Ex Libris

Pulitzer Prize–winning literary critic Michiko Kakutani shares 100 personal, thought-provoking essays about books that have mattered to her and that help illuminate the world we live in today—with beautiful illustrations throughout. “A book tailormade for bibliophiles.”—Oprah Winfrey “An ebullient celebration of books and reading.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) In the introduction to her new collection of essays, Ex Libris: 100+ Books to Read and Reread, Michiko Kakutani writes: “In a world riven by political and social divisions, literature can connect people across time zones and zip codes, across cultures and religions, national boundaries and historical eras. It can give us an understanding of lives very different from our own, and a sense of the shared joys and losses of human experience.” Readers will discover novels and memoirs by some of the most gifted writers working today; favorite classics worth reading or rereading; and nonfiction works, both old and new, that illuminate our social and political landscape and some of today’s most pressing issues, from climate change to medicine to the consequences of digital innovation. There are essential works in American history (The Federalist Papers, The Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr.); books that address timely cultural dynamics (Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction, Daniel J. Boorstin’s The Image, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale); classics of children’s literature (the Harry Potter novels, Where the Wild Things Are); and novels by acclaimed contemporary writers like Don DeLillo, William Gibson, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Ian McEwan. With richly detailed illustrations by lettering artist Dana Tanamachi that evoke vintage bookplates, Ex Libris is an impassioned reminder of why reading matters more than ever.

Ruth Bell Graham is known as the wife of evangelist Billy Graham. It was Ruth who influenced Billy, as his most trusted life-partner. In Ruth, a Portrait, we meet this fascinating and remarkable woman. Brimming with anecdotes, this is a breathtaking journey, with stops at many of this century's epoch-making events. The childhood years of the future Mrs. Billy Graham were spent light-years away--in the China of the 1920s and 1930s. The daughter of medical missionaries, she and her family were caught in a crucible of unspeakable hardship; in addition to pestilence and plague, there was the unstable political and military turmoil surrounding the Nationalist government, the Communists, and the Japanese invaders. These hazardous realities shaped Ruth Bell and her family, a family inured to difficulties, but buoyed up by their deep belief in God's abiding will. Virtually raised by the Grahams, the author is a repository of Ruth Bell Graham's stories and has seen firsthand the spirit of this courageous woman. Patricia Cornwell not only gives readers a full, rounded, and intimate portrait of Ruth Bell Graham, but also insight into the life of the Graham family and particularly Billy Graham.

Responding to a cryptic summons to a remote country house, London bookseller Isaac Inchbold finds himself responsible for restoring a magnificent library pillaged during the English Civil War, and in the process slipping from the surface of 1660s London into an underworld of spies and smugglers, ciphers and forgeries. As he assembles the fragments of a complex historical mystery, Inchbold learns how Sir Ambrose Plessington, founder of the library, escaped from Bohemia on the eve of the Thirty Years War with plunder from the Imperial Library. Inchbold's hunt for one of these stolen volumes - a lost Hermetic text - soon casts him into an elaborate intrigue; his fortunes hang on the discovery of the missing manuscript but his search reveals that the elusive volume is not what it seems and that he has been made an unwitting player in a treacherous game.

A collection of essays discusses the central and joyful importance of books and reading in the author's life.

You are looking at (or: you are holding) the book Ex Libris by Matt Madden. Maybe you came looking for it, maybe you just came across it in a bookstore or at someone's house. Maybe you are reading this in a catalogue on a screen. What kind of adventure do you think takes place in these pages? To judge by the cover design and the title, it would seem that books themselves are a subject of this book. Does this book have a comic book as its hero? If you put the book down now, you'll never find out, but on the other hand imaginary, hypothetical versions of the story will branch off endlessly in some corner of your mind. If you do want to find out what happens, all you need to do is open the book and read the first page. But be careful: you might just get sucked in

In the fall of 1924, occultist and New Hampshire native, Benjamin Franklin Wentworth comes into possession of an ancient text which appears to show that the tomb of the man who inspired the legend of Merlin the Magician is located somewhere in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. He assembles an eclectic crew, including the mysterious Professor Hecate N� Fidelma, a reputed witch, and sets off in search of the tomb. However, their plans go awry. Unsure whom she can trust, Hecate sets out on her own and goes into hiding. Pregnant and alone, she is in desperate need of help. But someone suspects her secret and has found where she is. And they are interested in more than just an old book...

"On the Processes for the Production of Ex Libris (Book-Plates)" by John Vinycomb is a fascinating text for craftsmen and artisans as well as literature lovers and intellectuals. Though the topic of book-plates may seem like it can easily be dry and uninteresting, Vinycomb manages to make it an intriguing and even entertaining topic.