blogis librorum. A blog about books. Rare books.

There’s an exciting new project at the University of Virginia that highlights the significance of the book as a physical object and the individual histories of library books. At a moment in which the physicality of university libraries (and others across the country) are under threat of depletion due to the looming presence of the electronic text, we couldn’t imagine a more compelling project than Book Traces. It’s a crowd-sourced web project sponsored by NINES at the University of Virginia, and it’s led by Andrew Stauffer, a professor of 19th-century literature at UVA. We had a chance to catch up with Professor Stauffer to ask some questions about the origins, current uses, and futures of Book Traces.

If you’re planning a trip to Spain and you like to think of yourself as a book collector, then you’re in luck. The International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB) lists more than 40 shops selling rare and antiquarian books in various parts of the country, from storefronts in Sevilla in the southern part of Spain to those in Bilbao in the north. Depending on where you travel in the country, the makeup of the cities—from language to culture—varies widely. Anyone who has been to Catalonia will tell you that Catalan, as opposed to Spanish, is the primary language spoken. And in towns with close proximity to the Strait of Gibraltar, the architecture reveals influences from North Africa. But these regions do have one thing in common: a commitment to the preservation and sale of the book as physical object.

Morocco is a place that has long captivated the Western imagination, both for good and for bad. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine classical Hollywood cinema without thinking of Casablanca, Michael Curtiz’s 1942 wartime screen gem starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. While none of the film was actually shot on location in the country (in fact, the entire city of Casablanca depicted in the film was created at the Warner Brothers studio), it continues to introduce audiences to the city of the same name on the Moroccan coast. And just over a decade later, Alfred Hitchcock actually shot The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) on location in Marrakech, bringing that city’s old medina to American viewers with the help of Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day.

But there’s a lot more to twentieth-century Morocco and its hold on our imaginations. We’d like to take a look at some of the literary works that have reshaped the ways we think about Casablanca, Marrakech, and other cities in the North African country.

Bohumil Hrabal was a Czech novelist and essayist whose work perhaps best depicts the tragicomedies of politics and everyday life. He was born in Brno, the second-largest city in the Czech Republic (after Prague), on March 28, 1914. At the time of Hrabal’s birth, however, Brno was one of many Eastern European cities within the Austro-Hungarian empire. And during Hrabal’s lifetime, he’d see those national borders that defined his urban life continue to shift as both Brno and Prague became part of Czechoslovakia (1918-1993) and later the Czech Republic. His fiction has been adapted for the screen on more than one occasion to much critical praise, and if you have a chance, you shouldn’t hesitate to start reading his work, which redefines the boundaries of magical realism at several significant moments in twentieth-century history.

One of the most prominent literary voices for political freedom and racial equality in South Africa, Nadine Gordimer wrote fifteen novels, more than two hundred short stories, and numerous other essays and works of criticism. Gordimer resided in Johannesburg, South Africa, a city that features prominently in her fiction. After her death in 2014, literary magazines across the world published tributes to the writer and her role in the anti-apartheid movement. Gordimer’s literature remains essential to any consideration of the relationship between fiction and politics. With so many works to choose from, where should a reader begin? Tracking a career that spans more than sixty years, here are five of the most influential books of Nadine Gordimer.

Graphic novels haven’t always held an esteemed spot on collectors’ shelves. While earlier incarnations of the graphic novel (i.e., comic books) have indeed been objects heavily and preciously collected, the rise of the graphic novel is assumed to be, for many readers, a relatively new phenomenon. Yet many graphic novels (and other works by their authors) are quite collectible. If you’re thinking about starting a new type of collection, delving into the history of this genre might be for you.

Over the last century, war literature has become a popular genre for readers in many parts of the world. Whether you were assigned Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) on a literature syllabus dealing with World War I, or if you picked up a copy of Michael Herr’s Dispatches (1977) to learn more about the war in Vietnam, you’re likely acquainted with fiction and creative nonfiction that interrogates and remakes wartime experiences. But one area of war literature that isn’t so commonly read or taught is fiction from the recent Iraq War. If you’d like to think more about the relationship among novels, memoirs, and the so-called war on terror, where should you begin? We’d like to recommend a handful of books that hail both from American authors and from Iraqi writers translated from the original Arabic.

If you have an academic interest in historical archives or merely a personal passion for learning more about the origins of literary culture, there are many libraries both in the United States and abroad that are likely to pique your interest. One of the most interesting libraries that you are likely to encounter is one set high above the city of Barcelona in the mountain of Montserrat. Indeed, the Abbey of Montserrat, located in Catalonia, Spain, contains a library founded in the 11th century. And if you make plans ahead of time, you can visit the collections, including various manuscript works from the last several centuries.

What would it look like to take a trek across the country (and outside the country, too) to visit all of the homes and favorite haunts of Ernest Hemingway? The novelist and short-story writer made his homes in seemingly disparate parts of the United States and the Caribbean, not to mention the years he spent living abroad as an expatriate in Paris, France. We’re intrigued by the varied climates that captured the writer’s interest, particularly in relation to his relatively domestic beginnings in Oak Park, Illinois. So, if you were going to take a tour through Hemingway’s life, what homes would need to make your list?

How might we introduce children to important issues of politics in literature? While such a premise might seem unlikely, a number of children's books have depicted geopolitical violence at various moments in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, suggesting that illustrated books perhaps contain more power within their pages than many of us would anticipate. From Linda Sue Park’s historical book about 12th-century Korea to Thanhha Lai’s illustrated poems of exile from Vietnam, children’s books have a lot to teach us and the children in each of our lives.