Richard Coxford is the proprietor of Bytown Bookshop in Ottawa, Canada. He has been collecting fine/press books for many years. We talk here about their history, and the joys and challenges of hunting them down.

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Band: not broad.

This is just in, though a tad dated:  a carrier pigeon can deliver information faster than the Internet, at least in South Africa. Local news agency SAPA reports (via Reuters) that Winston an 11 month old pigeon, took one hour and eight minutes to fly the 80 km (50 miles) from offices near Pietermaritzburg to the coastal city of Durban with a data card strapped to his leg. Including downloading, the entire transfer took two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds — the time it took for only four percent of the same data to be transferred using a Telkom ('Hellcom to South Africans) line.

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"The full appreciation of fiction, as of poetry, history or drama, depends upon a skilled technique which in turn can only be obtained by constant watchfulness. The aim is the development of a ripe sensibility, capable of sensing the meaning within the meaning of words and sentences. The skilled reader is not dependent on the adventitious aids of easiness or brightness; he is no longer, for instance, dependent upon plot for his enjoyment of fiction, or upon what is called 'actuality' or 'incident', or mere verisimilitude of description. Such things are elementary and they evoke but superficial feelings. They are for the callow reader, or for those moments when an easy escape from trial or tension is necessary. Imaginative experience should induce a sensitiveness towards inner meaning, towards understanding the subtlety and tenderness which an author experiences when he puts himself into plot or character or incident."

from The Reading of Books by Holbrook Jackson.

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As rendered by Edith Sitwell:

"Virginia Woolf had a moonlit transparent beauty. She was exquisitely carved, with large thoughtful eyes that held no foreshadowing of that tragic end which was a grief to everyone who had ever known her."

And by Rosamond Lehmann:

"She was extremely beautiful, with an austere intellectual beauty of bone and outline, with large melancholy eyes under carved lids, and the nose and lips, the long narrow cheek of a Gothic madonna. Her voice light, musical, with a throaty note in it, was one of her great charms. She was tall and thin, and her hands were exquisite."

From John Lehmann's Thrown to the Woolves.

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Alabama, and Les Pitons de St. Lucia.

Photo: Zazzle

A lonesome used bookstore in Mobile,

and some street-side

flowers

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Oldest, biggest, tallest, deepest…you'll find a lot of these 'ests' in tourism literature…here are some of what I'd say are the coolest

photos

I took

at the

French Market in New Orleans

the other day.

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One of the most memorable features of the French Quarter in New Orleans

is the multi-coloured, variously textured facades

which grace the buildings that

line the

streets.

New Orleans is now one of only a few cities that offers a decent congregation of used

bookstores

within

(French Quarter)

blocks

of eachother.

I did the rounds yesterday.