Book Review: Reading New York by John Tytell

Book Trout Book Review: Reading New York, by John Tytell (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003)


The book reeled me in with its grainy old cover photo of a 1911 Manhattan street scene and the sexy subtitle "A Celebration of New York Writers, The Essence of the City, and the Transforming Effects of Reading", but what really hooked me in the gills was the short first chapter which described the author's horrible eye condition which necessitated periodic corneal scrapings and a prohibition against reading. Weepy eyes and parents notwithstanding, Tytell went ahead and read. What a little hero!

The rest of the book interjects snippets of Tytell's youth, university days, sexual awakening with his Arthur Murray dance teacher, and (more interestingly) his interviews, research and sometimes interaction with leading literati in New York City. He offers short overviews of the work of some major NYC writers, including Herman Melville, Henry Miller, Henry James, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe and the various Beats.

Tytell's style is polished and interesting, and the fact that he met with Miller, Allen Ginsberg and some of the other Beat writers and can provide a contrast between their private and public personas gives the book a freshness and intimacy with the reader.

My only criticism is that the end was much too abrupt. I was cantering along with Tytell in the 1970s, as his Queens College teaching job was in financial jeopardy, along with the rest of the New York City government, when I turned the page to find out that there were only two more chapters left. The final chapter summarizes the next thirty years of Tytell's writing career in five choppy sentences. He went to Venice to write about Ezra Pound, taught in Paris, hung out in Southeast Asia and then came back to roost with some doves in the Village. I guess that's all fodder for the next book.

The Book Trout recommends this book, particularly for the New York City-Obsessed, Lovers of Literary Biography, Beat Readers and those who fancy good Books About Books.

Q & A with Sheridan Hay

Sheridan Hay, author of the biblionovel "The Secret of Lost Things" will be signing copies of her book at our shop on Saturday, May 3rd at 5 pm. We will be in full party mode with refreshments, live music and two art gallery openings that evening so plan to visit our historic and cultural village. Here are some interview questions with Ms. Hay from the HarperCollins U.K. edition to whet your appetite in the interim:

Did you enjoy writing The Secret of Lost Things?

Writing is difficult and takes time and discipline but it is intensely satisfying. When I look up after a day of concentrated work and realize that I've been enfolded in an envelope of time -- hours pass in one attenuated moment -- that is what I really enjoy and I came to that eventually with The Secret of Lost Things.

The Secret of Lost Things feels like a fairy tale or fable at times, at other times a compelling detective story. Did you consciously use different genres?

I was conscious of trying to write a sort of personal fable -- one girl's "myth" of her beginnings -- and that the structure of the bildungsroman was a form I wanted to employ. An exemplar of the form is Great Expectations, and I've always been taken with Dickens' ability to make "types" wholly compelling as characters. One doesn't really question, for example, the "believability" of Miss Haversham remaining in her wedding dress or not throwing out the cake after half a lifetime! I am interested in the emotional impact of theatrical "reality" -- the staged piece that none the less moves one to tears. So there is an element of the theatrical in the novel -- the characters are playing, to some extent "roles" in Rosemary's play, and the Arcade is both theatre and bookshop. The "mystery" element owes less I think to a detective genre than to my interest in Borges and playing around with truth and ideas of history.

Melville was brilliant in his manipulation of different forms and very early on was moving between genres. In Moby- Dick, he made a new form using combinations of established forms which is interesting to me.

Did you like using factual material in the novel?

I love letters and what they communicate and what they leave out. Letters are the best kind of history because they record thoughts. It was only as I sat with the material over a couple of years that I saw how Melville's lost novel and its theme of abandonment and remorse could amplify Rosemary's story of becoming herself. The factual elements of Melville's story, research into the lost novel, as well as things like the cabinet of curiosities and the arcana of collecting, meant that I couldn't wait to get to work each day, that there was always something interesting to find out about and to find a place for.

"[Australia]. That great America on the other side of the sphere...given to the enlightened world by the whaleman". What was it like to come from Sydney to New York? Do you miss Australia and will you ever return to live there?

