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Title: A Pound of Paper : Confessions of a Book Addict by John Baxter ISBN: 0-312-31725-5 Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books Pub. Date: 11 December, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (4 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A Pound of Pleasure
Comment: By Bill Marsano. The very first thing you should know is that this is a book about collecting, not just book collecting. Collecting--the determined search for specific objects on a given theme--is pretty much the same kind of mania for all collectors, whether they're after vintage cars, rare stamps and coins or--as in this case--books, and whether the treasure they seeks are top dollar or bottom. Every kind of collecting develops its own little cultures and subcultures, its side streets and back alleys, its characters loved or hated or legendary. And, of course, its litany of heart-lifting successes and heart-breaking failures. So if you collect (as distinct from accumulate) or if you know a collector, this book is a definite buy.
John Baxter's collecting, which began with science fiction, made him into a short-story writer then a scriptwriter then a novelist and a teacher. He begins his trek in a desolate tank town in Australia, where things start slowly, but he soon moves on--and ups the pace and tension--to London, the U.S. (East Coast and West) and finally Paris. The whole journey runs along like a thrill ride as you join Baxter in a series of adventures and misadventures with his assortment of bookstruck ne-er-do-wells and genial lowlifes.
There are only pluses to this book. Plenty of amusing incidents and anecdotes, lots of inside information about book collecting (appplicable to collecting in general) and to top it all off, superb writing. Baxter writes vivid, imaginative, entertaining prose. He is a delight to read.--Bill Marsano is an award-winning travel writer, an editor and a desultory book collector.
Rating: 5
Summary: A True Delight For Every Book Lover
Comment: This is a engaging, entertaining memoir by a true book lover. The leisurely, slightly discursive way in which John Baxter unfolds his life story led me into imagining I had struck up a conversation with him in a musty second-hand book shop; and found his story to entertaining that I invited him across the street to a dark, smoky pub to continue the tale over several tall pints of lager.
Baxter grew up in Australia, and has since called London, Los Angeles and Paris home. He's been a broadcaster, novelist, biographer and film critic. The one constant thread in this far-ranging life has been his love of books. As a young adult, he became obsessed with science fiction. While living in London, he stumbled on a rare copy of a Graham Greene children's book, which served as the basis for a Greene collection he spent several years building.
In this book, he celebrates some of the most memorable people he's encountered along the way, including book runner Martin Stone (A book runner makes his living, if you can call it that, by buying and reselling books from flea markets, thrift stores and the like); and several literary greats, including Kingsley Amis, Ray Bradbury and Harry Harrison. He also explores collectors of erotica, the difference between Paris and London bookshops, skewers the ignorance of many eBay sellers, and has a grand good time through it all. The closing scene, where he brings all the books he owns together in one place for the first
time in his life, had a special resonance for me....it's something I dream of in my own life. For book lovers everywhere.--William C. Hall
Rating: 3
Summary: A Pound of Paper
Comment: In his memoir A Pound of Paper, novelist and film biographer John Baxter meanders through the story of his life-long obsession with books and book collecting: from his precocious childhood in the Australian hinterland, where he devoured the science fiction magazines that were piled in a friend's garage, through years spent hunting Graham Greene first editions, to his Parisian penthouse in the present, in a building whose stairwell was once splattered with F. Scott Fitzgerald's vomit. Reading the book is akin to the experience of overhearing the eclectic chatter of a cocktail party. There is a lot of talk about people and places and books and films one has never heard of: my one complaint about Baxter's book is that he spends too much time mentioning publishers or book sellers that can mean nothing to the average reader (though book collectors will doubtless relish the detail). But interspersed among the forgettable bits are some delightful passages that any neophyte reader can enjoy--Baxter's description of the eccentricities of movie theaters in the small-town Australia of his youth, or of book browsing in Parisian librairies, an activity quite unlike shopping in English or American bookshops:
"The aristocratic attitude to bookselling meant that whole areas of Anglo-Saxon book-dealing expertise simply didn't apply. In visiting a librairie, you were paying a social call and admiring a collection. You were expected to walk appreciatively along the shelves, taking down books at random, admiring the bindings, rubbing a hand over the worn morocco, perhaps reading a few pages, nodding at a well-turned phrase, even smiling. Browsing, yes, but not as we know it.
There is, too, for those interested in flayed humans, a catalogue of anthropodermically-bound books, and also a story about a certain Bea Miles--"smelly, dumpy but charismatic,"-- that is worthy of Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair: she "roamed Sydney, wearing a hand-lettered cardboard sign offering to recite Shakespeare for a shilling a time." A Pound of Paper has many such anecdotes to offer readers.
In the end, one does not leave Baxter's book feeling that one knows the author particularly well--he does not offer readers an intimate entree into his life. But one does leave the cocktail party entertained, for the most part, by the chatter.
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Title: A Splendor of Letters : The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World by Nicholas A. Basbanes ISBN: 0060082879 Publisher: HarperCollins Pub. Date: 25 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: The Bookman's Promise : A Cliff Janeway Novel by John Dunning ISBN: 0743249925 Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: 09 March, 2004 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Memoirs of a Book Snake: Forty Years of Seeking and Saving Old Books by David Meyer ISBN: 0916638545 Publisher: Waltham Street Press Pub. Date: 01 May, 2001 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
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Title: Book Row : An Anecdotal and Pictorial History of the Antiquarian Book Trade by Marvin Mondlin, Roy Meador ISBN: 0786713054 Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub. Date: 10 December, 2003 List Price(USD): $28.00 |
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Title: So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading by Sara Nelson ISBN: 0399150838 Publisher: Putnam Pub Group Pub. Date: 09 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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