Fantastic Metropolis

Intro · Likes · Rituals · Necessity
Examples · Memories · Bios

Forrest Aguirre

Back in the early ’90s, before I knew what I wanted to do with my college career, I picked up a hardbound edition of Dinesen’s Out of Africa. Because of that little volume (and, I believe, not only because of the text therein) my life has taken several turns that would never have been, were it not for that brown and black box of paper magic. Books are objects of power—be careful the next time you hear one’s siren’s song through the aisles. Keep a safe emotional distance, as that power cannot be treated lightly without consequence.

Hawk Alfredson & Mia Hanson

Mia says, “When I was about five years old I had a book of The Senses that I really loved. I especially loved the tactile part of the book that had something that seemed like coarse bear hair growing from the pages. I’d like to see an intelligent book come out sometime with bear hair inside!”

Neal Asher

The first book I ever read was not a Janet & John. It was called The Wasp Without Wings and involved a conversation between an ant and an oak tree. Then I remember being spellbound while a teacher read The Hobbit to the class I was in. My first time in a public library my mother asked me what I might like to read and I said something about how I enjoyed said Hobbit. Directed to the relevant shelf the first book I picked up was The Two Towers. Looking back, I can see that I didn’t stand a chance: I was destined to be a science fiction and fantasy writer!

Dale Bailey

From the very first I sensed that books had significance. My father collects rare first editions—Sir Walter Scott, especially, but a wide range of 18^th- and 19^th-century English writers—and I sensed the value he attached to them as objects that transcended the text within them. He loves Scott’s Waverly but he knows it’s just not the same reading it out of a cheap paperback edition. My memories of my father are inextricably bound up with my earliest memories of books.

R. M. Berry

I remember in maniacal detail and with a vividness that defies sanity every book I ever failed to finish.

K. J. Bishop

A few years ago I was on holiday in the UK, and went to the British Museum library. I was looking at the books on display in glass cases, and one in particular caught my attention. It was open at a poem called “The Golden Journey to Samarkand.” A beautiful illustration accompanied the text, but it was the poem itself that really captivated me. However, the author’s name wasn’t visible, and I couldn’t see any staff who I could have queried about it. A couple of days later I went up to Scotland to visit a relative, my late grandfather’s cousin Betty. While idly browsing her bookshelves, something made me choose one volume, The Collected Poems of James Elroy Flecker. I’d never heard of Flecker—I suppose I was just in the mood to read some poetry. I looked at the contents, and there in the list of titles was “The Golden Journey to Samarkand.” With great kindness Betty gave me the book, saying that being an “aged party” she was divesting herself of her possessions. (I’m happy to say that Betty is still alive and indomitable). I’ve since acquired Flecker’s play Hassan, and his biography by John Sherwood, No Golden Journey.

Richard Bleiler

Books have always been a major part of my life. I grew up in a big old house filled with my parents’ books, and now that I have a house of my own I find that I too am filling it with books.

Jay Caselberg

There were times in my life that I have had to part with books for various reasons. That’s probably one of the hardest things to do. I’m not a person who reads stuff again, but I like to have them there around me. Words have their own magic.

Michael Chabon

The way my father kept the books that he was reading or intended to read very soon out on various tables, end tables, coffee tables, all around the house, with their edges all perfectly squared to one another and to the edges of whatever table they were laid on. A habit which I have now begun to catch myself indulging.

Intro · Likes · Rituals · Necessity
Examples · Memories · Bios

Brendan Connell

I remember the first book I bought by Nerval. I was youngish then and had not heard of the author. At a library book sale I stumbled across a nice thin little volume that looked interesting in a limited edition of 250 copies. It was only a dollar, so I bought it. The book was Les filles du feu, and to this day it is one of my most prized possessions. “Discovering” the author on my own obviously added to the thrill… I also like it when I check out books from the library that no one has read for years. I remember checking out Claire Lenoir by Villiers de L’Isle-Adam from the Queens library. It had not been checked out since 1927.

Ian Covell

Too many, none important to anyone else.

