The Perfect Home?

I'm green with envy looking at this incredible home library in the Kokubunji district in Tokyo, Japan a designed by Atelier Bow-Wow. More about it and more pictures at apartmenttherapy.com.

Browsing Gaiman's Bookshelves

Thanks to Ted I spent a while browsing the shelves of Neil Gaiman's incredible home library, up on Shelfari. Couldn't you just lose yourself here? And there's even a library cat to complete the picture.

Super Geek's Super Library

It this the world's most incredible personal library? Jay Walker opens the door for the first time to Wired .

Walker is apparently a pioneer in the game of staking a claim to intellectual property on the Internet) and Forbes magagazine has referred to him as "the New Age Edison".

Nice to see he spends his billions on some thing as lovely as this!

For the Love of the Book

Our relationship with books is often complicated. Here are three recent articles from US newspapers well worth a read. :

Books entered my house under cover of night, from the four winds, smuggled in by woodland creatures, and then they never left. Books collected on every surface; I believe that somehow they managed to breed.

Take a wander around Luc Sante's book collection (left) in this very enjoyable piece from The Wall Street Journal.

I’m not suggesting that gigantic books are useful only as an excuse for avoiding responsibility.

You might not be so convinced as Joe Queenan talks about his love for big fat tomes in The New York Times.

I say: shore up the library. Stock it with printed matter. Reinforce its reading rooms. But don't think of it as a warehouse or a museum.

Robert Darnton looks at the future of the research library in the The New York Review of Books, and underlines the importance of the physical book even in this electronic age.

Social Networking for Book Nerds

Does you library live in cyberspace too?

Hermione Buckland-Hoby on The Guardian blog looks at the rise of the virtual bookshelf and takes a look at social networking sites for the literati.

I have a bookshelf up on my Facebook profile, and it's nice to see what others are reading too.

I am as in love with LibraryThing as ever, not so much for social networking (most interactions don't get much further than "Hi! Nice library!") but because it really does help me to organise my ever-growing collection. Also, they look so pretty when they flash up in the sidebar of the blog, and it's good that I am reminded from time to time of the titles I haven't got round to yet!

(I've added too more widgets there so as well as random books from my library, you can see my most recent additions and a selection of the books I've tagged "Malaysian".)

If you live nearby and can promise to return what you borrow within a reasonable time frame and in good condition, then you are welcome to borrow. (And if you don't return them, I can always put your wanted poster on this blog!)

I now have 1729 books listed though I keep finding books on my shelves I've accidentally omitted ... and still can't bring myself to add Abu's yellowing thrillers or my teaching books. The main categories are fiction (801), non-fiction (658), novel (619), british (399), american (203), malaysian (186), short stories (130), history (106), travel (103), poetry (99).

I've been acquiring books apace (28 so far this month!) many of them bought cheaply from warehouse sales and discount bookshops. (Was at the Payless Sale last weekend and BookXcess yesterday.) Many others have been given to me - many as review copies given by authors, bookshops and distributors. (One of the perks of blogging about books.)

I've also managed (thanks to AbeBooks) to track down a couple of English translations of Malay novels (which should never have gone out of print in the first place) : I've now got Harry Aveling's translation of A. Samad Said's Salina which I want to read side by side with the original, and Adibah Amin's No Harvest but a Thorn (a translation of Ranjau Sepanjang Jalan).

I will eventually bequeath my library to the nation ... though by the time I shuffle off this mortal coil you will probably all be reading ebooks anyway - or maybe you will have devices fitted into your brain that download all the content of all the books ever published directly into your brain.

Manguel's Library

My library is not a single beast but a composite of many others, a fantastic animal made up of the several libraries built and then abandoned, over and over again, throughout my life. I can’t remember a time in which I didn’t have a library of some sort. The present one is a sort of multilayered autobiography, each book holding the moment in which I opened it for the first time. The scribbles on the margins, the occasional date on the flyleaf, the faded bus ticket marking a page for a reason today mysterious, all try to remind me of who I was then. For the most part, they fail. My memory is less interested in me than in my books, and I find it easier to remember the story read once than the young man who then read it.Here's another truly amazing personal library to wander around.

Albert Manguel, writer, translator and editor, explains in The New York Times the origins and organisation of his library of some 30,000 books in an old stone presbytery in France.


There's more about his collection in The Library at Night, and you can read an extract here. James McConnochie reviews it in The Times today.

The Plymouth Bibliomaniac

When Alex Dove opened the 16th-century book on witchcraft, something black and scaly fell out into her hands.

Dove, who works in the books department at auctioneers Lyon &Turnbull, was horrified when she realised it was the body of a frog, wizened by time and pressed flat between the pages.

The books in question came from the library of one Robert Lenkiewicz, artist, and were sold on after his death in 2002. I didn't hear about the auction at the time, and in fact hadn't given Lenkiewicz much thought until I came across this piece by Alice Jones in the art section of The Independent today. During his lifetime Lenkiewicz failed to win acceptance among the art critics in London, but now, apparently, the value of his paintings is soaring, and I really am glad to hear that.

I lived in Plymouth in the late 1980's and have had a strong connection to the city ever since. (I still work for the same college.) It's impossible to visit the Barbican (the oldest part of the city surrounding the harbour) without coming across Lenkiewicz' work in galleries, restaurants, and on murals. And then of course there was his studio. We saw him sometimes standing before the open window, watching the street below, and almost biblical figure with flowing white hair and beard. At night when all else was dark, the lighted window showed a library of antiquarian books in rich bindings. I could not have guessed the extent of it.

But although there was a sign on a side door saying visitors to the studio were welcome to walk up, and though I very much wanted to, I lacked the courage to just walk upstairs and introduce myself. I regret that very much, even now.

Lenkiewicz was in every sense a much larger than life character, and he was also an incredible bibliomaniac :

He spent all the money he had (and plenty he didn't) on them, even doing a two-month sentence in Exeter prison for stealing four rare books from the Plymouth City Museum in the early 1970s. "Nobody really cared about them until four years later when the police came calling ... He came to the door and said, 'I've been expecting you, what took you so long? Do you take sugar in your tea?'"

He had, amongst so much else, one of the world's largest collections of antiquarian books relating to witchcraft and demonology. The whole collection is described in detail here. Do go take a stroll around it.

Did I mention the mummified bodies he kept in there too?

Nestling in a secret drawer, hidden behind some elaborate panelling at the bottom of a bookcase, was the embalmed corpse of a tramp. The Plymouth-based painter had befriended Edwin McKenzie – whom he dubbed Diogenes after he found him living in a barrel on a rubbish tip – and promised him that he would preserve his body after his death as a "human paperweight" rather than handing it over to the authorities for burial.