After more than 20 years in New York, I think what I miss about Australia has less to do with what I might find if I lived there again than with what lives in my imagination. At 46, I've lived away almost as long as I lived at home. There are great advantages to being an ex-patriot but I'm never sure if the underlying sense of loneliness and isolation I occasionally feel describes my nature or my displaced condition. I have family in Australia, so I will always return to visit but I've made my life in America and have an American family of my own. In that sense I think the children of an ex-patriot become her roots rather than the more conventional way ones parents root one to geographic place. Both my parents are dead and that changed profoundly my idea of Australia as a home to return to.

Rosemary says of her mother's death "Her death had called me to my self". Have you any personal experience of such grief?

My mother died just as I began the novel and for some time I felt that in describing Rosemary's fictional anguish, I was describing my own. I had a feeling throughout that my mother was keeping me company as I wrote, and the sense of loss that pervades the novel is perhaps its most autobiographical element.

Oscar is an original and intriguing character. Did you want his ending to remain enigmatic?

Oscar, in part, stands outside the action of the novel, so having him "escape" its ending is intentional. Oscar is not touched by the lives of others but is driven by a fascination with his own subjectivity. I see this as less narcissism than retreat. He will turn up in a situation that suits his purposes. I think there are people who find intellectual immersion and the accumulation of knowledge a way to remain beyond the realities of emotional demand. The fact that Rosemary imagines he can return something on the order of affection to her is an indication of her naivete, and her optimism.

What does Rosemary learn during the course of the book?

Well, Rosemary learns many things but mostly she learns how to live free of the projections of others and a bit closer to the notion of her own truth. She is on the way to learning the hard lessons of resilience and independence, and we have to assume she gains them as the narrative is told in retrospect and the older and wiser Rosemary looks to this particular year and its experiences to illustrate those gains. She learns that the way through grief is to remember and to live as best she can. It is her imagination that saves her.

Apart from Rosemary, who is your favourite character in the novel?

I love all of them -- you have to like your characters to spend so much time with them. Lots of people have mentioned finding Geist either disgusting or repulsive but I find him neither. To me he is heartbreakingly lonely and isolated. Rosemary's encounter with him is an encounter with otherness and he stands, in a way, for the inevitability of such reckonings. A sexual encounter appeared to be the most dramatic way to depict his utter remoteness: his complete incapacity. That incapacity is something he shares with Oscar only it takes a different form. I know the scene in the rare book room is disturbing, it would have little impact if it wasn't disturbing. But it is Geist who is revealed in that scene rather than Rosemary. It is his suffering that we discover. Readers have told me that they love Lillian and especially Pearl. I imagine that's because they are both capable of loving. All the characters are flawed and sort of in disguise -- each has something to "give" Rosemary (almost like tasks in a quest) but it isn't necessarily something she can anticipate -- or want!

The theme of memory is threaded throughout the novel. Rosemary's name is the symbol for remembrance. And the Arcade functions because of the booksellers' use of memory. Do you think the new technologies will necessarily alter our use of memory for the worse?

I know they will from my own experience. Memory is internal not external and the process of recall is idiosyncratic and entirely human -- that is the point of the Who Knows? game in the novel. My way of writing is associative and depends on reading and the experience of reading. If the novel fetishizes books as magical objects, then it is certainly no more than the computer is perceived by some as an object of enchantment. Perhaps both things are true, but I wrote an old-fashioned novel because my ideas about these things are, I suppose, conservative. I don't want to witness a transition from the medium of books to some other technology and I don't see why that should be the case. It isn't either or, but both serving different purposes.

I do feel that technology is having its impact on bookselling and publishing, and the novel is an intentional homage to a sort of life I feel has largely passed from the culture. It is that feeling that makes the novel have a fairy tale aspect -- that it in part takes place in another time where things were done differently. But that elegaic quality might be intrinsic to the pastime of selling books itself: it is a business forever in decline, and its demise has been predicted for as long as I can remember.

There are many eclectic references in the novel: to Shakespeare, to Auden, to Borges and of course to Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Do you see any parallels between being a writer and being a 'collector' like Peabody?

