The Book on the Bookshelf
10 best books like The Book on the Bookshelf (Henry Petroski): Parnassus on Wheels, Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, A Passion for Books: A Book Lover's Treasury of Stories, Essays, Humor, Love and Lists on Collecting, Reading, Borrowing, Lending, Caring for, and Appreciating Books, How Reading Changed My Life, Slightly Chipped: Footnotes in Booklore, The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You'll Never Read, Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future
| Author | Christopher Morley |
| ISBN | 1414270658 |
This is a pilot for a new feel-good tv series:
Opening Credits:
It is a glorious morning on a deserted track somewhere in the rural Midwest. Rolling on the lane is a long gypsy-type wagon being pulled by a great big horse. On the open seat up front holding the reins is a cheery man of middle years...
Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books
Paul Collins and his family abandoned the hills of San Francisco to move to the Welsh countryside—to move, in fact, to the village of Hay-on-Wye, the "Town of Books" that boasts fifteen hundred inhabitants—and forty bookstores. Taking readers into a secluded sanctuary for book lovers, and guiding...
Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
| Author | Anne Fadiman |
| ISBN | 0374527229 |
Anne Fadiman is—by her own admission—the sort of person who learned about sex from her father's copy of Fanny Hill, whose husband buys her 19 pounds of dusty books for her birthday, and who once found herself poring over her roommate's 1974 Toyota Corolla manual because it was the only written material...
A Passion for Books: A Book Lover's Treasury of Stories, Essays, Humor, Love and Lists on Collecting, Reading, Borrowing, Lending, Caring for, and Appreciating Books
| Author | Harold Rabinowitz |
| ISBN | 0812931130 |
"When I have a little money, I buy books. And if any is left, I buy food and clothing." — --Desiderius Erasmus — Those who share Erasmus's love of those curious bundles of paper bound together between hard or soft covers know exactly how he felt. These are the people who can spend hours browsing through...
How Reading Changed My Life
| Author | Anna Quindlen |
| ISBN | 0345422783 |
A recurring theme throughout Anna Quindlen's How Reading Changed My Life is the comforting premise that readers are never alone. "There was waking, and there was sleeping. And then there were books," she writes, "a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did, a universe...
Slightly Chipped: Footnotes in Booklore
| Author | Lawrence Goldstone |
| ISBN | 0312263953 |
More than a sequel, Slightly Chipped: Footnotes in Booklore is a companion piece for Used and Rare. A delight for the general reader and book collector alike, it details the Goldstones' further explorations into the curious world of book collecting. In Slightly Chipped, they get hooked on the correspondence...
| Author | Stuart Kelly |
| ISBN | 1400062977 |
In an age when deleted scenes from Adam Sandler movies are saved, it’s sobering to realize that some of the world’s greatest prose and poetry has gone missing. This witty, wry, and unique new book rectifies that wrong. Part detective story, part history lesson, part exposé, The Book of Lost Books...
| Author | Michael Dirda |
| ISBN | 0805083383 |
"As warm and stimulating as a library to which one returns again and again."
—Chicago Tribune (Editor's Choice)
While books contain insights into our selves and the world, it takes a conversation—between the author and the reader, or between two readers—to bring them fully to...
| Author | Nicholson Baker |
| ISBN | 0375726217 |
The ostensible purpose of a library is to preserve the printed word. But for fifty years our country's libraries—including the Library of Congress—have been doing just the opposite, destroying hundreds of thousands of historic newspapers and replacing them with microfilm copies that are difficult...
| Author | Robert Darnton |
| ISBN | 1586488260 |
The invention of writing was one of the most important technological, cultural, and sociological breakthroughs in human history. With the printed book, information and ideas could disseminate more widely and effectively than ever before—and in some cases, affect and redirect the sway of history....
| Author | Elizabeth L. Eisenstein |
| ISBN | 0521607744 |
What difference did printing make? Although the importance of the advent of printing for the Western world has long been recognized, it was Elizabeth Eisenstein in her monumental, two-volume work, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, who provided the first full-scale treatment of the subject....
So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance
"Gabriel Zaid's defense of books is genuinely exhilarating. It is not pious, it is wise; and its wisdom is delivered with extraordinary lucidity and charm. This is how Montaigne would have written about the dizzy and increasingly dolorous age of the Internet. May So Many Books fall into so many...
