I’ve just read a delicious review in The Observer called The Romantic Librarian. It looks at Alberto Manguel’s new book The Library at night. There is a nice comment on librarians:

Alphabetising their stock or relying on fractionalised decimals like Dewey, librarians are obsessive classifiers who impose on chaos an order they know to be fictional and false. Their crazed logic makes libraries, as Manguel says, ‘pleasantly mad places’.

The Library at night reminded me of Ex Libris: Confessions of a common reader by Anne Fadiman. A Salon review sums up its appeal:

an unapologetic confession of raging bibliophilia … a modest, charming, lighthearted gambol among the stacks. It serves up neither ideas nor theories but anecdotes about the joys of collecting and reading books.

Jasper FfordeIt seems to me that the natural outlet for a bibliophile author is to play with books and authors and even literary characters in your writing. Jasper Fforde’s exuberant books do well in this arena – fiction, fun and favourite literary figures getting to cut loose from the page and take on new roles. Where else could you get to see an army of thousands of Mrs Danvers clones (Mrs Danvers is that grim housekeeper in Rebecca) wreaking havoc?

Funnily enough I saw this tshirt called Attack of Literacy yesterday. It looks a zombie Edgar Allan Poe, Shakespeare and Jane Austen etc look ready to lay the smack down (by the way, Peter Ackroyd, one of the world’s best biographers had just published Poe: a life cut short).

Authors are easily commandeered into literary characters. I’m not sure about the trend for making them into detectives … there’s a fictional Jane Austen, Beatrix Potter and even a Dante out there solving mysteries.  And the industry of making sequels, prequels and other additions to famous books continues on apace (but never say never because I do enjoy Emma Tennant playing with fiction classics). It makes sense in our mashup culture to play around with what’s gone before and make it new.