Odd Words from the Book World
There is a New Yorker video making the rounds this week, and it’s terrific. It features quick chats with a cast of characters, each a bonified book expert or rare book dealer, while they discuss their favorite vocabulary and odd words from within the rare book world. It’s just a few minutes long and it’s worth a watch if you know the name Nicholas Basbanes and have books like Keith Houston’s The Book or Rosenberg’s and Marcowitz’s The Care and Feeding of Books Old and New around the house. A few of my favorite words are: I do not know when this short video first appeared, but I recognize everyone from their appearance in the 2020 documentary film The Booksellers. I really enjoyed that movie. It did a great job of capturing New York, the Antiquarian Book Fair, and the plight of the rare and used book market, as well […]
A Land of Books by Duncan Tonatiuh
A Land of Books: Dreams of Young Mexicah Word Painters is a book I ran across after seeing the news that the author and illustrator Duncan Tonatiuh was named a 2023 Pura Belpré Youth Illustration Honor Book. Not only do the illustrations in this book look fun to flip through, but the whole story and the history it explains also sounds fascinating. It would make a fantastic adult non-fiction book. A Land of Books, published by Abrams Books for Young Readers, tells the story and demonstrates just how advanced and progressive the manuscripts and reading culture were in pre-colonial times. The story follows an Aztec girl as she explains how painted manuscripts are made and how paper is created from plants, and how it’s all folded together to make books. Evidently, the pre-Columbus civilization has lots of books and cultural records focused on history, community tributes, and rituals. Just digging a […]
Oak Knoll Press
Oak Knoll is the preeminent publisher of books about books. If you’re reading this site, then I am pretty sure you are already familiar with Oak Knoll Press. I have not heard how they were in the early days (starting in the late 19070s), but for the past ten years, since I have been following their output, their books have been stellar. Oak Knoll Press started a couple of years after Oak Knoll Books opened its doors. The shop specializes in used, new and rare books on books. Their site is so much fun to scroll through. When you visit their website, pay attention to all the categories and rabbit holes you can fall into: book collecting, book history,bookselling, bibliography, libraries, publishing, private press printing, fine printing, bookbinding, book design, book illustration, calligraphy, graphic arts, marbling, papermaking, printing, and typography They have thousands of books in these categories that they have published over the past 45 years. These folks get it. I am passionate about […]
Once Upon a Tome by Oliver Darkshire
I was flipping through the most recent issue of BookPage when I ran across an introductory full-page piece by Oliver Darkshire, the author of Once Upon a Tome. The article’s title is “From Antiquarian Bookseller to Author: Oliver Darkshire’s memoir about working at a 262-year-old bookshop has a surprisingly modern origin story.” While I had heard of Henry Sotheran Ltd before, I had never heard of Darkshire. But chances are you have heard of him, as his Twitter account has been going gangbusters since he started it in 2018. He must be pretty good, as his personal Twitter account has 24k followers, and the Sotherans account he manages has almost 42k followers. That’s impressive for a bookshop. According to the BookPage piece, Darkshire landed his Once Upon a Tome book deal because of Twitter attention. So I expect this one to have a very modern take on a very old […]
Kicking off Books about Books
“Often have I sighed to measureBy myself a lonely pleasure,Sighed to think I read a bookOnly read, perhaps, by me.”– William Wordsworth It’s the beginning of March, and just like the Romans who would shake the dust and frost off their swords every spring and head back to war, now feels like a great time to shake off the dust and start this blog site. Books about Books is a site I’ve thought about for a long time because I could never find one like it! Sure, plenty of sites talk about book arts or collecting books or book auctions, but I have never been able to find that one deep dive. That one place where no one would look at me weird for wanting to talk about books about books and nothing else. Wait… is that weird? If it is, that’s ok. I hope to get to bump into […]
Not every book lover is the same, but I hope everyone can find something here that has them falling in love with books all over again. Please, sit a spell, and let’s celebrate everything that books are. I hope you find something new to read and want to join the conversation on books about books.