BIBLIOPHILIA!
A selection of books about books for people who love books.
Choose a book to celebrate New Zealand Bookshop Day (27 October).
A book is different things to different people. This is a lovely and whimsical set of thoughts of what books can be and do, with entirely appealing illustrations. You will love this book.
In attempting to define what constitutes a 'book' in an age when technology is helping us to re-examine the definitions of many cultural entities, Borsuk covers much interesting ground, both historical and speculative, approaching books as physical objects, as content, as ideas and as interface.
>> 'The Hand and the Page in the Digital Age.'
The main difference between The Bookshop in Scotland's Book Town of Wigtown and Black Books is that business at The Bookshop proceeds without a script and the odd customers are all (or mostly) actual members of the public rather than actors. As Bythell shows, running a booklover's paradise may not always feel like you're in paradise yourself, but booksellers wouldn't have it any other way (that is to say, they are of no use for any other occupation).
>> A shop with books in.
>> Shaun shows us how to reconfigure with a broken Kindle.
Franklin loves books and he loves reading to children, but people tend to be scared of him because he is a dragon. Fortunately, Luna knows all about dragons from reading many books about them, and the two spend many hours together discussing the books they have read. To share their love of books with others, they decide to open a flying bookshop (good idea).
What is a book? This book lavishly illustrates the developing relationship between people and their books as recorded in paintings from the last 500 years.
Personally, we're for them. An extended consideration of the importance of a bookshops as cultural and intellectual spaces.
A good selection of influential Anglophone and translated books, well illustrated with covers, portraits, &c.
A new way of thinking of familiar literary worlds is shown in the quirkily drawn maps of this enjoyable book.
“Dear Reader is an enjoyable novel on several levels, from straightforward publishing-industry story, to a more personal story of time going by and loss, to the sheer technical virtuosity on display — both Fournel’s and translator Bellos'. Dear Reader is a good example of why the Oulipian method isn’t merely a game, but rather a surprisingly fertile approach to writing.” – The Complete Review
14-year-old Dita is confined in the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The several thousand residents of camp BIIb are inexplicably allowed to keep their own clothing, their hair, and, most importantly, their children. Fredy Hirsch maintains a school in BIIb. In the classroom, Dita discovers something wonderful: a dangerous collection of eight smuggled books. She becomes the books' librarian. Based on a true story.
How did the period of Soviet cultural outreach affect the production of children's books in other countries? Apart from the interesting text, which shifts the focus of international children's book production, the book is packed with delightful examples of illustration and book design.
Visit 45 towns around the world (including Featherston in New Zealand) that celebrate the printed word.
Kells runs his finger along the shelves and wanders the aisles of libraries around the world and through time, both real and imagined, with books and without, and ponders the importance of the library as a representation of the human mind.
Knowing what Shakespeare read would provide new levels of insight into his works, but which books did he read and where are they now?
What role does a book jacket play in the relationship between a writer and a reader? What is the contribution of a designer to a work of literature? Elegantly written.
A beautifully presented celebration of literary maps, with contributions from Robert Macfarlane, Frances Hardinge, DAvid Mitchell, Coralie Bickford-Smith, Philip Pullman. Irresistible.
When Manguel 'downsized' his home, he had to pack his library of 30000 volumes, knowing that he might never see many of them again. As he did so, his mind was filled with thoughts about literature and about our attachment to books. Fortunately, he has written this book of these thoughts.
Peter Mendelsund has designed some of the best book covers of recent years, and one of the reasons that they are so successful is that they arise from his careful reading of the texts. In this book, which reminds me of Ways of Seeing and The Medium is the Massage in its interplay of image and text giving an appealingly light touch to a heavy subject, he is particularly interested in the visual effects of reading. These visual effects are non-optical and comprise mental images fished into awareness by the ‘unseen’ black hooks of text; they are the fictional correlative of the visual effects fished into awareness by ‘actual’ optical stimulation. I suppose a difference between reading text and reading actuality is that when reading text the scope of our awareness has been set for us by the authority of the author (our surrogate self), whereas actuality is undifferentiated and incomprehensibly overstimulative and the necessary repression of stimuli in the reading of it is dependent on personality, conditioning, socialisation and practicality. Emphasising that he is interested in the experience of reading rather than the memory of reading (if such a distinction can be sensibly made), Mendelsund treats in depth an aspect of what I would call ‘the problem of detail’: what is the role of the reader in ‘completing’ the text? Whereas the reader’s ‘actual’ experiences of course inform and colour their reading of detail, I’m not sure I entirely agree with Mendelsund’s opinion that when reading we ‘flesh out’ characters in our imagining of them or place them in ‘familiar’ contexts – while we are reading we may well also indulge in such extra-textual self-massage, but I don’t think that this is the reading itself.
500 images, 32 varied and outstanding contemporary artists whose practice includes making books. Impressive, and full of interesting ideas.
>> Sample pages on our website!
Influential art writers consider the work of influential art writers, including Nikolaus Pevsner's Pioneers of the Modern Movement, Alfred Barr's monograph on Matisse, E.H. Gombrich'sArt and Illusion, Clement Greenberg's Art and Culture, and Rosalind Krauss's The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Required reading.
Scottish-American industrialist Andrew Carnegie's philanthropic trust established 2,509 library buildings throughout the English-speaking world between 1886 and 1917. This book of well-observed photographs and documentary images records the 23 libraries established in the South Pacific (18 of them in New Zealand). A few have been demolished, others have been repurposed, some are still used as libraries.
The destruction of the 'I'.
Read this with a pencil at the ready: not only will you be making yourself a reading list, you'll be wanting to start writing love letters and break-up notes to the books that you love or that have disappointed you.
Just because these books have been lost from history for one reason or another hasn't prevented them from being culturally important and the foci of intense speculation. What are we to make of the memoirs of Lord Byron, the magnum opus of Bruno Schulz, the Hemingway novel mislaid at the Gare de Lyon, the second part of Gogol's Dead Souls or the contents of Walter Benjamin's suitcase?
Over 250 works of art from all periods depicting people reading books.
Offers concise introductions - each of them accompanied by generous quotation (in English) from the book in question - to sixty-six works in the canon of Chinese literature. The books chosen reflect the chronological and thematic breadth of Chinese literary tradition, ranging from such classics as The Book of Songs and the Confucian Analects, through popular dramas and novels (The Romance of the Western Chamber; The Water Margin), twentieth-century political and biographical works (Quotations from Chairman Mao, the autobiography of the last emperor) and modern novels that are little known in the West (Memories of South Peking, Six Chapters from a Cadre School Life).
100 recipes for dishes mentioned in favourite books. Includes Marmalade (A Bear Called Paddington), Tunna Pannkakor (Pippi Longstocking), Crab & Avocado Salad (The Bell Jar), Stuffed Eggplant (Love in the Time of Cholera), Coconut Shortbread (The Essex Serpent), Madeleines (In Search of Lost Time), Figs & Custard (Dubliners), Chocolatl (Northern Lights) and Smoking Bishop (A Christmas Carol).
"A work of rare joy, and one as wholly irresistible as the food it so delightfully describes. It is a glorious work that nourishes the mind and spirit as much as the body, and I could not love it more." - Sarah Perry (author of The Essex Serpent)
>> Crytallised ginger to please Agatha Christie
What can finding out more about the places in which books are set help us to appreciate those books more deeply? Well illustrated and documented.
A love letter to all things bookish, quirkily illustrated with hand-drawn stacks of books, bopokshops (including Unity Auckland!), bookshop cats, &c.
Also available:
Bibliophile diary 2019 $40
Bibliophile notecards $30
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