Phantom Libraries – Part 3: The Sealed Museum of Sir Thomas Browne

Having reviewed comical imaginary libraries from Swift to The Sims, Jonathan Law turns to stranger, more dreamlike worlds, for 'large are the treasures of oblivion'... So far, this has been mostly for laughs. The libraries invented by Rabelais, Donne, Joyce, and Swift were all uproarious things, even where the humour seemed to be laced with something ... Read More...

Why Proust hasn’t changed my life

What's the real minority specialist-interest genre of books - the one that bookshops just can't shift? It's literary fiction, says Steerforth... As a bookseller, one of the first lessons I learned when running the fiction section was that the sales of the first volume of Proust's A La Recherche Du Temps ... Read More...