Absolutely. I like to think about the Australian species of Bowerbirds -- they build an elaborate nest and fly around looking for shiny bits and pieces to decorate the nest and make it beautiful. If you ever find a nest it's full of bright things like tin foil and bottle caps, the odd earring, shells and even berries: sometimes hundreds of dramatically colored objects that the Bowerbird sorts through obsessively. I think my writing style is something like that. I'm on the lookout in everything I read, I see, I hear, for "shiny bits." I keep copious notes on these bits of treasure and look through my pages of fragments before beginning writing each day. That way my mind is working on associations, on the stuff of my preoccupations, on things that caught my eye in another context, while I concentrate on moving the story forward. This is exactly like collecting objects except that I'm the only one who values the bits I've found. They don't have any other value until they're strung on the thread of story.

Are you working on another novel?

Yes, an historical novel set in the middle of the nineteenth century in America and England. The novel's protagonist is a very minor historical figure, an obsessive and an unreasonable woman. She was a writer. I've been researching the book for a year and am now writing the first draft

Breaking Book Trout News....

Sheridan Hay, author of The Secret of Lost Things, a biblionovel about an eccentric array of New York City used bookstore employees and one of the best books I read last year, is coming to Old Saratoga Books for a book signing on May 3rd. Her book is now out in paperback and in keeping with the title of her book, she graciously forgave my having lost her contact information for over a month. Stay tuned for more details and for an upcoming email interview with her by the Trout herself.

In the interim, you can check out my book review from the blog archives and Hay's own website.

Ten Gift Ideas for Book Lovers

There's still time to get your Christmas shopping list pared down and here are some ideas from the Book Trout:

1) Book lovers will make good use of a rugged and useful book tote bag from the Bibliobullpen site in the classic design of an elderly gent in front of a fire with his glass of wine and books at his feet (needing to be properly put down to avoid cracking the hinges). I use mine daily to lug books back and forth from home to bookshop, but it also serves duty hauling library books, groceries, and packages to mail. Check out the rest of the site for bookish designs on T-shirts, clocks, baby apparel and thongs (thongs can also be used as bookmarks). $14.99

2) A Book! If you can engineer a secretive peek at whatever list your loved one has to keep track of books they've heard about and want to read, grab it and copy it and then sneak out to obtain a copy. Bibliophiles also welcome "upgrade" copies of their favorite books, as in a lovely hardcover to replace a well-thumbed paperback edition or replacement for a beloved book that has been loaned out but not returned. It is common here at Old Saratoga Books to get last-minute phone calls at the holidays to track down a replacement copy of mom's bespattered and scorched favorite cookbook or sleuthing with few clues ("It had a red cover with a bunny on it") for a lost childhood favorite. If all else fails, you can always get a gift certificate from your recipient's favorite online or in-person bookstore.

3) Cool bookends. Bookends are not inexpensive anymore, as they seem to have hit the collectible category in the last decade. I try to get inexpensive, mismatched or solo bookends, to sprinkle around the shop and a true bibliophile will love some weighty bookends to help dress up the bookshelves. Thrift shops and tag sales seem to be the best bet for bookends under $20.00. If you are crafty, you could whip up some sturdy bookends from bricks covered with fabric or at least some cheap felt for the bottoms to avoid scraping delicate tomes and shelves.

4) A Literary calendar for 2008. Some folks like those quote a day calendars from literary legends and some just like monthly calendars with a literary theme. $10-$15 easily ordered online from any number of sources (google "literary calendar") or from most brick and mortar bookstores.

5) Simple book repairs and maintenance are easily achievable with the products and tools obtained at this book repair supplies website. There are even videos to show you how to use the products or effect simple repairs, like removing bookplates, tipping in loose pages and cleaning book covers. The Basic Book repair kit contains Book Deodorizer, Dry Cleaning Sponge, Large Dry Cleaning Pad, Dusting Brush Set, Leather Dressing, Bestine Solvent, Nylon Label Lifter and Scotty Label Peeler. $36.00

6) How about owning the a Bust of your favorite author? That's pretty classy and they can also serve double duty as an overly large bookend. At this website you can pick from Balzac, Aristotle, Hippocrates, John Wesley, Plato, Socrates, Voltaire, Shakespeare, Dante, Darwin, Einstein, Goethe, Homer, Sappho, Freud, Robbie Burns, or Schiller. From $32 for a sale priced Hippocrates up to triple digit prices.

