Pages & Proofs

While browsing AbeBooks, I discovered these books by George F. Jowett (1891-1969) – one of the original ‘strongmen’ of the 20th century. Born in Bradford in Yorkshire, George Jowett fell out of his mother’s lap while a baby into a fireplace and was not expected to live beyond his teenage years. Inspired by the Victorian […]

More poetry news, and once again the poems concern a depressing subject. Sharon Olds has just won the TS Eliot poetry prize for her Stag’s Leap collection about divorce, reports The Guardian. The American poet wins £15,000 – a sum donated by Valerie Eliot. The collection operates as what The Observer described as a “calendar […]

BBC Radio 4 is going to broadcast a new version of Tony Harrison’s controversial poem, V, which is heavy on the swear words, according to The Guardian. The poem includes the f-word, the c-word and and the n-word. V was written during the 1984-85 coal miners’ strike and features the problems in Leeds during that […]

Evan S. Connell, the author of the novels Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge, has died in New Mexico at 88. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge was published in 1959 and was a finalist for the National Book Award won by Philip Roth with Goodbye, Columbus).  He published Mr. Bridge 10 years later. The two novels were adapted into […]

At least 15,000 books have been written about Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States. If you wish to learn about the man who led the North during the American Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862 then you are not going to be restricted by choice. (AbeBooks alone has more […]

Our latest video is a review of a hefty book called Le Corbusier Le Grand published by Phaidon. Le Corbusier Le Grand is a visual biography of Charles-Edouard Jeanneret’s work and his impact on modern architecture. An artist, urban planner, theorist, furniture designer and author, Jeanneret is better known by his pseudonym, Le Corbusier. The […]

The first journey on the London Underground was made 150 years ago, on 9 January 1863. The carriage was pulled by a steam train so imagine the smoke and dirt on that journey. The Daily Telegraph has a round-up of the Tube’s cultural impact but surely the Tube has always been a friend to booklovers […]

I missed this piece of news from last week – Sol Yurick, the New York-based author of The Warriors died on 5th January. He was 87. The Warriors was his debut novel and was published in 1965, and it’s a violent story of New York’s gang wars. It also become a film of the same […]

Take a look at this new book from Abbeville Press – The Grand Medieval Bestiary: The Animal in Illuminated Manuscripts by Christian Heck, a leading  authority on illuminated manuscripts. A book of 587 colourful images from illuminated manuscripts produced during the Middle Ages. Art historian Heck explains that the prevalence of animals in illuminated manuscripts […]

Henri Matisse’s stunning interpretation of a Greek myth was AbeBooks’ most expensive sale in December and the book, a signed limited edition from 1944, sold for a pretty penny too.  Our top 10 list also includes Rudyard Kipling, some Salvador Dali, poetry from Shelley, a history of a landlocked English county, a book from a […]