The Bookcase of Curiosities is a corner of this site dedicated to the unexpected. Not every remarkable signed book was signed by its author. Sometimes the signature belongs to an actor who loved the work, a musician who lived inside it, a cultural figure whose connection to the text is oblique, personal, or simply wonderful. These are books with a story attached, where the signature adds a layer of meaning that no bibliographer could have predicted.
This section celebrates those happy accidents of collecting, the items that don’t fit neatly into any category but are too interesting to ignore. Each one is from my own shelves, and each one arrived with a conversation, a coincidence, or an encounter worth writing down.
I arrived at the Stieg Larsson party a little late. For a while I’d been noticing the Millennium trilogy in Italian translation, stacked up in huge pyraminds in bookshops all over Rome, impossible to miss, but for some reason I resisted the marketing push. It was my writer friend Adam Williams who finally gave me …
There are pianists who play the notes, and pianists who play the notes AND the room. Lang Lang has always been firmly in the second camp, and that is precisely why critics have spent decades unsure what to do with him. Too theatrical, too demonstrative …simply too much! What they are now reluctantly beginning to …
The signed copy of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley: Essential Poems that sits in my collection is not a rare first edition, but it comes with a great story and the somewhat bittersweet memory of the day I met Julian Sands. On the afternoon of 6 September 2019, the library of the Keats-Shelley House …
