The Biblio File: images of N.E. bookstores, for bibliophiles

Oliver & Friends Bookshop, Waterville, Maine

David Levine on writers: Hermann Hesse

David Levine (1926-2009) was one of America’s most prominent illustrators during a career that spanned decades. No less an authority than Jules Feiffer described him as "the greatest caricaturist of the last half of the 20th century,” although Levine continued to work in the early years of this century as well. Levine’s subjects included himself (above) and people from many walks of life. Authors, scribes and scribblers were a big part of the mix, as these caricatures make clear. 

Lit Toons: Cartoons with a bookish bent

Macanudo

First Lines: John Scalzi

I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife's grave. Then I joined the army.

Old Man’s War

John Scalzi

"They say it's your birthday" - writers born on January 6

Allen Appel  (1945)
Idris Davies  (1905)
E. L. Doctorow  (1931) 

Khalil Gibran  (1883)
Juan Goytisolo  (1931)
Barry Lopez  (1945)
Ion Minulescu  (1881)
Wright Morris  (1910)

Carl Sandburg  (1878)
Karin Slaughter  (1971) 

Elizabeth Strout  (1956)
Alan Watts  (1915)

The Biblio File: images of bookplates, for bibliophiles

David Levine on writers: François Rabelais

David Levine (1926-2009) was one of America’s most prominent illustrators during a career that spanned decades. No less an authority than Jules Feiffer described him as "the greatest caricaturist of the last half of the 20th century,” although Levine continued to work in the early years of this century as well. Levine’s subjects included himself (above) and people from many walks of life. Authors, scribes and scribblers were a big part of the mix, as these caricatures make clear. 

Lit Toons: Cartoons with a bookish bent

First Lines: Philip Roth

I hadn't been in New York in eleven years. Other than for surgery in Boston to remove a cancerous prostate, I’d hardly been off my rural mountain road in the Berkshires in those eleven years and, what’s more, had hardly looked at a newspaper or listened to the news since 9/11, three years back; with no sense of loss—merely, at the outset, a kind of drought within me—I had ceased to inhabit not just the great world but the present moment.

Exit Ghost

Philip Roth

"They say it's your birthday" - writers born on January 5

Friedrich Dürrenmatt  (1921)
 Umberto Eco  (1932) 

Rudolf Eucken  (1846) 
Stella Gibbons (1902)
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o  (1938)

W. D. Snodgrass  (1926)