blogis librorum. A blog about books. Rare books.

J.D. Salinger said, "Mothers are all slightly insane." Alice Walker complemented her mother with these words, "Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me." Maya Angelou wrote of her mother, "To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power."

From the slightly insane to the flawed to the near saintly, mothers have been a force of nature in both human history and in literature. In honor of Mother's Day, here are five literary mothers on which to ruminate this May.

The process of printing and publishing a book has many steps, and when it comes to collecting rare books, the pre-publication material can be as valuable (if not more so) than the actual book. What are the terms to distinguish these unique items? We hope this quick glossary helps in your collecting!

You can’t talk about the history of libraries without including the Library of Alexandria, that pinnacle of human knowledge and wisdom in the Ancient World. Like other aspects of far history, not very much is concretely known about the Library of Alexandria, but we can piece together what Ancient historians and thinkers have said about it. It is not just a matter of legend.

Author Peter Benchley may have stumbled into fame as an expert on all things shark, but he quickly took up the mantle as their advocate. Benchley’s smash hit novel, Jaws, came out in 1974, spent 44 weeks on the bestseller list, and became the first summer blockbuster film (ever) the following year. Although Benchley cast a great white shark as his villain, he would spend the rest of his career debunking the stereotype he created.

Are you a fan of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings? Ever wonder what it would be like to live in Middle Earth? Are you more of a hobbit, elf, dwarf, orc, or human? Take our quiz to discover where you belong on Middle Earth.

Today, Robert Browning is a firmly canonical author. His art draws a line between the Victorian literary tradition of psychological realism and the following tidal wave of modernism. His great talent is most apparent in his dramatic monologues, in which his poetry expertly illustrates the thoughts, motivations, and intellectual machinations of a character. Yet despite his posthumous fame, for a considerable portion of his life, Browning was overshadowed by his poetically gifted wife, Elizabeth Barrett.

The Jorge Luis Borges Collection at the University of Virginia attracts scholars from across the globe who are interested in examining one—or many—of the more than 2000 titles in its holdings. In fact, UVA's Borges collection is the most comprehensive in the world. We were lucky enough to conduct an interview with Jared Loewenstein, who began developing the collection in 1977.

Kaye Gibbons's debut novel Ellen Foster (1987), which she wrote at the age of 26, opens with the sentence, "When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy." In a letter to her readers Gibbons explains, "Since Ellen Foster is autobiographical, it shouldn't come as a shock that when I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy. My mother...became too sad and died when I was almost ten..." Back to the book, the fictional character, 11-year-old Ellen Foster says a few lines later, "But I did not kill my daddy. He drank his own self to death a year after the County moved me out." This raw, honest tone penetrates Kaye Gibbons' works, making them poignant reads and lenses into the power of writing through and about pain.

In 15th century Europe, the act of accumulating a collection of written works was linked to prestige and wealth. An early collector from this period, Philip the Good, proves an interesting study. As the Duke of Burgundy, Philip amassed a vast collection of texts, more specifically, illuminated manuscripts. During his reign, he contributed to a flourishing of the arts throughout the Burgundy province.

The past is never dead. It's not even past. -William Faulkner, 1951

While Faulkner could sometimes be cryptic, this quote seems easy enough to grasp. After all, if the past were really past, why would we read so much historical fiction? Hardly the sole purview of trashy paperback enthusiasts and Civil War reenactors, historical fiction has held a distinguished place in literary history for centuries. It stretches back to the famed 16th Century poet Sir Walter Raleigh and continues through to contemporary authors like Hilary Mantel. Between these two, the legacy of historical fiction makes another notable stop with Nobel Prize-winning author Henryk Sienkiewicz.