Missing Books

This is a book for the book-lover. As the author writes, 'great and wondrous things can happen around books. Boswell met Johnson at Tom Davies's bookshop in Covent Garden. Karl Marx planned to remodel the world in the Reading Room of the British Museum. Jorge Luis Borges conceived a universe in the form of a vast library. And as a child I spent my Sunday mornings in the Battersea Reference Library awaiting my mother's Sunday roast.' The loss of a library can be a catastrophe, but Brian Harris has made the most of his by inviting the reader to take a trip through the contents of his bookshelves, past and present - from children's books to science fiction, from poets ancient and modern to ground-breaking forms of biography, from literary humour to books on life's deeper issues. He describes how the writings of an English rope maker helped bring about two of the world's greatest revolutions, and how a book moved Abraham Lincoln to take up the cause of emancipation. The author has views on a host of other issues, including the importance of reading to the growing child, the inconvenience of over-weighty volumes, and when plagiarism can be justified. Brian Harris is a retired lawyer and former editor with a number of well received books to his credit on subjects such as Injustice, Intolerance, and the life and works of Rudyard Kipling.