In all honesty, Lauren Leto’s Judging a Book by Its Lover isn’t actually a book about books. It’s really a book about the people who love and write books. But like a gossip column, it is so much fun to read. If you want to sound really smart at your next cocktail party, or are studying for your appearance on Jeopardy, its full of book trivia that never gets old. My favorite chapter gives a step by step guide on how to fake having read a book. I never have been able to get through a Charles Bukowski book, but I can talk about it!
The Book on the Bookshelf is a wonderful, concise history of the evolution of the book.
Henry Petroski walks you through the process of book making and binding and how it has changed over the years. There is even a chapter on the evolution of bookshelves.
Sometimes it is just nice to read about reading. Jacques Bonnet’s Phantoms on the Bookshelves is a wonderful series of essays on the joys of reading and owning books.
“Every time you open a book for the first time, there is something akin to safe-breaking about it. Yes, that’s exactly it: the frantic reader is like a burglar who has spent hours and hours digging a tunnel to enter the strongroom of a bank. He emerges face to face with hundreds of strongboxes, all identical, and opens them one by one. And each time the box is opened, it loses its anonymity and becomes unique”
Bonnet also discusses the development of reading as a cultural phenomona growing up in post-WW II France. It really is fascinating.
When I first pick up a book, one of my favorite things to do is to look at the author’s portrait on the back flap.
It can reveal so much about the author. Closer to Home is a series of author portraits, shot in black and white. It is, after all, the author portrait that “gives body to the silent form of the text”.
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