7) Perhaps your gift intended covets The Book Lover's Cookbook: Recipes Inspired by Celebrated Works of Literature and the Passages That Feature Them, by Shaunda Kennedy Wenger (NY: Ballantine, 2003). Available used on the Internet starting at $1.00 plus shipping.

8) A book switchplate for the home library. I really want some of these to dress up the old bookshop. They are available at the Folger Library website for $9.95 apiece. The Folger Library also has a collection of other great Shakespeare gifts for Bard lovers, including Hamlet finger puppets, mugs, a Shakespeare rubber ducky, and other amusements. $9.95

9) Male bibliophiles may enjoy a necktie printed with book images, Shakespeare heads and other reading images from this teacher website ($10.00-15.00), while book women might enjoy a bookish scarf from the same source ($10.00-$11.95).

10) Time to read is perhaps the most precious gift for a bibliophile. Finding the time to fit in a good stretch of book time is hard when work, holiday gatherings, shopping, cooking, kids and all the business of modern life gets in the way. If your favorite bibliophile has kids, a coupon for child removal for an afternoon of blissful quiet with a good book would be just the ticket. If your book lover is just too busy and stressed out with life, a coupon allowing him or her to pass on some errands and just chill out with some reading time would be thoughtful indeed. $$$$$Priceless.

For loads of other bookish holiday suggestions, check out the Library Support Staff website. It has many other bibliophilic gift ideas and links which should keep you browsing and shopping for hours.

Wishing everyone a happy, healthy holiday season with lots of relaxing reading time thrown in.

Chris over at the great Book Hunter's Holiday blog, where the posts are organized as chapters, has a great review of books about books which should be perused by every bookseller and bibliophile. Chapter 33, "Required Reading for Those New to Antiquarian Books", covers biblionovels, books about used bookselling, rare booksellers' memoirs, and books about book collecting. Great stuff. And now I must add to my nightstand reading pile since there were many titles I haven't explored.

The Secret of Lost Things: A Biblionovel Book Review

The Secret of Lost Things, by Sheridan Hay (NY: Doubleday, 2006)

After hearing a radio interview with the author I had to buy a copy of "The Secret of Lost Things". Biblionovels are one of my reading passions and this book did not disappoint. It provided a neat interweaving of bookstore novel, unusual character studies and a literary puzzle.

The book is a coming of age story about a red-maned Tasmanian daughter of a milliner. Upon her single mother's death she is taken in by her mom's best friend bookseller. The friend sagely suggests having an adventure while she is young and firmly insists that she move off her island and onto another: Manhattan. Our eighteen-year-old heroine, Rosemary Savage, then finds cheap lodging in a women's hotel managed by Lillian, the grieving mother of an Argentine professor, one of the thousands of "the disappeared", tortured and killed by the military junta that ruled during the 1970s.

Rosemary then stumbles into a job at a Strand-like used bookstore, The Arcade, where the characters are eccentric all. There is the store owner, Mr. Pike, a blustering man with Victorian speech patterns; Arcade manager, Walter Geist, an albino with failing eyesight; Nonfiction manager Oscar, an emotionally-stunted fountain of textile minutiae; Pearl, the flirtatious transsexual cashier and would-be opera singer; and the Czar of the Rare Book Room, Mr. Mitchell, a rubicund, pipe-smoking teddy bear who skillfully presses the buttons of upscale book collectors.

With this disparate crew, Hay inserts a small voyage to retrieve a lost Melville novella. There are many interesting scenes at the New York Public Library, collectors' mansions and at Rosemary's second apartment, a heatless and downtrodden flat in the Lower East Side. The theme of the selfish collector, one who amasses the world's treasures but does not share them with others, is fleshed out perfectly with this description of the curator in charge of a millionaire collector's cabinets of curiosities:

"A peevish woman appeared, in her late twenties but dressed expensively in clothes more suited to a woman twice her age. Her hair was set severely in a bun, and she was round without seeming fleshy, somehow taut inside her clothing, at once plump and stiff".

