The Biblio File: images of bookmarks, for bibliophiles

And you read your Emily Dickinson
And I my Robert Frost
And we note our place with book markers
That measure what we've lost

David Levine on writers: Billy Collins

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

Mutts

First Lines: Terry Gamble

In the years before our grandmother died, when my sister and I wore matching dresses, and the grown-ups, unburdened by conscience, drank gin and smoked; those years before planes made a mockery of distance, and physics a mockery of time; in the years before I knew what it was like to be regarded with hard, needy want, when my family still had its goodness, and I my innocence; in those years before Negroes were blacks, and soldiers went AWOL, and women were given their constrained, abridged liberties, we traveled to Michigan by train.

Good Family

Terry Gamble

"They say it's your birthday" - writers born on August 28

John Betjeman  (1906)
Bruce Catton  (1899)

Robertson Davies  (1913)

Rita Dove  (1952)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe  (1749)
Janet Frame  (1924)

Sheridan Le Fanu  (1814)

Tasha Tudor  (1915)

Jack Vance  (1916)

The Biblio File: images of readers, for bibliophiles

"Artist's Sisters Reading," Constantin Hansen