Pages & Proofs

Edith (E.) Nesbit was the queen of children’s literature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Her best-known work is The Railway Children (1906), a story of three children trying to prove the innocence of their father, who is falsely imprisoned for espionage. Nesbit’s writing went beyond children’s books to adult novels, political writing, […]

When I was in Atlanta, Georgia in October, our friends took us for dinner at Pizzeria Vesuvius (damn fine pizza). When I went to the bathroom towards the back of the restaurant, I saw there was a bookcase against one wall – which then swung open, and a guy emerged. Behind the bookshelf was a […]

I saw this list of the 25 most famous librarians to ever live on the Books Inq. blog and thought you might enjoy it too. 1. Ben Franklin: Ben Franklin didn’t sit behind a circulation desk and help college kids find research materials, but he is still a legitimate librarian. In 1731, Franklin and his […]

Hats off to the London rare bookseller Peter Harrington, who celebrated World Book Day yesterday by visiting a local primary school… and taking a leaf from a Gutenberg Bible for show and tell. My daughter normally takes a stuffie or stone found on the beach, so a leaf from a Gutenberg Bible trumps those objects. […]

Former bookshop assistant Hugh Howey has gone from being a self-published e-book author to the darling of Hollywood in just two years, reports the BBC. Howey wrote a short story called Wool two years ago and now his story is set to become a movie. Wool is a dystopian tale where humanity is confined to […]

Today’s authors feel a “commercial obligation” to write about sex, says Julian Barnes, according to a report in the Daily Telegraph. “It’s easy to mock, and each generation will mock the previous one because each generation tends to imagine that its attitude to sex strikes just about the right balance; that by comparison its predecessors […]

What’s the definition of a rare book? Well, a book where there are only three copies available on AbeBooks.co.uk will probably fall into that category.  Just such an example is The Mocking Horse by Alan Hull. It’s a slim volume of poetry and Hull was a singer/songwriter with the folk rock group Lindisfarne, famous for […]

Gardening guru and booklover Alan Titchmarsh has weighed in on the Enid Blyton debate after folks in Beaconsfield objected to a plaque (I originally wrote ‘plague’ instead of ‘plaque’) to commemorate the author. They say her books are racist and offensive. Blyton’s detractors argue that as well as being racist, she was actually not a […]

In the publishing world, pelicans are related to penguins. Famous for affordable paperbacks, Penguin launched a non-fiction imprint called Pelican and published thousands of titles between 1937 and 1984. The first Pelican was George Bernard Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism & Fascism, and today you will find these books in secondhand […]