John Coulthart

Too many, I think; for now I’ll just mention my first encyclopedia that I received as a gift aged five—a book I remember vividly—and a Thames and Hudson book of photographs of Scotland that I saw in a bin in the street. This became one of my main reference books when adapting The Haunter of the Dark as a comic strip.

Jack Dann

One of my earliest memories of reading was that when I opened a book, all the characters would come alive; when I closed it, they would go to sleep. On some level, I still believe that.

Ellen Datlow

I feel a thrill when I find a particular out-of-print book I’ve searched for for a long time or upon rediscovering (physically) certain books that meant a lot to me as a child. The latter I want to just look at and thumb through and have in my possession (e.g. Eleanor Cameron’s Mushroom Planet books).

Alan DeNiro

Wandering the stacks in the University of Virginia’s Alberman library, finding light bulbs between seldom-used shelves burnt out, losing one’s self in the twisty little stairwells that seemed designed for gnomes, getting off on an elevator on the wrong floor and coming across the red carpeted, gilded special collections department, finding random 18th century books in Greek in the shelves in unlikely places. I also lament the fact that books aren’t stamped with due dates anymore, it seemed. Sometimes I’d try to find odd books that might have only been checked out once in the 1920s, or sat on a shelf for eighty years and were never checked out once—there’s something deeply melancholic about that.

Lawrence Dyer

Two or three times in second-hand book shops I’ve come across old copies of much-admired books which I read maybe twenty years earlier at a tender age and experienced the thrill of being reunited with them, like meeting old school friends after many years. Examples are the fantasy novel Jog Rummage (author unknown to me now), An Experiment with Time (author also lost to me but a book literally about experimenting with time travel as an individual in the real world), and Essex author Anne Ashbury’s Miniature Gardens.

Brian Evenson

I collect books, so have lots of stories about books that I’ve looked for for years and then finally found, or books that I’ve found for incredibly good prices, but they’re so personal they’d hardly make sense to anyone who doesn’t collect or doesn’t know me well. Here’s one that’s slightly crazy: When I lived in Seattle, I stumbled by accident across Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz’s novel Insatiability, which at the time was out of print and very difficult to find. I bought, began to read it. When we drove for a daytrip to Canada, to Vancouver, I took the book with me, but then found myself loath to leave it in a car, even a locked car, because it had been a book so difficult to find. So, I carried the book around all through Vancouver. My wife thought I was crazy, pointed out that of all the things in the car probably Insatiability was the only thing that thieves wouldn’t take. I agreed with her, could understand that rationally, but one often has odd relations to the books that one finds, and I felt, quite illogically, that to leave my book alone in a (admittedly hardly) foreign country would be like abandoning my child.

Intro · Likes · Rituals · Necessity
Examples · Memories · Bios

Tim Feeney

I think that most readers have experiences like these, but they tend to be difficult to convey—it’s not easy to describe the charged joy of finding a book you’ve been after for years, or of coming across a favorite author’s latest work, or of discovering a rarity priced far below what you’d normally have to pay for it. Stories like these tend to come off sounding sort of geeky. I think many of us identify with the general experiences, but unique tastes dictate that the particulars—i.e., each of our favorite books and authors—end up being very personal. Like reading in general, come to think of it.

Jeffrey Ford

I remember a book I had as a child of 6 or 7 that had a little story about this family of children for each day of the year—365 stories. I read the corresponding story each date at night before I went to sleep. The illustrations in it were beautiful and I felt like I was living two lives, my own and the world of the fictional family. I don’t know if I have ever felt more deeply part of a book as when that year was done.

Karen Joy Fowler

As a child I fell in love with a book called The Green Poodles. I checked it out of the library every other week and read it over and over until one Christmas my parents gave me my own copy to keep. Three months later I’d brought it home from the library again. I’d been watching over it in the interim and no one had checked it out. I thought it was probably feeling lonely and unappreciated. My parents were amused, but, now that I’m a writer, I think I was merely prescient. There are a lot of lonely books out there and some of them are mine.

