About the Book: Books-A Manifesto: Or, How to Build a Library
This is a book about books, about the subversive power of reading and the
strange, enduring magic of books as objects.
Ever since childhood, books have been at the centre of Ian Pattersons life, as
a poet, teacher, translator, bookseller and collector. As he constructs the last
of many libraries, he makes an impassioned case for the radical importance of
reading in our lives-from Proust to Jilly Cooper, from golden-age detective
novels to avant-garde poetry.
Wise, irreverent and exhilaratingly wide-ranging, Books: A Manifesto reminds us
that poems know things that we