A Passion for Books - Tapa dura

Two publishing industry veterans collect 60 classic and modern musings on the joys and perils of bibliomania. They include book care tips, resources, "The Ten Best-Selling Books Rejected by Publishers Twenty Times or More," cartoons, a bibliobibliography, and a foreword by Ray Bradbury who wrote of book-burning in Fahrenheit 451 . Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

have a little money, I buy books. And if any is left, I buy food and clothing."
--Desiderius Erasmus

Those who share Erasmus's love of those curious bundles of paper bound together between hard or soft covers know exactly how he felt. These are the people who can spend hours browsing through a bookstore, completely oblivious not only to the passage of time but to everything else around them, the people for whom buying books is a necessity, not a luxury. A Passion for Books is a celebration of that love, a collection of sixty classic and contemporary essays, stories, lists, poems, quotations, and cartoons on the joys of reading, appreciating, and collecting books.

This enriching collection leads off with science-fiction great Ray Bradbury's Foreword, in which he remembers his penniless days pecking out Fahrenheit 451 on a rented typewriter, conjuring up a society so frightened of art that it burns its books. This struggle--financial and creative--led t