Pages & Proofs

I’m sure you can all work out what sort of books are classified as bibliomemoirs. They are not all that common but memoirs about a life of reading, or the books that have particularly influenced someone are intriguing to fellow bibliophiles. Readers can always relate to fellow readers. Here is a selection of bibliomemoirs to […]

It’s a book that contains just a single word, repeated six million times across 1,250 pages. Gefen Publishing, a Jerusalem-based published, has produced And Every Single One Was Someone and it’s a book that was worthy of the front page of the New York Times at the weekend. That one word is ‘Jew’ and this […]

And finally Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series is coming to an end. Just published, The Days of Anna Madrigal is the ninth and final book about life in San Francisco from a series of novels that began in 1978 with Tales of the City. I read the first six books in the 1990s (like […]

When it comes to the treasured art of bookbinding, Dario Ustino is a true master. One of the more interesting booksellers listing books for sale on AbeBooks is Charta located in Venice, Italy. Charta is the business operated by Ustino and Jeanne Biagi. The couple moved to Venice in 1975 and opened their ‘art binding’ […]

The next Cormac McCarthy novel to arrive in cinemas will be Child of God – his third novel, published in 1973. It’s a violent story set in Tennessee in the 1960s and not for the faint-hearted. The book has no quotation marks and McCarthy also switches between styles to further confuse (or inspire) the reader. […]

January 17 is Muhammad Ali’s birthday. All fans of this boxer should make themselves acquainted with Taschen’s  GOAT Greatest of All Time by Jeff Koons, which has pride of place on one of my bookselves. It’s massive, gorgeous and has plenty to read. It was originally published in 2004 and covers the boxer’s entire life […]

What do Ray Bradbury, Madeleine L’Engle, Arthur Hailey, Nora Roberts, Stephen King, Salvador Dali and Dick Cheney’s wife have in common? They all appear on the annual BookFinder.com list of the top 100 most searched for out-of-print books. As usual, the list is topped by Madonna and her famous spiral-bound Sex photo-book, which is still […]

Jamaica Inn is for sale. No, not the book, I mean the actual building in Cornwall and it’s going to cost £2 million, according to the BBC. The inn, made famous by Daphne du Maurier’s fantastic smuggling novel, has been owned by John and Wendy Watts for the last 40 years and they are now […]

Here’s a heartwarming story from Knutsford in Cheshire. A nine-year-old school girl, Faith Jackson from Hough Green, has ploughed through 272 books in six months. She began keeping track on 1 July at the suggestion of her mother, Laura, so they could see how she did during the school holidays. However, Faith kept counting once […]

If you have a spare £150,000 and a fascination with printing history, then you might like this beautiful miniature illuminated Hebrew prayer book, published in 1745 in Mainz, Germany. Recently listed on AbeBooks by Les Enluminures from Chicago, this is a stunning item. It contains 13 miniatures and is bound in maroon morocco leather. The illustrations include […]