Book picks similar to
The Bookshop of the World: Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age by Andrew Pettegree
history
non-fiction
european-history
books-about-books
In Search of Lost Books: The forgotten stories of eight mythical volumes
Giorgio van Straten - 2016
They vanished from history leaving scarcely a trace, lost to fire, censorship, theft, war or deliberate destruction. Yet those who seek them are convinced they will find them.This is the story of one man’s quest for eight mysterious lost books.Taking us from Florence to Regency London, the Russian Steppe to British Columbia, Giorgio van Straten unearths stories of infamy and tragedy, glimmers
of hope and bitter twists of fate. There are, among others, the rediscovered masterpiece that he read but failed to save from destruction; the Hemingway novel that vanished in a suitcase at the Gare de Lyon; the memoirs of Lord Byron, burnt to avoid a scandal; the Magnum Opus of Bruno Schulz, disappeared along with its author in wartime Poland; the mythical Sylvia Plath novel that may one day become reality.As gripping as a detective novel, as moving as an elegy, this is the tale of a love affair with the impossible, of the things that slip away from us but which, sometimes, live again in the stories we tell.Giorgio van Straten is director of the Italian Cultural Institute of New York and one of the editors of the literature review Nuovi Argomenti. He is the author of several novels, including the prize-winning My Name a Living Memory, along with two collections of short stories. He has translated the works of authors such as Kipling, London and Stevenson and has edited several works of non-fiction.
The Paper Trail: An Unexpected History of the World's Greatest Invention
Alexander Monro - 2013
This is the story of how a simple Chinese product allowed knowledge, ideas and religions to spread at an unprecedented rate around the world and down the social scale.
Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions
Alberto Manguel - 2018
Packing up his enormous, 35,000‑volume personal library, choosing which books to keep, store, or cast out, Manguel found himself in deep reverie on the nature of relationships between books and readers, books and collectors, order and disorder, memory and reading. In this poignant and personal reevaluation of his life as a reader, the author illuminates the highly personal art of reading and affirms the vital role of public libraries. Manguel’s musings range widely, from delightful reflections on the idiosyncrasies of book lovers to deeper analyses of historic and catastrophic book events, including the burning of ancient Alexandria’s library and contemporary library lootings at the hands of ISIS. With insight and passion, the author underscores the universal centrality of books and their unique importance to a democratic, civilized, and engaged society.
The Rothschilds: The Dynasty And The Legacy
Michael W. Simmons - 2017
There, one man and his five brilliant sons made their fortune as court agents to a royal prince. It would take Napoleon’s earth-shattering quest to conquer Europe to scatter the five brothers to the four winds, but when the dust of war settled, there was a Rothschild brother and a Rothschild bank in five cities: London, Paris, Frankfurt, Naples, and Vienna. The era of haute finance had begun, and the legend of a banking dynasty more powerful than any royal family in history was established. In this book, you will follow the progress of the Rothschild family through the centuries. Their ranks included not only bankers and financiers but doctors, scientists, bomb experts, and collectors who amassed not only some of the finest art collections in Europe, but also one of the finest bug collections. Find out for yourself how the Rothschilds prevented wars, crowned and uncrowned kings, helped win the battle of Waterloo, looked down their noses at Nazis, and established a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
Books: A Living History
Martyn Lyons - 2011
The author traces the evolution of the book from the rarefied world of the hand-copied and illuminated volume in ancient and medieval times, through the revolutionary impact of Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, to the rise of a publishing culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the subsequent impact of new technologies on this culture. Many of the great individual titles of the past two millennia are discussed as well as the range of book types and formats that have emerged in the last few hundred years, from serial and dime novels to paperbacks, children’s books, and Japanese manga. The volume ends with a discussion of the digital revolution in book production and distribution and the ramifications for book lovers, who can’t help but wonder whether the book will thrive—or even survive—in a form they recognize.