While the novel did not contain as much bookstore gossip as I had hoped, it was an elegantly-written and -plotted book. And, oddly, the central character, Rosemary, seemed the most remote to me. She seems somewhat numb all the time, despite having the most unusual experiences. Still, an absorbing read and another book I am anxious to share with others.

I especially loved the comparison of the millinery supply shops Rosemary would travel to each year with her hatmaking mother and Mr. Mitchell's lair at the Arcade:

"No doubt my fondness for the Rare Book Room came in part from a sense of familiarity. It was a version of Foys' hat workroom from childhood visits to Sydney. There were no piles of skins, no wall of drawers filled with bric-a-brac, but each old volume amounted to something like the same thing. A book was like a drawer; one opened it and notions flew out."

Recommended reading for bibliophiles, Big Apple lovers, Melville fans and most everyone else.

Reading: An Essay, by Hugh Walpole

Reading: An Essay, by Hugh Walpole (NY: Harper and Brothers, 1927).

I was delighted to read, in the shop no less, this delightful book by the popular early 20th century American novelist. Walpole shies away from offering suggested reading lists, recommending instead that one meander along an individual trail of books because:

"...I believe, with the pleasures of Reading it can be nothing if it is not autobiographical, for the only certain thing about Reading is that it is personal first, personal second, and personal all of the time, and Milton's PARADISE LOST and Dante's DIVINA COMEDIA may be the twin dominating peaks of a glorious range, but they are nothing to you whatever if you happen to be looking the other way."

*Note to self: Read Milton and Dante before people think you are illiterate.

This extended essay has so many great quotes about books to savor. Here's another:

"On looking around you it is the books that you have loved that count, not the books that you have criticised, and by that, of course, I do not mean that you should be one of those sentimental readers to whom a book is a sort of meringue; readers who wallow in books like pigs in a trough, to obtain every sort of emotion save only the intellectual one."

Walpole revels in the books he's read, starting with the childhood standouts, "Lottie's Visit to Grandmamma" and "Alice in Wonderland", (which gave him a lifelong distrust of men with drooping moustaches like the venal Walrus), doled out parsimoniously during his Victorian childhood when reading too many books (and never ANY on Sundays) was not recommended as part of a moral upbringing. He gorged on Walter Scott's historical romances during his teen years, especially during school holidays when rabid recreational reading was considered much more acceptable and the scenes he paints of settling down in cozy, thick-curtained libraries with a good book in front of a crackling fire made me swoon.

Walpole writes with an easy grace, peppered with self-deprecating comments about his own foibles in trying to stuff his head with the classics when he was young and feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume of volumes he hasn't and never will read. He gives gentle criticism to the Sophisticated Readers who look down upon Readers who Read for Enjoyment, and chides the Ordinary Educated Critics who read with pen in hand to note inconsistencies in writing and later send him copious notes about his own novel's mistakes.

Other enchanting passages concern his descriptions of various libraries: The Friendliest: Morgan Library in New York City; Most Interesting: Mr. Thomas Wise's library in Hampstead (Thomas Wise the rare book forger?, yeah, that WOULD be very interesting); The Stupidest: A certain millionaire's library in an unnamed location. He touches upon the fevers of first edition collecting, having passed through it himself ("That does not mean that I would for a moment surrender the original editions that I possess; I love them all, and I think that they have a certain affection in return for me"). He advises reading lustily and sloppily.

A recommended book for any reader touched with bibliophilia.

Firmin the Vermin

I wanted to like the book "Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife" by Sam Savage (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2006) more than I ultimately did, but it just didn't deliver more than a faintly humorous look at the development of bibliomania. The book's plot follows the life story of a young rat in a gentrifying Boston neighborhood. It started out with great promise; a hilarious illustration and first chapter description of Firmin's boozy twelve-teated mama collapsing after her nightly carousing on a bookshop basement floor to let her thirteen offspring (do the math) suckle. His rat siblings Sweeny, Chucky, Luweena, Feenie, Mutt, Peewee, Shunt, Pudding, Elvis, Elvina, Humphrey, and Honeychild leave runty Firmin hungering for something more than depleted mammaries and he finds succor in exploring the upstairs bookshop. At first he literally devours book pages (later he describes toilet paper as tasting like Emily Post) and then begins to slavishly read them.