Neil Gaiman

I remember one evening, there was just me and a copy of Lives of the Great Poisoners, and I had poured the tea and lit the jasmine scented candles, and it was obvious that the blind chaperone would soon fall asleep to the hum of the cicadas. And the way that book curled its pages at me, I knew we were both interested in the same thing. There were weasels, questing through the shrubbery, something which would normally have attracted my interest, but now… Er, better make that “no” as well.

Stephen Gallagher

As a child I bought used books from a stall on the Saturday market in Eccles, near my home in the northwest of England. It was a dirt-cheap treasure trove, marred only by the pricing practice of the owner—she’d snip off the top corner of a paperback cover and write her price in ink on the uncovered page beneath. I used to gum new corners onto the books and paint them in an attempt to match the jacket art.

Theodora Goss

As a child, I was read stories from a book of Hungarian fairy tales, with the somber, modernist illustrations in browns, blues, and purples then in fashion. They gave me nightmares for years. Today, the book is hidden between The New Junior Classics in ten volumes and The White Stag. When I take it out, I still shiver.

M. John Harrison

My whole life is a memory connected to books. But it’s too long to share and too idiosyncratic to be of use to anyone else.

Rhys Hughes

One utterly egocentric memory. Receiving a copy of my own first published book through the post and standing with it in my hands, pacing the room and imagining how other people might read it. Turning the pages until I became mesmerized and exasperated with my words and the titles of my stories, alternating between pride and embarrassment, foolishly imagining that fame was an imminent possibility. And already turning down phantom invitations to parties in my honor, because I didn’t know what to say or how to guess champagne accurately. Delighted and anxious at the same time, and pathetically unaware that the hordes of beautiful females who are desperate to throw themselves at published writers don’t in fact exist. Or rather that they do exist but are writing and publishing their own books elsewhere and have no need to throw themselves anywhere other than at themselves.

Intro · Likes · Rituals · Necessity
Examples · Memories · Bios

Shelley Jackson

All my memories are connected to books.

Harvey Jacobs

When I was in public school, around age 7, I took a book out of the school library named Skippy based on a then-popular comic strip. Unlike the strip, the book was rather dark, a depression novel that told of the destruction of life in what was an idyllic town mostly because of economic collapse. I found myself sad to the point of weeping and it came to me that there I was, crying because of some words on a page. It both puzzled and amazed me that language—the printed word—could have such an effect, that the connection I felt with a stranger called Skippy could produce such profound emotion. I sat down and made a cover for the book out of brown wrapping paper and drew a picture of Skippy on that protective wrap. A few hundred years later I found a copy of Skippy in a used book store and now it sits next to my own books. And I’m still amazed by the connection a book can achieve despite obstacles of race, creed, background, experience when it pushes the essential buttons that evoke that very sense of connection. I’m talking mostly about fiction. But the same is true, give or take, of books that convey valid information between two distant parties interested in whatever. I mean, the whole process is a splendid mystery, creation to consumption.

Stephen Jones

I still get excited if I come across something I’ve been looking for at a price I can afford. My “Holy Grail” of books for twenty years was always The Outsider and Others by H.P. Lovecraft (Arkham House). I could never afford a copy. Then a few years ago, at a World Fantasy Convention, a dealer was selling a copy at a very reasonable price. It had the Gerry de la Ree reissue dust jacket from the early 1970s (collectible itself now), but what really convinced me was that the original Virgil Finlay jacket had been pasted into the front and back endpapers at the time. Which meant, because it had never been exposed to the light of day, that it was absolutely pristine—as it must have looked when the book was published in 1939. So although I guess it’s a flawed copy, it’s an interesting copy, a talking point—which is what collecting books should be about. Oh, and it’s still a great collection!

Henry Kaiser

I remember reading some SF book in the elementary school library in 4th grade (maybe 1962 or 1963?). It had plates that seemed to be photos, illustrating the story I guess they were composite photos of people and space ship models… I guessed that now… They seemed real at the time and really impressed me.

