Skip to main content

Books about books: Anne Fadiman's personal list


The Book about Books: The Anatomy of Bibliomania
by Holbrook Jackson

A History of Reading
by Alberto Manguel

84 Charing Cross Road
by Helene Hanff

Great Books
by David Denby

Bookworms
 edited by Steven Gilbar

Books
edited by Gerald Donaldson

The Book-lover’s Enchiridion
edited by Alexander Ireland

The Romance of the Books
by Marshall Brooks

The wonderful Books
edited by Michael Dorrie and Emilie Buchwald

Penny Wise and Book Foolish
by Vincent Starrett

A Gentle Madness
by Nicholas A. Basbanes

On Book and the Housing of Them
by W.E Gladstone

The Size of Thoughts
by Nicholson Barker



Anne Fadiman is the author of the book Ex-Libris: Confessions of a common reader.
Found the list in a review of the book, done by Pradeep Sebastian for the Gentleman Magazine, June 2000 issue.
Labels:

Comments

  1. the_unexamined_lifeJul 13, 2007, 12:20:00 PM

    .
    as a historian there are two books about books which should surely be read

    1. Lucien Febvre, .The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450 - 1800. This book was published immediately after WWII though much of the research on which it is based was conducted pre-war. It remains a very relevant classic even today and is now available in Indian bookshops.

    2. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe which is another very good book. She has another two volume work The Printing Press as an Agent of Change which is not available in India but is the more detailed work.

    Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism has an excellent discussion on how the printed word, in both newspapers/magazines as well as in books, helped shape the modern nation.

    Aniket

    ReplyDelete
  2. Vinayak RazdanJul 16, 2007, 8:46:00 PM

    Thanks for recommending the books, Aniket.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I always like to hear back :)
However, irrelevant comments and irrelevant links will not be published. Needless to say, same goes for abusive comment and spam. Leaving back links related to the topic is encouraged. I know it can be tempting but try not to leave your email ids, phone nos and CVs in the comment.

Popular posts from this blog

Famous Old Faces of Doordarshan

Some people recall the faces and some people recall the names. Here are images of some of the famous readers and presenters of Doordarshan down the years. If you recognize any of them, leave a comment. [ Update 1 : Most of the faces now have names thanks to helpful comments by olio-gallimaufry ] [ Update 2 : Included image of one of the earliest presenters, Gopal Kaul. Send in generously from personal collection by son, Ashutosh Kaul. Sept, 2010.] [ Major Update 3: Got a tip-off about a documentary about the famous faces of Doordarshan from the makers   of     “The Golden Trail , DD@50 :Special feature on Golden Jubilee of Doordarshan ” from which these caps were taken. I managed to catch the incredible documentary and am adding some more faces/name and part of the docu here. New ones can be found after the image of  Narotam Puri. 30th Oct, 2010]  Pratima Puri. Believed to be the first Doordarshan reader.
176 comments
Read more

Indian Cigarette Vintage Ads

He put a cigarette in his mouth and, as a matter of silent routine, offered one to Gwyn, who said ‘No thanks.”Richard looked at him.”I packed it in.”"You what?”"I stopped. Three days ago. Cold. That’s it. You just make the life choice.” Richard looked up and inhaled needfully. He gazed at his cigarette. He didn’t really want to smoke it. He wanted to eat it. Almost the only thing that he still liked about Gwyn was that he still smoked…Paradoxically, he no longer wanted to give up smoking: what he wanted to do was take up smoking. Not so much to fill the little gaps between cigarettes with cigarettes (there wouldn’t be time, anyway) or to smoke two cigarettes at once. It was more that he felt the desire to smoke a cigarette even when he was smoking a cigarette. The need was and wasn’t being met… While it would always be true and fair to say that Richard felt like a cigarette, it would now be doubly true and fair to say it. He felt like a cigarette. And he felt like a cig
21 comments
Read more

Kishore Kumar, Yodel-ay-ee-oooo Songs, A List

*Updated with corrections pointed out by Bart Plantenga , author of some incredible book on Yodeling including Yodel-Ay-Ee-Oooo: The Secret History of Yodeling Around the World. -0- Kishore Kumar 's brother Anoop Kumar, who we basically know for the line ' O manu tera toh hua ab mera kya hoga ', used to own lots of Austrian music records. And from these records, Kishore Kumar picked up the art of Yodel singing, an art perfected in bathroom and then introduced by him to the world of Hindi film music. According to his biography 'Kishore Kumar: method in madness‎ ' by Derek Bose, "Kishore was a fan of the Swiss singer Tex Norton [* Tex Morton, an Australian cowboy born in New Zealand who sang  in the gene autry / Jimmie Rodgers style ] and the Australian Jimmy Rogers [* Jimmie Rodgers , perhaps the most American and one of the most famous yodelers in the world, famous for his blue yodels ] as well." Although most of these songs by Kishore Kumar are t
18 comments
Read more