Stories of Books and Libraries

An enchanting book about books: a beautiful hardcover Pocket Classics anthology of stories that testify to the irresistible power of the written word

 The characters in the delightful stories collected here range all the way from the ink-stained medieval monks in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose to the book-besotted denizens of Ali Smith’s Public Library and Other Stories. In these pages readers are invited to enter the interior lives of librarians in Lorrie Moore’s “Community Life” and Elizabeth McCracken's "Juliet" and are ushered into a host of unusual libraries, including the infinite rooms of Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Library of Babel” and a secret library in Helen Oyeyemi’s “Books and Roses.”

Books exert their power in mysterious ways: an attempt by the military leaders of an imaginary nation to censor all of literature goes awry in Italo Calvino’s “A General in the Library” and Julio Cortázar’s mesmerizing “The Continuity of Parks” dramatizes the merging of the world inside and outside of a book. In Stories of Books and Libraries, a dazzling array of writers including Evelyn Waugh, Colette, Walter Benjamin, Isaac Babel, Teffi, and Ray Bradbury pay tribute to books and the magical places that house them. 


Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

JANE HOLLOWAY is the editor of the Pocket Poet anthologies The Language of Flowers and No Place Like Home. She has been a senior editor at Everyman's Library in the UK since its revival in 1991. She lives in Seaford, East Sussex, in the UK.

CONTENTS

Ray Bradbury, “Exchange”
Helen Oyeyemi, “Books And Roses"
Richard de Bury, from The Philobiblon
Umberto Eco, from The Name of the Rose
John Bale, from The Laborious Journey
Italo Calvino, “A General in the Library”
Lorrie Moore, “Community Life”
Mary Arnold, “A Morning in the Bodleian”
Elizabeth Taylor, “Girl Reading”
Evelyn Waugh, “The Man Who Liked Dickens”
Julio Cortazar, “A Continuity of Parks”
Ali Smith, “The Ex-Wife”
Isaac Babel, “The Public Library”
Elizabeth McCracken, “Juliet”
Max Beerbohm, “Enoch Soames”
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel”
Michel de Montaigne, from "Of Three Kinds of Association"
Samuel Pepys, from The Diary
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, "On the Reading of Novels"
Alan Bennett, from The Uncommon Reader
Maxim Gorky, “The Icon-Painters”
Charles Lamb, “Two Essays of Elia”
Colette, “My Mother and the Books”
Saki, “Forewarned”
Italo Calvino, from If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler
Teffi, “My First Tolstoy”
Fay Weldon, “Lily Bart’s Hat Shop”
Jasper Fforde, “Wuthering Heights”
Helene Hanff, from 84 Charing Cross Road
Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library”
Ernest Rhys, from Everyman Remembers
John Evelyn, from Instructions Concerning Erecting of a Library
Seneca, from De Tranqvillitate Animi
J. W. Von Goethe, from Conversations with Goethe
Azar Nafisi, from Reading Lolita In Tehran
Ray Bradbury, “The Library”