James Patrick Kelly

I still have one of the first books I bought with savings from my allowance, most of which was spent on comics, but don’t get me started. It’s a hardcover of The Wizard of Oz, printed in 1944. I bought it used when I was about eight or nine. It is possibly the ugliest book that I own—the dust jacket was missing when I bought it, and the faded gray boards are frayed and water-stained and streaked with some nasty white gunk. But the words still dance and the Denslow illustrations still breathe magic and there’s my name crudely written in pencil on the inside cover that reminds this middle-aged guy where he came from and why he writes this stuff. It’s my own personal Rosebud.

John Klima

I’ve always loved to read. If you believe my mother, I taught myself to read One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish when I was two. I still try to read a book a month (a book a week if I can really get going), which I know is much more than the norm. My favorite memory of reading is how close together it brought my brother and me. I remember the day that my brother received his shipment of books from The Science Fiction Book Club. I stared at the spines forever: Asimov, Varley, Vance, Donaldson, Zelazny, Tolkien, and so on. Even though my brother is six years older than me, I read faster than him. He hated that I read the books before he did (for all sorts of reasons, but I think number one was that I was a slob and the pages would stick together when I was done with them), but I also know that he liked that he could talk about these things with his little brother.

Intro · Likes · Rituals · Necessity
Examples · Memories · Bios

Jay Lake

a) My earliest memory of reading is a Cat-in-the-Hat dictionary in French when I was about three-and-a-half, back in the 1960’s. We lived in Dahomey (now Benin), a former French colony in West Africa, and I went to a French language preschool. To this day, my understanding of the difference between a crocodile and an alligator is that an alligator “c’est un crocodile d’Amerique.” This memory of reading a book is one of three or four memories I have from Dahomey, the earliest I can recall in life. b) The first time I read Gene Wolfe’s Shadow of the Torturer, which I picked up off a college housemate’s shelf. I did nothing else for about forty eight hours except read the Book of the New Sun tetralogy, and (reluctantly) sleep and eat. Those books have had more influence on my thinking about fiction and on my efforts to create it than any other.

David Langford

I don’t particularly try to collect autographed books (though I once failed to resist a G.K. Chesterton signature)... but had a sense-of-wonder moment on finding that my signed first edition of one of Cabell’s key fantasies, The Silver Stallion, had previously been owned and signed by one of that author’s greatest fans: “James Blish, 1968.”

Tanith Lee

A recent acquisition: A secondhand copy from 1941 of Clamence Dane’s ethereal, terrifying The Moon Is Feminine—one of the unique books of the 20^th century—edition old, yet pristine, and clothed in pink and turquoise. I did actually kiss this copy as I received it. But then, I’ve waited over 15 years!

Des Lewis

The way a book can carry you through time and keep you you. The recent re-ownership of a Rupert annual from 1954 vividly brought back the smells and thoughts and joys and griefs of a six-year-old boy that was once me. We may slough off skins and pretensions of personality throughout the years, but books soak up and eventually give back the essential “you.” This may sound pretentious, but at least you no longer have to pretend you’re you.

Nick Mamatas

An old girlfriend of mine used to read The Stand over and over again—once every two months at least. When the covers fell off, she kept reading. When the first and last leaves started crumpling and then finally fell off, she kept rereading. When the spine gave out, she held it together with a great black swath of gaffer’s tape and kept rereading. When the pages finally started disintegrating and the ink smudged beyond recognition, then she was done with The Stand. Made me rethink my opinion of Stephen King.

Javier A. Martinez

One summer I was reading Footfall, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Not that this is a great book or anything, but I was a kid, maybe 13 or so. The book was from the SFBC and smelled very strongly like a book, that mustiness, pulpish smell. That smell was always there while I read that book that summer, sitting on my front porch in the swing. It was a great summer, like something out of Bradbury, and the smell of those pages has always remained with me. To this day, whenever I catch a whiff of the bookish smell, I always remember what a great childhood I had, reading SF, fantasy, and horror, and how lucky I am to be in a profession where I can continue to develop my interests.

