Customer Reviews

The Quotable Book Lover

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I've collected reading and book quotes for years in a spiral notebook. This one has all my favorites and then some. I plan to buy extra copies of this jewel for all my biblioholic friends!

These two have something very special here. I love reading quotations and I love books, so I guess it's obvious why I like this. Yet, as Winston Churchill once said, "It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations." Thank you for the entertainment and enlightenment.

Books about Books always get my attention. I have a lot of them in my library and have written reviews on several.This little tome packs a lot between its covers. While it is only
5" X 7",it has 241 pages. It is a really good introduction to the subject,especially if it is your first to read about book quotes. It is also interesting to someone who has read several.
The difference with this book is that it gives quotes from various areas of books.
First,we get a Forward by Nicholas A Basbanes,one of the premier writers about books. Then 10 Chapters as follows;
1 In Praise of Books
2 On Writing
3 Autobiography and Biography
4 Reading
5 Libraries
6 Literacy
7 Censorship and Destruction of Books
8 Publishing and Publishers
9 Literature
10 Collecting Books
So,you see it gives quotes on every aspect of books.
Personally,I found some chapters better than others. Surprisingly, I found that the quotes by writers did not impress me as much as I expected. I enjoyed the chapter on Collecting books the most;and that did not surprise me as Nicholas Basbanes was involved with it;and he is one of the best.
To someone new to Books about Books;you will be given the names of many other books on this subject.I kept waiting for some mention of one of my favorites,"The Anatomy of Bibliomania" by Holbrook Jackson. I had just about given up hope when it appeared on the last page.
All in all, a great little book and sure to delight any book lover.

I'm a fool for collecting quotes from famous people, and I have a large computer file with my favorites. (Then I can apparently spontaneously add a bon mot to any e-mail conversation and look ever-so-clever.) As a writer and avid reader, naturally quotes about those subjects are most dear to my heart.

However, such book collections seem to come in one of two unwelcome forms. They are either dry and pedantic (more historical than enlightening, suitable only for a boring commencement speech) or lame (with the same quotes appearing in collection after collection). Lord knows that I have enough evidence of this on my bookshelf.

The Quotable Book Lover escapes these traps, and I'm glad I grabbed it off a discount rack a couple of years ago. It's organized in ten chapters: In praise of books; on writing; autobiography and biography; reading; libraries; literacy; censorship and the destruction of books; publishing and publishers; literature; collecting books. A few sections have subsections, such as "Writing to heal."

The quotes themselves range from deep thoughtful stuff ("Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them"--Ralph Waldo Emerson) to fun fluffy comments ("A publisher who writes is like a cow in a milk bar"--attributed to Arthur Koestler). While of course there are some I've seen before (how can one NOT quote Mark Twain?), the real joy of this 200+ page book is that it has lots of quotes I've never seen elsewhere. I'm tempted to write out a few more to show them off (and there I go, with my head down in this little book for another ten minutes, chuckling and nodding and thinking Hmmm) but if you know the one I'd randomly pick, you'd probably get cranky with me.

The result, though, is a perfect little book for bathroom reading, or to sit on a writer's desk for inspiration. This one about writing, for instance, may get me through the day: "You don't say, 'I've done it!' You come, with a kind of horrible desperation, to realize that this will do."--Anthony Burgess