Books on books...and all things book related (libraries, collections & collectors, hoarders, book th

I have a number of books that relate to, well, books. The fascination they hold over us, their history, how they've been collected, both privately and for the benefit of the public, etc.

Titles that come to mind:

THE BOOK ON THE BOOKSHELF (Henry Petroski)
A GENTLE MADNESS (Nicholas Basbanes)
A HISTORY OF READING (Alberto Manguel)
THE LIBRARY AT NIGHT (Alberto Manguel)
BOOKS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD (Robert B. Downs)
RUINED BY READING (Lynne Sharon Schwartz)
THE PROFESSOR AND THE MADMAN (Simon Winchester)
GOD'S SECRETARIES: THE MAKING OF THE KING JAMES BIBLE (Adam Nicolson)

I love books. I even love READING about books.

"Gentle madness", indeed.

By 'books about books', I assume you don't mean pure bibliographies, but something with a little more insight. I have a few myself:

Victorian Book Illustration: The Technical Revolution (Geoffrey Wakeman)
The book of paperbacks; a visual history of the paperback (Piet Schreuders) (touchstone takes you to a variant title for the US edition)

and one of my all-time favourites:

How to avoid huge ships: and other implausibly titled books (Anonymous) (examples of winners and highly commended entries from the Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Titles of the Year, run by the UK trade magazine 'The Bookseller'; examples include 'Large and very large hole drilling', 'Scenes from the history of concrete', 'Extracts from the Journal of Nude Mice' and 'How green were the Nazis?'. All are real books from real publishers, and deliberately odd or ironic titles are excluded...)

There are also some novels about books (in my case, mainly sf or sf-related):

A Perfect vacuum (Stanislaw Lem) (reviews of imaginary books)
Lovecraft's book (Richard Lupoff)

Cliff,

Have you lurked around this target-rich environment?

http://www.librarything.com/groups/booklistersunite

Wow, Dawg, target rich is right.

Oh, dear. I have 139 books tagged "books on books". Scary.

Here's the list from my library (some are repeats of above posts; I take no responsibility for the flaky touchstones):

A Gentle Madness, Nicholas Basbanes
The Private Library, Arthur L. Humphreys
The Quotable Book Lover, edited by Ben Jacobs and Helena Hjalmarsson
A Booklover's Companion, edited by Matthew Reisz
The Library at Night, Alberto Manguel
Bibliotopia, compiled by Steven Gilbar
How Fiction Works, James Wood
The English Novel, Walter Allen
The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life, Steve Leveen
ABC For Book Collectors, John Carter
A Universal History of the Destruction of Books, Fernando Baez
The Lifetime Reading Plan, Clifton Fadiman
Lunacy and the Arrangement of Books, Terry Belanger
Collecting Rare Books, Jack Matthews
Book Collecting, Allen Ahearn
Every Book Its Reader, Nicholas A. Basbanes
A Dictionary of Book History, John Feather
The Care of Fine Books, Jane Greenfield
Almanac & C,; A Collection of Early American Almanacs
Books As History; The Importance of Books Beyond Their Texts, David Pearson
A History of Longmans and Their Books, Asa Briggs
The Mirror of the Library, Konstantinos Staikos
The Oxford Companion to the Book, Michael F. Suarez

Fiction
Parnassus on Wheels, Christopher Morley
The Haunted Bookshop, Christopher Morely sequel
Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloan
The Book of God and Physics, Enrique Joven
People of the Book, Geraldine Brooks
The Case of the Missing Books, Ian Sansom
Mr. Dixon Disappears, Ian Sansom sequel
The Book Stops Here or The Delegate's Choice, Ian Sansom sequel

There is another section in my library of reference material on literature and such, but the lists above are the ones that are about books specifically, and that's all I intend to list right now.

s

ETA fiction section, revise last sentence, change the 'O' in 'Os'

That's a great roster--a bibliography for bibliophiles to drool over.

I suppose we could also include works of fiction where books play a central role.

THE BOOK THIEF
THE CLUB DUMAS
THE NAME OF THE ROSE
MR. PENUMBRA'S 24-HOUR BOOK STORE
84 CHARING CROSS ROAD
Various tales by Jorge Luis Borges

Joan,

You've some really eclectic titles among those 139 titles.

Alas, my 78 are much more mundane:

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/Sandydog1&tag=books

One author: Borges

Still more lists of lists:

http://www.librarything.com/groups/ltslistofgreatbooksy

Because I have 18 years of formal USA education, I am pretty much illiterate. This list in particular, has been a tremendous help:

http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/greatbks.html

"Because I have 18 years of formal USA education, I am pretty much illiterate. "

A great line.

> 11

Maybe you should have studied more and partied less.

Inspired by Cliff's post 8, I just added a fiction section to my post 6

Os.

Good show!

Don Quixote, in the "works of fiction where books play a central role" category.

>8 CliffBurns:
Nice list, Cliff. The Book Thief is on my wishlist; The Name of the Rose and Mr. Penumbra are on my 'to-read' list; and 84 Charing Cross Road is one of my favorite reads. Sounds like I'd be well served by checking into The Club Dumas.

Os.

MR. PENUMBRA was a disappointment--very slight. CLUB DUMAS was adapted into the Roman Polanski movie (only so-so), "The Ninth Gate".

