Posts Tagged ‘book shops’
“A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read”*…
FT writers nominate awe-inspiring places to get your literary fix, from Mumbai to Buenos Aires…
And so many more: “The most brilliant bookshops in the world.”
* Terry Pratchett
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As we browse, we might recall that it was on this date in 1938 that the Mercury Theater broadcast the Halloween episode of their weekly series on the WABC Radio Network, Orson Welle’s adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. The first two-thirds of the show (which was uninterrupted by ads) was composed of simulated news bulletins… which suggested to many listeners that a real Martian invasion was underway. (While headlines like the one below suggest that there was widespread panic, research reveals that the fright was more subdued. Still there was an out-cry against the “phoney-news” format… and Welles was launched into the notoriety that would characterize his career ever after.)
“A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking”*…
A market doubles as a bookstore in Obidos, Portugal
What makes a book town?
It can’t be too big—not a city, but a genuine town, usually in a rural setting. It has to have bookshops—not one or two, but a real concentration, where a bibliophile might spend hours, even days, browsing. Usually a book town begins with a couple of secondhand bookstores and later grows to offer new books, too.
But mostly, they have a lot of books for sale…
Tour some of the world’s best at “Book Towns Are Made for Book Lovers.”
* Jerry Seinfeld
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As we browse in bliss, we might send a combo birthday and St Patrick’s Day greeting to Catherine “Kate” Greenaway; she was born on this date in 1846. Creator of books for children such as Mother Goose (1881), Little Ann (1883), & The Pied Piper of Hamelin (1889), she was one of the most the most accomplished illustrators of her time– and the inspiration for The Kate Greenaway Medal, awarded annually by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in the U.K. to an illustrator of children’s books.
Greenaway’s illustration of the Pied Piper leading the children out of Hamelin; for Robert Browning’s version of the tale.
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