The Novel: A Biography
Michael Schmidt - 2014
Geographically and culturally boundless, with contributions from Great Britain, Ireland, America, Canada, Australia, India, the Caribbean, and Southern Africa; influenced by great novelists working in other languages; and encompassing a range of genres, the story of the novel in English unfolds like a richly varied landscape that invites exploration rather than a linear journey. In The Novel: A Biography, "Michael Schmidt does full justice to its complexity.Like his hero Ford Madox Ford in The March of Literature," Schmidt chooses as his traveling companions not critics or theorists but "artist practitioners," men and women who feel "hot love" for the books they admire, and fulminate against those they dislike. It is their insights Schmidt cares about. Quoting from the letters, diaries, reviews, and essays of novelists and drawing on their biographies, Schmidt invites us into the creative dialogues between authors and between books, and suggests how these dialogues have shaped the development of the novel in English.Schmidt believes there is something fundamentally subversive about art: he portrays the novel as a liberalizing force and a revolutionary stimulus. But whatever purpose the novel serves in a given era, a work endures not because of its subject, themes, political stance, or social aims but because of its language, its sheer invention, and its resistance to cliche--some irreducible quality that keeps readers coming back to its pages."
Ancient Greece: From Beginning To End (Greek History - Ancient Greek - Aristotle - Socrates - Greece History - Plato - Alexander The Great - Macedonian ... Civilizations From Beginning To End Book 3)
Stephan Weaver - 2015
Home to humanities greatest philosophers like Socrates, Aristotle and Plato, this era is enriched with a wealth of fascinating events. Spanning over a period of seven centuries and reigning over large territories stretching as far as Southwest Asia and the entire Mediterranean, the kingdoms of Greece were able to imbue half the world with their beautiful culture, art, literature and innovative thinking. Inside you will learn about… ✓ The Rise of Ancient Greece ✓ Archaic Greece ✓ Classical Greece ✓ Hellenistic Greece ✓ The Fall of Ancient Greece ✓ Ten Little Known Facts about Ancient Greece This eBook discusses each epoch of this electrifying era from beginning to end: The Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic periods and the fall of Ancient Greece. Enriched with riveting details of the era, this eBook will not only edify you but also keep you entranced.
Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives
John Sutherland - 2007
In the spirit of Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, acclaimed critic and scholar John Sutherland selects 294 writers whose works illustrate the best of every kind of fiction—from gothic, penny dreadful, and pornography to fantasy, romance, and high literature. Each author was chosen, Professor Sutherland explains, because his or her books are well worth reading and are likely to remain so for at least another century. Sutherland presents these authors in chronological order, in each case deftly combining a lively and informative biographical sketch with an opinionated assessment of the writer's work. Taken together, these novelists provide both a history of the novel and a guide to its rich variety. Always entertaining, and sometimes shocking, Sutherland considers writers as diverse as Daniel Defoe, Henry James, James Joyce, Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Woolf, Michael Crichton, Jeffrey Archer, and Jacqueline Susann.Written for all lovers of fiction, Lives of the Novelists succeeds both as introduction and re-introduction, as Sutherland presents favorite and familiar novelists in new ways and transforms the less favored and less familiar through his relentlessly fascinating readings.
A Dark History: The Popes
Brenda Ralph Lewis - 2009
However, not every pontiff has acted in an entirely admirable and saintly manner. A Dark History: The Popes reveals the darkest deeds of the papacy: the murky and immoral past of the throne of St. Peter.The darkness of the papal history revealed here goes a great deal further than bribery, nepotism, and other vices. There were also atrocities perpetrated by the Church under papal orders, such as the medieval crusade against the dissident Cathars, which ultimately amounted to genocide. Popes committed—or at least sanctioned— murder. Popes were themselves murdered. By the order of Pope Urban VIII (1623–1644), the astronomer Galileo Galilei was persecuted by the Inquisition and kept under house arrest for ten years. Pope Pius XII (1939–1958) remains controversial today for his actions—or lack of them—during World War II.This book reveals a catalog of wrongdoings perpetrated by popes over the centuries, a record that has been mainly kept from the public eye. Fortunately, the dirty doings of the popes have not been confined to papal records. Diaries, letters, reports from foreign ambassadors to the Vatican, and official registers of the ecclesiastical courts have revealed a broader picture which shows how popes could be sinners as well as saints, and between them indulged in virtually every sin and every vice it was possible to commit.
Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London
Matthew Beaumont - 2015
In this brilliant work of literary investigation, Matthew Beautmont shines a light on the dark perambulations of poets, novelists and thinkers from Shakespeare, the ecstatic strolls of William Blake, the feverish urges of opium addict De Quincey as well as the master night walker, Charles Dickens.