Unfortunately, the successive chapters are just not as arresting. The writing becomes more leaden and old-fashioned and I found myself having to stop skimming ahead for exciting bits. The idea of a rat as a bibliomane is so full of promise, but the bibliophilic bits were grudgingly provided, sort of like a chocolate chip cookie with only one or two chips. I did enjoy Firmin's opinion of his fellow rodents in literature, like Ratty, Mickey Mouse and Stuart Little, whom he disdains as "affable, shuffling, cute, they stick in my craw like fish bones".

Overall, Firmin is a book that might be enjoyed more by a Bostonian or a die-hard science fiction fan (Firmin hooks up with a panhandling novelist in the later sections), but one which left me somewhat unsatisfied after plowing through.

Biblionovels: A Selected Reading List

The last Book Trout entry described the classic Christopher Morley novels “The Haunted Bookshop” and its predecessor, “Parnassus on Wheels” and it made me think of so many other great bibliophilic novels. The following is a selected reading list of Biblionovels of note.


BIBLIONOVELS: A SELECTED READING LIST FROM THE BOOK TROUT

Adamson, Lydia, ”Beware the Laughing Gull”, (NY: Signet, 1998). Retired librarian and full-time birdwatcher Lucy Wayles solves the murder of a bride on her wedding day.

Andahazi, Federico, ”The Merciful Women”, translated from the Spanish by Alberto Manguel, (London: Doubleday, 2000). A novel featuring Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and other hangers-on during an 1816 Swiss vacation. On the same night that Mary Shelley is to read aloud her Frankenstein tale, another literary dare had been extended to Byron's physician, Doctor Polidori, to offer a vampire tale. Great jacket art featuring Michelangelo's David with vampire bat codpiece.

Barron, Stephanie, the Jane Austen series. I particularly love this series. The literary conceit here is that a cache of Jane Austen's letters have been discovered at the bottom of an American relative's coal chute and they reveal that Jane had been working to solve murders, fall in love and spy for her country behind the mask of a proper English lady. The style and vocabulary fit Austen perfectly and there is plenty of dashing adventure to spice up the actual biographical events of her life.

Beresford-Howe, Constance, ”A Population of One”, (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1977). Our heroine is a professor of English at a university and struggles to juggle revolting students, boring departmental assignments and a serious of romances.

Blackstock, Charity, “Dewey Death”, (NY: Ballantine, 1985). Intrigue, eccentric librarians and murder stalks the Inter-Libraries Despatch Association in London, a librarian's library.

Block, Lawrence, The Burglar Who series. Burglar-turned-used-bookseller Bernie Rhodenbarr is the hero of this comic mystery caper series set in Manhattan. Bernie just wants to focus on selling his beloved books, but he hasn't given up his lock picks yet.

Bradbury, Ray, ”Fahrenheit 451” (pick your edition from any number of editions and printings) is probably the one that springs to most peoples' minds, a futuristic fantasy-noir in which books are officially verboten, but so beloved that people memorize their favorites and recite them underground.

Byatt, A.S., "Possession”, (NY: Random House, 1990). A great literary puzzle wrapped inside a passionate romance between bibliophiles that shifts between present day and Victorian London.

Caldwell, Ian and Dustin Thomason, ”The Rule of Four”, (NY: The Dial Press, 2004) Murder breaks out when two Princeton students solve a ciphered message encoded in the 15th century manuscript of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.

Colapinto, John, ”About the Author”, (NY: HarperCollins, 2001). Stockboy Cal Cunningham toils away in a Manhattan bookstore and dreams of writing the Great American Novel in this darkly humorous autobiographical novel. His killer shark literary agent is wonderfully over-the-top.

Curran, Terrie, ”All Booked Up”, (NY: Worldwide, 1989). A rare incunabula turns up missing at the academic Smedley Library, followed up by the corpse of one of its patrons.

