Novel Living: Collecting, Decorating and Crafting with Books
By Lisa Occhipinti​. STC Craft. $29.99.

The Book Lovers' Anthology
Edited by R. M. Leonard. Bodleian Library. $45.

Roger Grenier, born in France in 1919 and the author of more than 40 books, celebrates a lifetime's reading in Palace of Books. Grenier's translator, Alice Kaplan, professor of French literature at Yale University, notes in her foreword that Grenier, "looks to literature, to writers, to elucidate life's mysteries. Why do people feel the need to write? Why is the act of waiting so central a theme in literature? What is [the] difference between putting your deepest self in a literary text and revealing your private life".

Grenier's nine chapters explore themes and issues from personal observations and selections from authors that he has either read extensively, or with whom he has worked as an editor at Gallimard. In the former category are authors such as Proust, Nabokov, Balzac, Stendhal and Kafka, while the latter include Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.

Apart from his thematic interrogation of his favourite writers, he throws in intriguing snippets, such as Camus' La Peste being the only major contemporary novel without significant female characters. Camus apparently wanted to emphasise the trauma of wartime separations. Former French President Francois Mitterrand always gave a copy of Albert Cohen's Belle du Seigneur to his favoured female companions, which may or may not have pleased them.

John Donne once wrote, "I shall die reading: since a book and my grave are so near." Given Grenier's age, the last two pages of his book appropriately bring together Sartre and Beckett musing on "what else is there to do". Grenier has certainly done more than most. Readers will benefit from his wisdom expressed through his life experiences and his literary analyses. Grenier's Palace of Books will amply stock the shelves of your mind.

American artist Lisa Occhipinti provides, in Novel Living, "a hymnal to actual physical books their forms and functions", examples of innovative physical shelving.  She begins with a basic guide to collecting books, organising them and then moves on to conserving and crafting books. In her last chapter, she emphasises the aesthetic and sensory pleasures in "deconstructing and reforming books into design objects". Some of her artistic creations are ingenious, such as bedside reading headboards and making table runners and napkins composed of scans of favourite passages from books.

Does the book have a future is a constant question, but The Book Lovers' Anthology, subtitled A Companion of Writing about Books, Readers and Libraries, has no doubts. This is perhaps because it is not a new publication, but rather a reprint of a 1911 work, a fact not publicised on either the cover nor the title page.

The Bodleian​ anthology, nonetheless, is a treasure trove of apt quotations from more than 250 authors, such as Shakespeare, Swift and Ruskin, in chapters covering "Literary Worlds", "The Joys of Reading" and "The Library". The whole still resonates as "an essential anthology for bibliophiles".