In 1900, aged fourteen, Jacques Rivière founded a little journal called L’Avenir (“The Future”) which lasted three years, its print run extending to just five mimeographed copies circulated within his

“A deluge of printed matter pours over the world”, F. R. Leavis proclaimed in his doctoral thesis of 1924. An excess of low-quality verbiage, in the view of this young literary scholar, was doing harm

“As movers and the moved both know”, John Updike noted, “books are heavy freight ... They make us think twice about changing addresses.” Books: A manifesto, or, How to build a library begins with the

Gerald Howard’s The Insider is a crowded but colourful portrait of Malcolm Cowley, poet, editor and chronicler of the so-called Lost Generation – those American exemplars of literary modernism who, li

“This tremendous aggregate of a book has many of the characteristics of a Festschrift assembled to honour some Great Influencer”: so, in 1973, the architectural historian Priscilla Metcalf began the f

“Where are we to begin?”, Virginia Woolf asks in her essay “How to Read a Book”. “How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and so get the deepest and widest pleasures from what we read?