blogis librorum. A blog about books. Rare books.

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.

Writers are often the best champions of other writers. In the early days of the last century, it was Nobel laureate George Bernard Shaw who helped cement Henrik Ibsen’s reputation in the English-speaking world. Years later, Pulitzer Prize winner Walker Percy would play a crucial role in arranging the posthumous publication of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) after a manuscript thereof was sent to him by Toole’s mother. That Bernard Shaw and Walker Percy were, by then, quite prominent in their own rights was of course a huge help to their causes, as seems so often to be the case.That’s why it’s rather lucky for P.G. Wodehouse that his mantle was taken up by none other than Evelyn Waugh. 

What is a bookworm, anyway? Is it the baby of a beetle? A living creature that loves books? A larvae placed there by a moth? Why do we care, again?

If you're interested in learning more about how to identify and beat the bookworm in order to keep your books and collection safe, you're in the right place. Read on for our best bookworm-busting strategies.

Book collecting can be a complex and varied activity, hobby, or profession. First editions, rare editions, signed editions, provenance...these are all areas in which one needs to be educated. But what if you want to collect, but don’t necessarily want to take a master’s course to do it? Even better, what if you just want to collect what you love, and love what you collect? One possible solution is to become a collector of children’s books.

The life of W.E.B. Du Bois occupies a remarkable span. He was born in Massachusetts in 1868 to a nation in the middle of its very reconstruction. He took up the mantel of the previous generation of great African-American thinkers, like Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, who themselves escaped bondage. But even with emancipation, America’s work was, and still is, not nearly over. But thanks to the life and work of W.E.B. Du Bois, the United States, and the world, are a little more humane.

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.

The San Francisco Bay Area is something of a puzzle. It’s a massive, sprawling metropolitan center whose topography and landscape is as varied as its residents. Rugged, broken hills give way to sweeping shorelines and sand dunes just as quickly as Silicon Valley life butts up against hipsters and hippies clinging to scraps of a Bohemian lifestyle first introduced by the Beat Generation of the 1950s.

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.

Legendary author Harper Lee passed away today at the age of 89. She leaves behind a legacy that has reverberated through the international literary community since the publication of her landmark novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, in 1960. The novel was an instant sensation worldwide and earned Lee a number of prestigious accolades, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961.

"If you wrote a novel in South Africa which didn't concern the central issues, it wouldn't be worth publishing.” – Alan Paton

It’s frequently said that history is written by the winners. When it comes to some of the great humanitarian causes of the last century, it often seems that the winners write most of the great literature, as well. In the case of the American Civil Rights Movement, for instance, the American canon was able to embrace such monumental works as Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), James Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953), and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). So too has the tradition of anti-apartheid writing in South Africa yielded not just powerful political statements, but some of the era’s most enduring pieces of writing. This powerful vein of protest literature gave the world Nobel Prize-winners J.M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer. It gave us Zakes Mda and Lewis Nkosi. And, crucially, it gave us Alan Paton.