Dobson, Joanne, Karen Pelletier series. Fordham University English Professor Joanne Dobson has turned out several elegant, quasi-autobiographical bibliomysteries featuring an English professor who solves literary puzzles involving nineteenth century American writers with the help of a hunky detective of Polish extraction.

Dunning, John, the Cliff Janeway series. Dunning just doesn't write these fast enough. His first book is the most satisfying, as his Denver police detective turned book scout seems to find an underpriced literary treasure at every single thrift shop and garage sale. The later books in the series focus less on his book finds and more on shoot 'em up chase scenes with villains. But do seek out Dunning's first bibliomystery, "Booked to Die", if you haven't read it.

Eco, Umberto, ”Foucault's Pendulum”, (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1989). Forget "The Da Vinci Code", this literate thriller about books, Knights Templar, Gnosticism, Stonehenge and international cabals is the one to read. Eco's other great biblio-roman is "The Name of the Rose"(San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1994), a murder mystery set in a 14th century Italian abbey. Lots of symbols and secrets hidden in illuminated manuscripts with a superb ending.

Engel, Howard, ”Murder in Montparnasse”, (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1999). A thriller set in 1920s Paris, in which our detective, journalist Michael Ward attempts to solve the Jack-the-Ripper-style serial murders of young women, aided by his cafe-loving writer and artist pals, including Gertrude Stein, Jules Pascin, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, etc.

Fforde, Jasper, The Thursday Next series. Several recent novels to date which are sort of a mix of mystery and fantasy, featuring literary detective Thursday Next, who investigates the kidnapping of Jane Eyre in one novel, hangs out with Shakespeare in the next.

Goodrum, Charles A., ”Dewey Decimated”, (NY: Crown Publishers, 1977). A classic bibliomystery involving death in the stacks of a rare book library. Author photo on rear jacket flap seated at his Library of Congress desk.

Gottlieb, Samuel Hirsh, “Overbooked in Arizona”, (Scottsdale, AZ: Camelback Gallery, 1994). An apocalyptic tale of bibliomania gone terribly wrong. The narrator begins his tale from a Death Row jail cell in Arizona and relates his book obsession through the Southwestern and Western United States. Lots of real-life used and rare bookstores and books discussed.

Grimes, Martha, ”Foul Matter”, (NY: Viking, 2003). Intrigue set in the cutthroat world of New York City book publishing.

Grudin, Robert, “Book”, (NY: Random House, 1992). In jacket protector. An academic caper in which University of Washington English professor has disappeared along with all known copies of his obscure but brilliant novel.

Hart, Carolyn, Death on Demand series. Annie and Max Darling run a mystery bookshop on a South Carolina resort island and solve murders on the side. This is a great series for anyone who loves classic mysteries, because Hart peppers the books with references to various authors and novels and always has a puzzle involving paintings of scenes from famous murder mysteries that is solved at the end of the book. Her two black cats, Agatha and Dorothy (after Christie and Sayers) and the coffee mugs with famous mystery book titles displayed in the store add to this literary homage.

Hess, Joan, the Claire Molloy series. Molloy owns a new bookstore in a college town but always manages to be able to lock up and sneak off to solve murders. A light, humorous series.

Hunt, Barbara, ”A Little Night Music”, (NY: Rinehart and Company, 1947). Scots second-hand bookseller assembles a collection of rare books as a legacy for his daughter, but his plans are complicated by the arrival of a mysterious stranger.

Johnson, Pamela Hansford, “Cork Street, Next to the Hatter's”, (NY: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1965). London bookshop owner Cosmo Hines and his poet wife Dorothy Merlin preside over a raft of eccentric customers, including a literature professor who sets out to write a play, The Potted Shrimp, "so overpoweringly loathsome that nobody could put it on".

Jones, D.J.H.” Murder at the MLA”, (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1993). Chicago homicide detective Boaz Dixon must enlist the assistance of Yale professor Nancy Cook to solve the pile-up of bodies at the Modern Language Association annual meeting.

Kaewert, Julie, the Alex Plumtree series. Plumtree owns a small publishing house in London and must investigate murders on the side. All the titles start with Un- (Unbound, Untitled, etc.).