Farah Mendlesohn

The devastation of being given the wrong books by a relative who thought any title would do. The pleasure of receiving a boxed set of the Narnia Chronicles (I loved the way they fit together and the whole-ness of the design); the realization about five years ago that I could afford hard backs/first editions. Spending prize money this year on a first edition I could not usually afford.

Intro · Likes · Rituals · Necessity
Examples · Memories · Bios

Michael Moorcock

When my father left my mother he left behind a handful of books, The Constable of St Nicholas by Edwin Lester Arnold, Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Mastermind of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Apple Cart by George Bernard Shaw, Timothy Tatters (a tale of the Irish troubles by Anonymous). Apart from the Shaw and the Arnold they were all cheap editions and the browned paper and cheap red boards remain a strong memory, along with the illustrations to The Apple Cart. Later I used to cycle down to the local private lending library to get my mother’s favorite romance novels and there I discovered the bright dust wrappers of P.G.Wodehouse, much more Edgar Rice Burroughs, various thriller writers, and the westerns of Clarence E. Mulford. I preferred the private lending library (tuppence a week), which was rather like a modern video store, because they kept the covers on the books, while public libraries took them off and rebound the books. I still enjoy restoring books. I like cleaning them up, un-dog-earing the pages, cleaning and brightening the bindings, getting the dust wrappers into the best possible shape and putting plastic covers round them, reglueing, if necessary, and generally getting them into the best possible condition. On the other hand, I care very little about what condition the books are in when I buy them and have none of the collector’s desire for books which are as near to mint condition as they can be. I’m inclined to be suspicious of books which haven’t been thoroughly read. If my own library consisted of books with mint d/w-s and uncut pages, I’d feel I was advertising myself as a fool. My sympathy lies more with Wordsworth, who had a habit of slicing open the uncut pages of new books with the butter knife. Part of me always likes the idea of knowing what the original reader was eating when they first started reading the particular volume I’ve come to own.

Cheryl Morgan

I’m a reader, not a book collector. Most of my memories of books are concerned with slogging round the world with piles of books in my suitcases. But I keep doing it, and that is a measure of how much I hate reading on computer screens.

Richard Eoin Nash

Sorry to continue with the spiel here: my personal seminal cultural experiences were formed by reading print books. But if our generation continues to assume that what has been true for us will be true for younger generations we will consign linear text to the dustbin of history. Many many intelligent pubescents and adolescents are having their identity-forming experiences on-screen. If books cannot be found there, we’re not going to be able to win them back.

Vera Nazarian

My earliest memories are of books. All right, there’s also that weak, pale amber tea in a baby bottle—and then there are books. One book in particular—a volume of Homer and ancient Greek mythology in Russian, a navy blue hardcover with embossed gold type on the cover and spine. It is thick with text, and scattered all throughout are photos and reproductions of antique statuary, Greek vases, reliefs. I read that book over and over until the pages yellowed, and stared at the illustrations until I entered them. Over the years many of the pages fell out and many others simply crumbled to dust. I still have the venerable corpse of this book and consider it a personal artifact.

Ian Nichols

The first time I received an author’s copy of a book I’d written. It was like seeing a new-born child.

Lance Olsen

For me every encounter with a book takes me back to the bright afternoons of my early childhood, just before naptime, when I my mother used to read to me. Everything was Eden then, and every encounter with a book is a return to that white-light possibility space.

Intro · Likes · Rituals · Necessity
Examples · Memories · Bios

Milorad Pavić

The book you did not finish reading till the end is like a life without death.

Justina Robson

I once gave a copy of Dragonflight to my English Lit teacher in secondary school to show her that books besides Jane Eyre could be interesting, forgetting that my friend and I had written frankly rude remarks all through the margins of the “sexy” bits… On returning it, she masterfully made no comment but I imagine that she and her husband must have had a good laugh on us. I still have the copy and it brings a smile to my face every time I see it.

