Reading Copy Book Blog

Got that back-to-school feeling again? Take a gander at our literary tribute to teachers and students in literature. My personal favourite from this list of 25 memorable books is Tom Sharpe’s Porterhouse Blue. The head porter, Skullion, is a wonderful creation and a truly crafty individual. Having spent 10 years living in Oxford, I am [...]

Berlin was ‘bombed’ with poetry at the weekend, reports The Guardian.

My favourite kind of women are…..The Women of Pulp. They can’t be tamed, they cannot be trusted. Blondes, brunettes, redheads – we have got the lot. There are voluptuous vixens, dangerous dames, and buxom bombshells. They really don’t publish books like these any more. I love this selection of pulp fiction put together by my [...]

I love this display of the 150 covers of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. It says more about the world and how different nations have interpretated the book than the book itself. There is a Greek cover where the girl looks about seven. This one is rather disturbing. Let’s see now – lots of knickers, lollypops, pigtails [...]

I can’t say I am familiar with the Nevada Appeal newspaper but it has a lovely article about the Jurey’s Bookbinding Services. It’s an interesting read. The Jureys’ workshop in Wellington, 65 miles from Carson City, is stacked with projects including several very old, large and lavishly illustrated family Bibles with embossed leather covers and [...]

For obvious reasons, we love this post on the magnificent Stacked blog

Dwight Garner writes about the 40th anniversary of Deliverance by James Dickey in the New York Times book review. Dickey wrote about men, neither dudes nor (although they were fathers) dads. The men in Deliverance meet real monsters and recognize their ability to become, in Dickey’s phrase, countermonsters. Deliverance had its moment. The book got [...]

Therese Holland of McLeods Books in Melbourne, Australia, blogs about why secondhand bookshops are chaotically quirky. I feel customers of used bookstores actually want to see quirky things. They want to be surprised. They want to see books that haven’t been stocked in a Barnes & Noble or Borders or Waterstones or Chapters for decades. [...]

Bishops, monks, chaplains, vicars and deacons – men of the cloth are found through all genres of fictional writing, including science fiction. They were key figures in several of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and can still be found in modern bestsellers like Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. [...]

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