“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

“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

LETTERS

“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

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Michael D. C. Drout The Tower and the Ruin J. R. R. Tolkien’s creation 384pp. Norton. £25. Giuseppe Pezzini Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation 456pp. Cambridge University Press. £30. Michael