Reading Copy Book Blog

Our friends at BookFinder.com have released their annual “BookFinder Report” on the 100 most sought after out-of-print books in America. I enjoy looking at this list each year because it features everything I love about used book shops in one tidy list. A nice mix of nearly forgotten fiction, old manuals that are superior to [...]

Taschen has reprinted its legendary tribute to Muhammad Ali – G.O.A.T or Greatest Of All Time – and guess what? It’s an affordable cut-price edition with a list price of $150. The original edition costs…. well, an arm and a leg and perhaps your first child. Those true first editions are signed by Muhammad Ali [...]

I’m very sad to hear of Tony Curtis’ death. Some Like It Hot, Spartacus, The Vikings, Trapeze and The Defiant Ones are among my best-loved movies. They remind me of watching BBC 2 on Sunday afternoons. Taras Bulba is probably my all time favourite Tony Curtis film. This 1962 movie was loosely based on Nikolai [...]

Laurie Halse Anderson’s young adult novel, “Speak”, deals with the rape of a young teenager and her struggle to cope. Now there’s a battle to ban it.

I would like to show you this crazy cover from 1953. Mutant by Lewis Padgett aka Henry Kuttner. Gnome Press was the publisher. What can I say? They certainly don’t make book covers like this one anymore. Those floating heads really make me think of Star Trek for some reason. Compare the floating heads version [...]

The boys at Ladbrokes betting have set up this years odds for who will win the Nobel Prize for Literature. They’ve got Philip Roth, Margaret Atwood, and Thomas Pynchon at 18/1 and are favouring Thomas Transtromer at 5/1. Which of course means that your smart money is on lottery tickets and none of the listed [...]

I loved this story about The Strand, New York’s independent landmark book store, combating the recession by adding a Candyland section for their customers. Old-fashioned, reasonably priced, interesting sweets, alongside all those books? Sounds like heaven, and a way to keep the people dragged in by us booklovers happy – and spending.

He would have been 86 tomorrow, it says right here on his birth certificate.

Let’s all do the Page 99 Test – coined by Ford Madox Ford – to see if a book is worth reading. Just open to page 99, have a gander and if it sounds interesting head to the beginning. If it sounds not so good, then….. I’ve just opened The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews, [...]

I missed this story about author Nick Hornby working with musician Ben Folds to produce an album called Lonely Avenue until hearing about it on NPR this morning. I imagine lyric writing came pretty easy to Hornby who, of course, adores music and blends it into much of his writing.