Here are libraries modest mobile mystical (Borges of course) and magical (Helen Oyeyemi's
enchanting 'Books and Roses') public and private provincial and prestigious. Little that
happen in Elizabeth McCracken's eccentric library did not happen in real life - even down to
the murder and it is rumoured that on 3 June 1997 the British Museum Reading Room really was
visited by the ghost of Max Beerbohm's obscurest of poets Enoch Soames... Fiction and reality
merge in Cortazar's 'A Continuity of Parks'. Characters step out of their books in Fay Weldon's
'Lily Bart's Hat Shop' while Jasper Fforde's Jurisfiction operatives enter Wuthering Heights
to deliver a Rage-Counselling session. Charles Lamb muses on the annoying book-borrowing habits
of Samuel Taylor Coleridge the teenage Teffi is overawed by Tolstoy Helene Hanff in Manhattan
launches her famous correspondence with a London antiquarian bookshop at 84 Charing Cross Road.
Reading as the Queen informs an appalled private secretary is 'untidy discursive and
perpetually inviting'. And also of course a lot of fun. Sit comfortably then and begin.
