Ex Libris

Pick it up: If you're an incurable bibliophile, if you think book people are the best people, if you love to scribble in the margins of your books or have never even folded the page corners and hiss "bookmarks!" at people who do. If you're lucky enough to be part of a family of readers, reading about Fadiman's family can be something your entire family finds enjoyable. 

One of our all time favourite books about books,. Ex Libris is about books and reading, writing and language, and some of the eccentricities and foibles of passionate readers and collectors of books. There’s something about book love that makes us cast an indulgent eye on the kind of behaviour that people not afflicted by the passion would view as downright crazy, like the author’s description of a trip to a second-hand bookshop that her husband surprised her with, as a birthday gift. They spent seven hours in that shop and they came away with nineteen pounds worth of books (Fadiman weighed them when she got home).

The eighteen essays in this collection cover a variety of topics from a love of second-hand books, to a love of big, interesting, and somewhat obscure words, the Fadiman family’s obsessive tendency to proof-read everything, including restaurant menus, the attachment that writers have to their writing instruments, whether an old pen or an old typewriter, the joys of reading aloud, the passing on of books from parent to child, the way we treat our books, what our bookshelves say about us, and a lot more.

Some of these pieces were written as columns for a magazine. Fadiman wanted to write about readers in general, but her editor suggested that she write about herself and her relationship with books and reading. Fadiman found this a bit daunting at first, but ultimately it was freeing. Writing about herself as a reader and exploring her relationship with the written word, led to writing about her husband George, her father and mother, her brother Kim, and her two young children, all of them readers and book lovers. This is Anne Fadiman giving us a glimpse into her life and a delightful glimpse it is.

If you’re a reader, you’ll see yourself at one point or the other in this book and think, I do that too! or That’s a wonderful idea! A must read for anyone who loves books.