A labour of love and scholarship, this is a study of the extraordinary Royal Library of Dom Joao V (1706-1750) of Portugal that was destroyed in 1755 in the Lisbon earthquake. The library co... read more
A neat bit of historical detective work enabled the author of 'Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts' to identify Becket's Anglo-Saxon Psalter, which he may have been holding when he was murd... read more
A brilliant tale of lexicographers whose lives are influenced in surprising ways by mountweazels. (Mountweazel, noun: a fake entry deliberately inserted into a dictionary or work of referenc... read more
The director of the Bodleian includes some of the US president's deleted tweets in an historical survey that ranges from the Library of Alexandria to the Windrush papers. The surprise is tha... read more
The author began his bookselling life in the King's Road (not at Sandoe's but Slaney & Mackay, where JdeF worked for him briefly). For the last 30 years he has managed the Waterstones in Can... read more
We heard about Molotov's library in Rachel Polonsky's superb Molotov's Magic Lantern (£12.99). Now we have a portrait of Stalin through the books he read - and he was an avid reader all his... read more
From the Bible to Simon Schama, a huge investigation of how the writing of history influences the record of human experience, and therefore its development.
A memoir by the Egytian woman who set up an independent book shop with a friend and her sister in 2002 - ten years later it had grown to include ten shops and 150 employees. Full of the nois... read more
Argues that the physical form of books makes them distinctive, and sometimes dangerous, quite as much as their content. (John Morgan’s recent, limited edition Usylessly, with its beautiful... read more
Gorgeous colour images, as well as translations and commentary on these celebrated Persian poems. Both manuscripts date from the C15th and are exquisitely illustrated. This will be ravishing... read more
Using West's 1930s masterpiece Black Lamb, Grey Falcon as a vade mecum, Allan has written a wonderful, personal portrait of the countries that made up the former Yugoslavia.
Marius is the distinguished antiquarian bookseller who features in the work of Javier Marias and worked for Bernard Stone and Peter Ellis; also a wide-ranging writer, most recently on Naples... read more