In his national bestseller, A Gentle Madness, Nicholas Basbanes explored the sweet obsession people feel to possess books. Now, Basbanes continues his adventures among the "gently mad" on an irresistible journey to the great libraries of the past -- from Alexandria to Glastonbury -- and to contemporary collections at the Vatican, Wolfenbuttel, and erudite universities. Along the way, he drops in on eccentric book dealers and regales us with stories about unforgettable collectors, such as the gentleman who bought a rare book in 1939 "by selling bottles of his own blood."

Takin...
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A charming, beautifully designed collection of bite-sized wisdom from Agatha Christie's beloved detective Hercule Poirot--delightful, witty, and perceptive quotations and bon mots to stimulate every fan's little grey cells.

"My name is Hercule Poirot and I am probably the greatest detective in the world." Perhaps the most famous detective of all time worldwide, Hercule Poirot is one of the most unique characters ever created. Fastidious, faint of stomach, a literal egghead, and a perpetual curser of patent leather shoes--the French-speaking Belgian may have his eccentricities...
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Aimed at individuals and reading groups, A Year of Reading provides five fiction and nonfiction selections for each month with thorough summaries in the following categories: Crowd-Pleasers, Classics, Challenges, Memoirs and Potluck. This book also makes reading more fulfilling by providing additional selections, plus questions about the selections to stimulate thought an...
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What Is a Classic? revisits the famous question posed by critics from Sainte-Beuve and T. S. Eliot to J. M. Coetzee to ask how classics emanate from postcolonial histories and societies. Exploring definitive trends in twentieth- and twenty-first century English and Anglophone literature, Ankhi Mukherjee demonstrates the relevance of the question of the classic for the global politics of identifying and perpetuating so-called core texts. Emergent canons are scrutinized in the context of the wider cultural phenomena of book prizes, the translation and distribution of world literatures,...
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Phyllis Rose, after a career of reading from syllabuses and writing about canonical books, decided to read like an explorer. She "wanted to sample, more democratically, the actual ground of literature." Casting herself into the untracked wilderness of the New York Society Library's stacks, she chose a shelf of fiction almost at random and read her way through it. Unsure of what she would find, she was nonetheless certain "that no one in the history of the world had read exactly this series of novels."
What results is a spirited experiment in "Off-Road or Extreme Reading." Rose's shelf of...
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