Literature

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much

People have been collecting—and stealing—books since even before Gutenberg invented the printing press. Internationally, according to Interpol, rare book theft is more widespread than fine art theft. In The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, Allison Hoover Bartlett takes us deep inside the world of rare books and tells the cat-and-mouse story of two men caught in its allure. She introduces us to John Gilkey, an unrepentant, obsessive book thief, and Ken Sanders, the equally obsessive self-styled “bibliodick,” a book-dealer turned amateur detective. While their goals are at direct odds, both men share a deep passion for books and a fierce determination—Gilkey, to steal books; Sanders, to stop him.

Julian MacLaren-Ross

Julian Maclaren-Ross fitted the profile of a Soho flaneur. The story of his career is one of a spiralling descent, and his biographer Paul Willets described him as “the mediocre caretaker of his own immense talent”. In Anthony Powell’s A Dance To The Music Of Time he’s lightly fictionalised as a novelist. Careless, feckless, cripplingly impractical, he squandered his grand ability, the talent to write. Always the dandy, with his waved hair, elegant overcoat, and silver-topped Malacca cane, and an effortlessly riveting raconteur, his shambolic life of short-leash rootlessness tacked around the fringes of the literary establishment, involving permanent insolvency and occasional bouts of homelessness.

A Hero of Our Time

A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov is a a psychologically probing portrait of a disillusioned 19th-century aristocrat. The novel is set in the Russian Caucasus in the 1830s. Grigory Pechorin is a bored, self-centered, and cynical young army officer who believes in nothing. With impunity he toys with the love of women and the goodwill of men.

Bruges-la-Morte

Bruges-la-Morte is a short novel by Georges Rodenbach, first published in 1892. It tells the story of a widower overcome with grief, who takes refuge in Bruges, where he becomes obsessed with a dancer he sees at the opera Robert le diable who is the exact likeness of his dead wife. The book is notable for its poetic evocation of the decaying city and for its innovative form.

Robert Walser

Robert Walser, a German-Swiss prose writer and novelist, enjoyed high repute among a select group of authors and critics in Berlin early in his career, only to become nearly forgotten by the time he committed himself to the Waldau mental clinic in Bern in January 1929.

The Cane as a Weapon

The Cane as a Weapon is a book by Andrew Chase Cunningham presenting a concise system of self defense making use of a walking stick or umbrella. It was first published in 1912 in the United States of America.

Felisberto Hernández

A giant of Latin American letters and precursor to the magic realist writers is well served by this absorbing translation of some of his most acclaimed works. Once a pianist who accompanied silent films, Felisberto Hernández crafts luminous works that reflect the guileless drama and visual intensity of silent films. His characters, all pianists of one level or other, are constantly reliving a past recital or pondering their next performance. Music is the subtext for narratives that plumb aspects of memory and thought, without a definable plot. Hernández revels in images that are simple and repetitive: arms, light and shadow, the houses of the wealthy and their odd contents. The stories acquire a luxurious sheen from the ease with which they navigate memories, taking pleasure in recounting them with no intention other than tracking the mind's twists and turns.

Dick Francis

Dick Francis was a British jockey and crime writer, many of whose novels centre around horse racing.

Rimes De La Mere Oie

Rimes De La Mere Oie is a book of French translations of Mother Goose nursery rhymes.

A Humument

In the mid-1960s, Tom Phillips took a forgotten nineteenth-century novel, W. H. Mallock's A Human Document, and began cutting and pasting the extant text to create something new. The artist writes, 'I plundered, mined and undermined its text to make it yield the ghosts of other possible stories, scenes, poems, erotic incidents and surrealist catastrophes which seemed to lurk within its wall of words. As I worked on it, I replaced the text I'd stripped away with visual images of all kinds. I began to tell and depict, among other memories, dreams and reflections, the sad story of Bill Toge, one of love's casualties.' After its first publication in book form in 1980, A Humument rapidly became a cult classic.

Opus

Encyclopædia of the sublime