Phantoms on the Bookshelves
Jacques Bonnet - 2008
The author, a lifelong accumulator of books both ancient and modern, lives in a house large enough to accommodate his many thousands of books, as well as overspill from the libraries of his friends. While his musings on the habits of collectors past and present are learned, witty and instructive, his advice on cataloguing may even save the lives of those whose books are so prodigiously piled as to be a hazard... The Phantoms on the Bookshelves ranges from classical Greece to contemporary Iceland, from Balzac and Moby Dick to Google, offering up delicious anecdotes along the way. This elegantly produced volume will be a lasting delight to specialist collectors, librarians, bibliophiles and all those who treasure books.
Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life
Nicholas Phillipson - 2010
Yet Smith saw himself primarily as a philosopher rather than an economist and would never have predicted that the ideas for which he is now best known were his most important. This biography shows the extent to which Smith's great works, The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, were part of one of the most ambitious projects of the Euruopean Enlightenment, a grand “Science of Man" that would encompass law, history, and aesthetics as well as economics and ethics, and which was only half complete on Smith’s death in 1790.Nick Phillipson reconstructs Smith’s intellectual ancestry and shows what Smith took from, and what he gave to, in the rapidly changing intellectual and commercial cultures of Glasgow and Edinburgh as they entered the great years of the Scottish Enlightenment. Above all he explains how far Smith’s ideas developed in dialogue with those of his closest friend, the other titan of the age, David Hume.
Books on Fire: The Destruction of Libraries throughout History
Lucien X. Polastron - 2004
The Vedas say that this library predated the creator’s creation of himself. Yet, almost as old as the idea of the library is the urge to destroy it. The reasons cited for this are many: educated people are much harder to govern, and some proclaim that only the illiterate can save the world. There are also great destructions brought about by weather, worms, and even the paranoia of the library’s owner. Books on Fire traces the history of this perpetual destruction from the burning of the great library of Alexandria (on three separate occasions) and the libraries of the Chinese Qing Dynasty to more modern catastrophic losses such as those witnessed in Nazi-occupied Europe and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The author examines the causes for these disasters, the treasures that have been lost, and where the surviving books, if any, have ended up. His investigation also reveals a new danger facing libraries today with the digitalization of books threatening both the existence of the physical paper book and the very idea of reading for free. The promise of an absolute library offered by the computer may well turn out to equal the worst nightmares of Ray Bradbury, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell.Books on Fire received the 2004 Société des Gens de Lettres Prize for Nonfiction/History in Paris.
Amsterdam
Geert Mak - 1994
From a twelfth-century settlement of wooden huts at the mouth of the River Amstel, it had become by the late sixteenth century one of the great cultural capitals of Europe and a major financial center.In this gracefully written examination of Amsterdam's soul--part history, part travel guide--the Dutch writer Geert Mak imaginatively depicts the lives of early Amsterdammers and traces the city's progress from a small town of merchants, sailors, farmers, and fishermen to a thriving metropolis. Mak's Amsterdam is a city of dreams and nightmares, of grand civic architecture and magnificent monuments, but also of civil wars, uprisings, and bloody religious purges. In his delightfully instructive journey through the city and through time, Mak displays an eye for the bizarre and the unexpected: a Rembrandt sketch of a young girl executed for manslaughter; the shoe of a medieval lady unearthed during a remodeling project; a graffito foretelling the city's doom on the wall of a mansion, daubed by a deranged burgomaster with his own blood.Amsterdam remains a magnet for travelers from around the world, and this charmingly detailed account of its origins and its history through the present day is designed to help the reader step into daily life in a truly modern city.
Schnitzler's Century: The Making of Middle Class Culture, 1815-1914
Peter Gay - 2001
Yet Peter Gay asserts in this provocative, seminal work that it is the sexually emboldened Viennese playwright, Arthur Schnitzler, who provides a better symbol for the age. Challenging many of the sacrosanct theories of such intellectual luminaries as Darwin and Freud, Gay chronicles the rise of modernity in countries as diverse as Germany and Italy, England and the United States, and in doing so presents a century filled with science and superstition, revolutionaries and reactionaries, eros and anxiety -- in short, an age of contradiction rendered remarkably clear by one of our most eloquent historians. Not since Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror has a century been brought alive as dramatically. Schnitzler's Century is nothing less than a tour de force, a work that tells us with remarkable lucidity how we came to be the way we are.