More books about books...

As you all know I haven't much time for extra-curricular reading, and poor luminous has taken the brunt of the fall. I've thought about posting about my readings, but how many of you really want to know the antonym of insects or how to tell an american cockroach from an oriental one. Few of you, I'm positive. I am curious to know what books you are reading though, and I think our other visitors are too. A few sentences would do for a posting, a might just be the life blood that keeps luminous going.

That said, I did recently finish a book. Used and Rare: Travels in the Book World by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone. The writing was simple, the ideas mostly dull and yet I read it cover to cover--never mind the fact that it took me three months. If you are interested in learning key words that come up in the book business (and by that I do mean the used and rare books business) this book is a great primer. From foxing and sizing to rag paper and red rot, there are many great terms scattered through out the book that anyone interested in working with books for a living should probably know.

That said the couple who co-authored the book are both supposedly writers but didn't come to have a love for book collecting until their mid-thirties. Whaaa? And if they had really read all the books that claim to have read, I would think their writing would be more refined and poetic. But alas, it's not. It also takes them all of 200 pages to and thousands of dollars to come to the conclusion they started off with. $7,000.00 for a book isn't reasonable for the average person. Lord knows how they were able to afford this "hobby" on writer's salaries. But since they the dropped book collecting like a bad habit by the end of the book, I guess it's not worth spending too much time trying to figure out.