blogis librorum. A blog about books. Rare books.

At some point in their careers, most great bands release a collection of B-sides. Songs that were recorded but were deemed not quite appropriate for official release on a record or CD. These songs often stray from the band’s usual sound and find the musicians experimenting with style, genre, length, instrumentation, and so on. With an author as prolific as Ian Fleming, it stands to reason there would be some B-side material with the world-renowned James Bond stories, which is where we find the 1966 volume, Octopussy and The Living Daylights.  

Any lovers of twentieth-century Russian literature should learn about—and purchase as soon as possible—the recently translated works of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. The Soviet author was born in Ukraine and studied law before traveling across much of Western Europe. In 1922, when he was thirty-five years old, he moved to Moscow, where he wrote most of his works in that same decade and shortly thereafter. His fiction was never published during his lifetime, likely due to the threat of Soviet censorship. Some have called him a postmodernist, trapped in the post-Revolutionary world of the Soviet Union in which literary dissent was unwelcome. Others describe his work in terms of science-fiction, fantasy, and even the magically real. Yet we don’t know that Krzhizhanovsky’s fiction is capable of being packaged so neatly. His works are at once reminiscent of postmodern novelists and short-story writers, true, yet they’re also some of the few works of fiction that seem to be truly unique.

American writer Margaret Fuller is well known for her roles as a journalist, novelist, critic, and feminist. Her untimely death in 1850 resulted in the loss of the manuscript that by all accounts would have been her masterpiece, but the legacies she left behind in women's history, feminism, and transcendentalism are more than enough to cement her place as one of the most important writers of the early 19th century.

In 1940, Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon appeared in English. While Koestler, a Hungarian-born author and journalist who later immigrated to Britain, wrote in German early on, he later began writing and publishing in English. The novel has an interesting backstory to it. Koestler wrote the novel in German (indeed, the last novel that he wrote in German), yet for decades, readers, scholars, and other interested parties had only known the novel in its English translation. While attempting to escape to the U.K. during the early years of World War II, Koestler convinced his lover, Daphne Hardy, to translate the novel into English. Everyone assumed that the original German-language version of the novel had been lost, and the English translation became the first edition of the text for all intents and purposes.

However, in 2015, a researcher in Switzerland discovered an original German-language version of the novel, reopening the background to Koestler’s famous twentieth-century work and to numerous political issues surrounding translation, wartime violence, and totalitarianism.

When my girls had library day at school or took home a book order form in their oversized backpacks, they were always excited to make their book choice. When you consider it, children actually have a fairly small number of things in their life on which they get to make the final decision. In their quest, I’m certain they carefully circled the library shelves at school as well as the pictures and descriptors in the fliers—usually with brightly colored hi-lighters if memory serves. I’m not sure when or how this happened, but nothing tipped the scales more or caused greater excitement than when a book had a medal on its cover. I can now point to this as an early sign of a lifetime of good decision-making. The Randolph Caldecott Medal is awarded yearly for the most distinguished American picture book for children. Among its recipients are titles with which many of us are familiar. However, since its inception in 1938, I’m certain there are a number of books that flew under or eventually fell off of our literary radar. Here are a few medalists worth rediscovering.

There's nothing like a good spy thriller to get your imagination running wild. And perhaps no one was better able to give his readers such a trip as the legendary Ian Fleming. Indeed, the titular hero of his James Bond series of books started out as an intentionally flat character, someone onto whom readers could project a more complex identity. And project they did. 26 film adaptions (and original reimaginings of the character) later, James Bond is one of the most well-known and well-loved characters in Western film and literature, his exploits having evolved over the years into a full-fledged mythology. The other characters who populate Ian Fleming’s literary universe, seemingly to compensate for a milquetoast Bond, were frequently more colorful and memorable, developing their own cults of admiration among readers. Here are five of Ian Fleming’s most memorable characters (who are not James Bond).

Are you interested in learning more about the natural spaces that inspired Jack London? Were you under the impression that you’d need to travel to the Yukon Territory in Canada to connect with the author? If you happen to find yourself in Northern California and can make your way to Glen Ellen, you can visit the Jack London State Historic Park, also known as the Jack London Home and Ranch. There’s not exactly a house to tour, but you can visit the remnants of London’s dream house, which was destroyed during a fire and never rebuilt. And this is also the site of the author’s grave, which you can visit on your own or through a guided tour. The wilds of Northern California are not quite those of the Yukon Territory, but you can nonetheless get a sense of how wilderness and solitude helped to define the writer.

Though there are many prestigious job titles in the world, none should be as highly regarded as “mother.” Mothers are the ones who love unconditionally, who support us enthusiastically, and who never let us go rollerblading without wearing our wrist-guards. To the women we cannot possibly repay, here are ten of the best quotes about mothers in literature:

Like many other countries in South and Southeast Asia, Indonesia’s modern history is one marked by colonization and the harms of imperialism. While some of the most frequently read books on Indonesia focus on the colonial period or postcolonialism in the country, we think it is important to make sure that you don’t think the region’s history begins with its colonization by the Dutch. Indonesia has a widely diverse cultural, social, and religious makeup, with parts of the country still governed by pre-colonial monarchy and others the democratic state. It is often described as one of the most heavily populated Muslim countries in the world, yet many religions beyond Islam are practiced, including Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity.

Given’s the region’s diversity, there are many exciting books on Indonesia to discover. Below we have just a few of our picks for the best books on Indonesia.

Children's literature today is as celebrated and lauded as literature for adult audiences. Entire sections of libraries are dedicated to it. Scholarly publications are dedicated to giving it advanced critical thought. Distinguished panels are put together annually to award the year's best and most important examples of literature for children. In recent years, it has become so popular that entirely separate best seller lists have been established in order to accommodate all of the worthy books being published for children. In short, it is hard to imagine a world in which children's books are not a large part of childhood. However, books written specifically for children are actually a rather new development in the greater history of literature.