Library Lovers discussion

I have a shelf on my home page called Books About Books that includes titles like 84, Charing Cross Road, Breathless Homicidal Slime Mutants: The Art of the Paperback and How to Suppress Women's Writing. Alas, as much as I love this subject, I have only 47 titles tagged this way.

What books have you enjoyed that are about books? Looking for suggestions.

I have 86 books on my "books-about-books" shelf

You can see My Shelf HERE

Standouts would be
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Under the Mesquite
Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore
The Book of Lost Things

Book Concierge wrote: "I have 86 books on my "books-about-books" shelf

You can see My Shelf HERE

Standouts would be
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Under the Mesquite
[book:Mr. Pen..."

I will have to go through my books but I did like Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore.

A Reader's Manifesto by B. R. Meyers is fun and a little cathartic for anyone who's had to sit through a seminar on Derrida.

For the more academically inclined, I know McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy is the usual go-to but I'm much more a fan of Elizabth Eisenstein's The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe for how it tracks the correlation between early early republicanism and Protestantism alongside rising literacy and book circulation.

The one I'm reading now -- Rat Scabies and the Holy Grail: Can a Punk Rock Legend Find What Monty Python Couldn't? -- turns out to be very much a book about books. This bizarre quest was seeded in the mind of punk rocker Rat Scabies because his dad was a rare book dealer who amassed a library on the Grail quest which Ratty grew up reading. And a major contact of Rat's was a legendary book scout, Martin Stone -- who was also the guitarist for bands like the Pink Fairies -- who took them on a bit of a side quest, not for the Grail, but for breathtakingly rare books about it.

Fishface wrote: "The one I'm reading now -- Rat Scabies and the Holy Grail: Can a Punk Rock Legend Find What Monty Python Couldn't? -- turns out to be very much a book about books. This bizarre quest ..."

This is certainly one of the most original or unique book title that I have ever heard of.

The story is pretty loopy, too. :)

The Library Book by Susan Orleans.

Currently reading two books about books
Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore
and
300 Days of Sun (a novel within a novel)

Book Concierge wrote: "Currently reading two books about books
Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore
and
300 Days of Sun (a novel within a novel)"

I got Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore on my reading list.

When Books Went to War: The Stories that Helped Us Win World War II by Molly Guptill Manning.

Koren wrote: "When Books Went to War: The Stories that Helped Us Win World War II by Molly Guptill Manning."

I read that - I thought it was very interesting.

That's on my TBR list. Apparently the special effort to get books to GIs in the world wars converted us to a nation of readers. For a while.

Dear Fahrenheit 451: Love and Heartbreak in the Stacks by Annie Spence




Just downloaded this from the library so I dont know much about it yet, but it is suppose to be funny.

Dear Fahrenheit 451: Love and Heartbreak in the Stacks by Annie Spence


Have you ever finished a book and felt like you are leaving an old friend? If you are truly a book lover you have done this many times, I'm sure. The author takes this a step further by writing letters to books. As a librarian she has had to discard many books and has also purged her own shelves and fantasizes about purging others. In this book she writes letters to those books. Sounds strange? Well, it is a little, but also hilarious! Witty, sassy, and a little irreverent (read that as a liberal sprinkling of the F word) and you will be smiling and nodding your head through a big portion of this book.

How to Avoid Huge Ships: And Other Implausibly Titled Books is one I enjoyed.

The King in Yellow is a sort of frame story, containing several other stories of the disasters that befell anyone who's read The King in Yellow...

Reading one now, Looking for Carroll Beckwith: The True Stories of a Detective's Search for His Past, that is proving to be a book about books. What I thought would be a plain old police investigation is proving to be a laser-focused hunt through one library after another. I just closed the book for the night as the detective's ILL microfiche came in and he realized that he had a 2-week limit on reading a handwritten diary kept daily from the day it started, when the author was 19, until he died at 65. Gulp!

Koren wrote: "Dear Fahrenheit 451: Love and Heartbreak in the Stacks by Annie Spence


Have you ever finished a book an..."

my f2f book club just finished discussing Fahrenheit 451. Maybe we should read this next.

Koren wrote: "The Library Book by Susan Orleans."

have you read other books by this author?

Sheri wrote: "Koren wrote: "The Library Book by Susan Orleans."

have you read other books by this author?"

I read her book on Rin Tin Tin and loved it!

Just spotted 2 new ones:

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life

The Book Collectors: A Band of Syrian Rebels and the Stories That Carried Them Through a War

It dawns on me that nobody has mentioned Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books yet!

And I forgot to mention Murder in the Synagogue, the psychological autopsy of a philosophy student that traces his mental decline through the books he reads and his understanding of them, until Presidents' Day when he does something that can never be taken back.

Just found another!

The Diary of a Bookseller

Fishface wrote: "Just found another!

The Diary of a Bookseller"

That's on my reading list!

Just stumbled across one I need to read: The Madman's Library: The Strangest Books, Manuscripts and Other Literary Curiosities from History, full of anecdotes about books guaranteed to raise demons, or bound in human skin, and other craziness.

Here's a list of new ones that turned up in my weekly newsmagazine:

The Latinist

Bibliolepsy: a novel

Essays Two: On Proust, Translation, Foreign Languages, and the City of Arles

Around the World in 80 Books

Just came across a promising title: The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman.

Article about the history of crime fiction revolving around books:

https://crimereads.com/a-deep-dive-in...

Sentence: Ten Years and a Thousand Books in Prison

Just came across these:

The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary

The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club

How about ... The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams?

Book Concierge wrote: "How about ... The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams?"

Great!

The Leather Apron Club: Benjamin Franklin, His Son Billy & America's First Circulating Library

What You Are Looking For Is in the Library is a book about books.

The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore by Evan Friss sounds like a good read!

But I'm here for the libraries, not the stores! :grin:

Cheryl wrote: "But I'm here for the libraries, not the stores! :grin:"

Well you're still allowed to read about them!

The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature

The Mystery of Edwin Drood: Charles Dickens' Unfinished Novel and Our Endless Attempts to End It

Huh. I didn't even know there was an unfinished Dickens. "Learn something new every day."

Cheryl wrote: "Huh. I didn't even know there was an unfinished Dickens. "Learn something new every day.""

AND it's fictionalized true crime!