Kelly, Susan, ”Out of the Darkness”, (NY: Villard, 1992). Free-lance journalist used to write about true crime for magazines, but then recessionary cutbacks squeezes her markets. She hooks up with creepy true crime bestselling writer to investigate the serial murders of young New England women.

Kurzweil, Allen, “A Case of Curiosities”, (NY: Ballantine Books, 1993). Young inventor Claude Page "learns the arts of enameling and watchmaking from an irascible defrocked Abbe, apprentices himself to a pornographic bookseller, and applies his erotic erudition to the seduction of the wife of an impotent wigmaker" in this witty novel set in late 18th century France.

Kurzweil, Allen, “The Grand Complication”, (NY: Hyperion, 2001). A stylish novel about reference librarian Alexander Short, who is hired for some after-hours cataloguing by an eccentric bibliophile looking for information about an 18th century French inventor.

Marlowe, Stephen, “The House at the End of the World”, (NY: E.P. Dutton, 1995). A novel featuring Edgar Allan Poe which offers a fictional explanation for the missing week in the author's life in 1849 when he vanished and then reappeared mortally ill at a Baltimore hospital.

McAleer, John, “Coign of Vantage, or the Boston Athenaeum Murders”, (Woodstock, VT: Countryman Press, 1988). An erudite mystery involving multiple murders at a Boston Brahmin gentleman's club neatly solved by Ralph Waldo Emerson biographer Austin Layman.

Meredith, D.R., ”Murder in Volume”, (NY: Berkley, 2000). A light, fun read about a motley cast of characters in a murder mystery book group at the local bookshop. Of course, they have a real-life murder to solve.

Michaels, Barbara, ”Houses of Stone”, (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1993). "When young professor of English Karen Holloway happens on a privately printed volume of verse dating from the early nineteenth century, it's all in a day's work. But when a battered manuscript bearing the same mysterious attribution, "Ismene," turns up, Karen realizes that it is an important discovery that could be the making of her academic career". Barbara Michaels (real name Barbara Metzger) also writes those great Egyptological Amelia Peabody mysteries under the name Elizabeth Peters.

Monfredo, Miriam Grace, the Glynis Tryon series. This is a great historical series set in Seneca Falls, New York in the mid-1800's. Not only are Civil War events swirling around, but the women's rights movement was born in this little Finger Lakes village. Enter librarian Glynis Tryon, who helps the local sheriff solve the inevitable murder.

Poe, Robert, “The Black Cat”, (NY: TOR, 1997). The author, a distant relation to Edgar Allan Poe, relates the story of a journalist, also a distant relation to Poe, who investigates the arrival of a witch woman and an outbreak of evil doings in his small town. Based on the original Poe's short story "The Black Cat".

Richardson, Bill, “Bachelor Brothers’ Bed and Breakfast”, (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1996) and its’ sequel “Bachelor Brothers’ Bed and Breakfast Pillow Book” are wonderful, cozy reads about two gentle eccentric twin brothers, Virgil and Hector who run a bed and breakfast for bibliophiles. A great mix of humor and erudition.

Riley, Judith Merkle, ”A Vision of Light”, (NY: Delacorte, 1989). Wealthy young Margaret of Ashbury has the audacity to wish to write a book about her remarkable experiences, but this just isn't done in 14th century England, so she must hire a renegade monk to chronicle her life.

Savage, Sam, “Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife”, (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2006). Firmin the Vermin (he’s a rat) comes of age in the basement of a used bookstore and then ends up hanging out with a fantasy writer in 1960s Boston. He develops an appreciation for literature after consuming various books.

Truman, Margaret, “Murder at the Library of Congress”, (NY: Random House, 1999). While researching Christopher Columbus and his travels at the Library Congress, writer Annabel Reed-Smith helps solve a murder and searches for a legendary diary by one of Columbus' shipmates.

This is only a partial list of books I have in my personal collection or on our bookshop shelves, so feel free to recommend other favorites I have missed or let me know of any biblio novel bibliographies that may be available on the Internet. There are some great resources for the bibliomystery subgenre such as this one), but I am not aware of any bibliography that addresses the bibliophilic novel.

Have a lovely time reading.