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Loading... Al paese dei libri (original 2004; edition 2010)by Paul Collins
Work InformationSixpence House by Paul Collins (2004)
  
No current Talk conversations about this book.   ) blueskygreentrees | Jul 30, 2023 |   ) jennybeast | Apr 14, 2022 | I've wanted to go to the town of Hay-on-Wye in Wales since I first heard of it several years ago; I want to spend a week there just wandering around and buying books like a sugar addict in a candy shop. Sixpence House is a book about an American couple as they pull up stakes with the intention of moving to Hay-on-Wye; how could I not snap it up?!? In this respect, Sixpence House mostly lives up to expectations. There's a fair amount of time spent in a lot of the bookshops, mostly in the bookshop of the "King" of Hay-on-Wye, Richard Booth. Collins paints a vivid picture of what extreme book hoarding would look like as he describes Booth's shop and its towering, never-ending mountains of books and the picture ends up being a blend of thrilling, fascinating and horrifying all at once. They have so many books they end up just storing them outside in open fields!! But Collins also spends a lot of time trying to weave his love of old obscure books and his philosophy about life in amongst the narrative about Hay. This only partially worked for me; I found most of the quotes and anecdotes about the old books interesting, but my enthusiasm was lacking when it came to his writer's angst and philosophising. I'd like to think it was filler, but I suspect it was meant to lend a bit of gravitas to the book and I'd have rather had more about Hay and the bookshops. Still, there was some dry wit here and there that made me laugh. I'm glad I bought it and I'm glad I read it - I enjoyed it much more than I didn't, even if it wasn't quite all I'd hoped it would be. (  ) murderbydeath | Jan 28, 2022 | ritaer | Jul 4, 2021 |  ) AChild | Feb 26, 2021 |
 Entertaining memoir....A treat for the bibliophile. Belongs to Publisher Series
"Paul Collins and his family abandoned the hills of San Francisco to move to the Welsh countryside - to move, in fact, to the little cobblestone village of Hay-on-Wye, the "Town of Books," boasting 1,500 inhabitants...and forty bookstores. Antiquarian bookstores, no less."."Hay's newest residents accordingly take up residence in a sixteenth-century apartment over a bookstore, meeting the village's large population of misfits and bibliomaniacs by working for world class eccentric Richard Booth - the self-declared King of Hay, owner of the local castle, and proprietor of the world's largest and most chaotic used book warren. A useless clerk, Paul delights in shifting dusty stacks of books around and sifting them for ancient gems like Robinson Crusoe in Words of One Syllable, Confession of an Author's Wife, and I Was Hitler's Maid. Meanwhile, as he struggles with the final touches on his own first book, Banvard's Folly, nearing publication in the United States, he also duly fulfills his duty as a British citizen by simultaneously applying to be a peer in the House of Lords and attempting to buy Sixpence House, a beautiful and neglected old tumbledown pub for sale in the town's center."."Sixpence House is an engaging meditation on what books mean to us, and how their meaning can resonate long after they have been abandoned by their public."--BOOK JACKET. No library descriptions found. 
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