Oh my, interesting thread. I actually haven't listed most of my lit crit books on LT, but I do love reading good books, especially by authors on how they conceptualize literature.

As for books on books, I've been enjoying 500 Great Books by Women. I also liked Mario Vargas Llosa's Letters to a Young Novelist not because it really had any practical advice to a beginning writer, but because he views the novel in a way different than how it is taught in the U.S.

I'm such a geek that I almost took the 52 pack of "Great Books" my friend had put in her garage sale. It was a deck of cards with no suits, so no real game could be played with them and there certainly wasn't a single book in it I hadn't heard of, but it was still fun to compare what I'd read with a friend. She was at about 20 of them and I'd read about 30.

Here's every work I have that I've categorised as criticism. Didn't realise quite how many I had until I did this...

fiction
How to Suppress Women's Writing, Joanna Russ
The Art of Fiction, David Lodge
The Practice of Writing, David Lodge
The Modern Writer and His World, G.S. Fraser
Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster
The Great Tradition, F.R. Leavis
The Common Pursuit, F.R. Leavis
Decline of the English Murder and Other Essays, George Orwell
Inside The Whale And Other Essays, George Orwell
The English Novel, Walter Allen
Literature and Western Man, J.B. Priestley
My Appointment with the Muse, Paul Scott

sf and fantasy
Trillion Year Spree: A History of Science Fiction, Brian Aldiss
New Maps of Hell, Kingsley Amis,
In Other Worlds, Margaret Atwood
Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels, David Pringle
Of Worlds Beyond, Lloyd Arthur Eshbach
The Silence of the Langford: Essays (And Some Stories), David Langford,
Starcombing, David Langford
The Mechanics of Wonder, Gary Westfahl
A Very British Genre, Paul Kincaid
The Arthur C. Clarke Award: A Critical Anthology, Paul Kincaid
What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction, Paul Kincaid
Soundings: Reviews 1992-1996, Gary K. Wolfe
Bearings: Reviews 1997-2001, Gary K. Wolfe
Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature, Gary K. Wolfe
Strokes: Essays and Reviews 1966-1986, John Clute
Scores: Reviews 1993-2003, John Clute
Look at the Evidence: Essays and Reviews, John Clute
Canary Fever: Reviews, John Clute
Flame Wars: the Discourse of Cyberculture, Mark Dery
Fantasy: The 100 Best Books, Michael Moorcock
In Other Words, John Crowley
Deconstructing the Starships, Gwyneth Jones
Imagination/Space, Gwyneth Jones
Storming the Reality Studio, Larry McCaffery
Who Writes Science Fiction?, Charles Platt
Science Fiction Today and Tomorrow, Reginald Bretnor
Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction, Mark Bould

I also have books on poetry and on works by individual authors.

Dear #6, Am I the only one, but when I try and look at:

There is another section in my library of reference material on literature and such, but these are the ones that are about books specifically

All I get is an endless 'spinning wheel"

>21 guido47:
I edited the sentence so it doesn't seem to reference the next line (it was supposed to refer to the lists above). The spinning wheel is the 'O' in 'Os'. It makes it easier for me to find my post, and i've had to go back and add/edit more than a few times, as I thought I might.

I've decided to change it, though, since the spinning wheel makes most folks feel like somethings about to happen, even if they know it's not.

Os.

Thanks, #22. I really though LT was trying to load a very long list...

I was going to touchstone the "Oxford Companion to the Book" but just noticed you had already mentioned it.
Thanks again, you have inspired me to 'dip' into it again. A truely marvelous book(s).
For those who do not own it, please read the review.

ETA. persuasive words. eg. 'please' :-)

Two fantastic titles that fall squarely in the "books about books" category are

Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman and
So Many Books by Gabriel Zaid

both are wonderful (and short). If you're reading this thread I would think you'd probably enjoy them.

I just started Different Engines about scientific discoveries and how they match up with the beginning of the science fiction genre and sci-fi publishing. Very well annotated and fascinating.

I, too, found Ex Libris wonderful. I do enjoy books about books and about reading.

I would add a book I have mentioned multiple times in this group, Writing to Learn. From it I got a whole list of nonfiction books to read, at least a half dozen of which were really thought-provoking.

I loved Ex Libris and because of it I read Carl Van Vechten's cat book, A Tiger in the House, which is mostly a great lit review of cats in books.

I agree that the Borges short stories are a terrific find for those of us who love books. I just got done reading some Saki short stories and was moderately surprised at how many of them involve characters getting lost in fiction and trying to avoid being hassled into conversation or distraction from books.

>24 trav:, 26
Okay, Okay! Ex Libris is now added to my wishlist. These kind of threads are hard on the purse (but fun to read).

Os.

#26 "...how many of them involve characters getting lost in fiction and trying to avoid being hassled into conversation or distraction from books."

I know that feeling.

#26 & anyone else...

I'm going to have to check out Borges. Where would you recommend starting? The most popular title on LT is Labyrinths. Would that be a good introduction? I'm curious has to why so many people say his writings are enjoyable for 'folks who like books'.

The problem with Borges is: it's ALL good.

But that collection you cite is an excellent place to start (it features a sampling of both his fiction and non-fiction).