Monday, April 12, 2010

#16: The Man Who Loved Books Too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett

Nonfiction exploration of book collecting, featuring curiously amoral book thief John Gilkey and the legion of rare book dealers that gathered to send him to jail.  Author Allison Hoover Bartlett inserts herself into the narrative, sometimes uncomfortably, as she gets involved with both sides of the story.

Voracious readers like myself will find interesting passages on the nature of collecting various things, and John Gilkey is a character really too strange for fiction.  Reading some of the interesting book anecdotes made me start thinking about used bookstores and garage sales a bit differently.  Overall, I enjoyed this look into a subculture I was only aware of in a tertiary way.

I listened to this on audio book on loan from the Morrison-Reeves Library in Richmond, Indiana.

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