Books and Libraries

An enchanting book about books: a beautiful hardcover Pocket Poets anthology that testifies to the passion books and libraries have inspired through the ages and around the world. Ever since Gutenberg, books have captured the love, imagination, even the veneration, of readers everywhere. Few human-made objects rival the book in evoking such bone-deep affection. Emily Dickinson called these page-packed parcels Frigates that take us Lands away. They are the deli offerings of civilization itself (Alberto Rios). Such affection naturally extends to the consummate book places--the libraries and bookshops where one can best hear a choir of authors murmuring inside their books / along the unlit, alphabetical shelves (Billy Collins). The poets collected here range from the writer of Ecclesiastes in the third century BCE through such canonical writers of British and American literature as William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, and Robert Frost to more recent poets writing in countries across many time zones, including such luminaries as Jorge Luis Borges, Wallace Stevens, Gwendolyn Brooks, Pablo Neruda, Maya Angelou, and Derek Walcott.