a pipe and a pint of bitter when having their publicity shots taken. Here’s Evelyn Waugh in an oil painting by Henry Lamb from 1930. It’s been used on a 1980s reprint of Ninety-Two Days, Waugh’s famous travel book from 1934. The full title is Ninety-Two Days: The Account of […]

A gem from 1922, The School in the South by Angela Brazil with illustrations by W. Smithson Broadhead. Brazil (1868-1947) wrote stories for school girls and published close to 50 titles, mostly set in boarding schools. She pretty much pioneered the genre and enjoyed huge sales. This copy of The School in the South costs […]

On the Road author Jack Kerouac spent 63 days as a fire lookout on top of a mountain, Desolation  Peak, in Washington State in the summer of 1956. A lady from the New York Times travel section recently hiked up to the top and enjoyed the view enjoyed by the writer. A fire lookout is someone […]

English crime fiction author Margaret Yorke, famous for her detective Patrick Grant, has died at 88, reports the Daily Telegraph. A former university librarian in Oxford, she was often compared to Agatha Christie and Margery Allingham. One of the most prolific writers of her generation, she produced on average one novel a year for more […]

This would be a great present for science fiction fans. A two-volume box set called American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s, published by The Library of America. The 1950s was the golden age for American science fiction and this collection contains works by Robert Heinlein, Richard Matheson, James Blish and Alfred Bester. […]

Australian author Bryce Courtenay has died at the age of 79, the BBC reports. He was best known for his debut novel, The Power of One. He wrote 21 books and sold more than 20 million copies in total. The Power of One tells of  boy growing up under apartheid in South Africa (where Courtenay was […]

American food and travel writer Anthony Bourdain has co-authored a foodie graphic novel, Get Jiro!, about warring  clans of chefs in a futuristic Los Angeles (so it’s based on reality then). Jiro is a supreme sushi chef who is wanted by both sides but devoted solely to the art of making sushi. The culinary war […]