Here we are.

Well, here we are folks, a New Year and almost midway through January (how did that happen?).

It’s been a string of rainy and dull January days. The Christmas decorations are put away, the tree is down, the house is back to everyday, the bills are coming in, and wannabe dictators threaten on the horizon.

But, hey lets cheer up and talk about books, always a good place to go when things seem grim.

I only read one (only one!) Christmas book, I picked up and put down several before settling in on a lovely novel set in an English bookshop, (of course). It’s put away with my notes to tell you about next year.

Santa gave me a lovely book…no, no, truth be told, I bought it for myself. While at favorite independent bookstore, buying a book for a friend, I stumbled across this little gem – and how could I resist?

This is a new addition to the Everyman’s Pocket Classics series. These are beautiful smallish books, bound with cloth in Germany. The dust jackets are, without exception, stunning. The books in this series are always nice to hold in the hand. (Funny how some books aren’t great to hold…)

Everyman’s Library was conceived in 1905 by London publisher Joseph Malaby Dent, whose goal was to create a 1,000-volume library of world literature that was affordable for, and that appealed to, every kind of person, from students to the working classes to the cultural elite.

All the Everyman’s editions come with this circa 1905, somewhat stilted, introduction and a sewn-in ribbon bookmark.

From the inside flap:

An enchanting book about books: a beautiful hardcover Pocket Classics anthology of stories that testify to the irresistible power of the written word.
The characters in the delightful stories collected here range all the way from the ink-stained medieval monks in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose to the book-besotted denizens of Ali Smith’s Public Library and Other Stories. In these pages readers are invited to enter the interior lives of librarians in Lorrie Moore’s “Community Life” and Elizabeth McCracken’s “Juliet” and are ushered into a host of unusual libraries, including the infinite rooms of Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Library of Babel” and a secret library in Helen Oyeyemi’s “Books and Roses.”

I’ve been happily skipping around reading a story here, a snippet there. So far, a wonderful collection of stories for book lovers, it even includes excerpts from 84 Charing Cross Road.

So, I’m closing the drapes, making a cup of tea I got for Christmas, and enjoying my new book.