Luís Rodrigues

Several—books inevitably become impregnated with events in my life, and vice-versa. My oldest recollection has to do with memorising the contents of an entire storybook when I was two or three, before I even knew how to read. I then surprised and amused guests when I “read” the book aloud and even turned the pages accordingly, like I’d seen my Mother do when she read it to me at bedtime.

Lucius Shepard

I once killed an agouti with a book. I was on a bus in Guatemala, near Tikal, when an agouti scurried across the road. They are, apparently, good to eat. The bus driver slammed on the brakes and young Guatemalan men boiled out and chased it up an embankment and one slashed it with a machete. They stood around, congratulating each other on the kill. I got off the bus carrying my pack—I’d never seen an agouti up close. It was still alive and suffering. I’m not usually squeamish—I’ve seen a lot of dying things—but this affected me for some reason. I told the young guys they might want to finish the job, but they ignored me. I had a voluminous English-Spanish dictionary in my pack, which I used—end-first—to crush the agouti’s skull. The men were annoyed with me, but I was happy to endure their annoyance. The dictionary was a mess. I ditched it and got another in Huehuetenango a few days later.

Delia Sherman

When I was a child, I had asthma. There were many nights I couldn’t breathe well enough to sleep (inhalers hadn’t been invented yet), and during those nights, my father read to me from the Golden Book version of Howard Pyle’s The Adventures Of Robin Hood And His Merrie Men. It had pictorial board covers portraying a luridly green Robin shooting a luridly brown arrow with luridly red fletching at a most unconvincing tree. The paper was so cheap that it began to yellow and crack almost immediately (you ought to see it 45 years later), and the plates it was printed from were a bit worn, especially the Ford illustrations. But I loved it. Not just the stories (which my poor father read until he could practically recite them, Medievaloid English and all) and the pictures (which I pored over, smudged and fuzzy as they were), but the book itself, solid and smoky-smelling and pleasant to hold. I still have it, the spine reinforced with floral Contact paper and the pages dark tan and almost too brittle to turn. And I still read it, from time to time, when I can’t sleep.

Intro · Likes · Rituals · Necessity
Examples · Memories · Bios

Mike Simanoff

When I was a kid, my dog Chelsea used to chew on the corners of my books (humans in my family do not generally bite books). She would do this for hours, until she was caught and shooed—and immediately forgiven. You had to see her eyes. I believe she enjoyed them tremendously.

Brian Stableford

I went into an antique shop in Epinal a few months back to look at their wall of books. I found Contes Fantasques et Fantastiques by Adrien Robert, priced at 300FF (45 euros in new money). I bought it because it looked interesting and had nice pictures. I looked up Adrien Robert in all the reference books. Nothing anywhere, except for the Catalogue of the Bibliotheque Nationale and the 1872 edition of Larousse—although AR (his real name was Charles Basset, but he used a pseudonym to distinguish himself from his father, also a now-forgotten writer) wrote lots of fantasy and science fiction novels and short stories in the 1850s and 1860s. Not a single book of his is on sale on the Internet and he generates no hits on Google. He translated “The Embalmed Hand”—a fantasy about a detached hand that wreaks vengeance on its former owner’s daughter’s nasty husband (a doctor) by cunningly rewriting one of his prescriptions. I am now, in all probability, the only living person who gives a damn about whether or not Adrien Robert ever existed, and the only person ever to have read anything by him in English. You don’t get that sort of experience from collecting beer mats. (If anybody ever happens upon a copy of one of AR’s fantasy novels or other short story collections—some of which were issued under the pseudonym Charles Newil or Newill—I’d be really interested to see it.)

Anna Tambour

For those of us who grew up reading, it is hard to remember our first loved book, but when I taught a fifty-five-year-old farmer to read a few years ago, his first loved book was obvious, and a surprise. It was a dictionary. He read it for pleasure at night, after work.

Jeffrey Thomas

When I was maybe three or four my maternal grandparents gave me a beautiful book on flying dinosaurs, which represent to me both the marvels of the natural world and the fantastic realms of the imagination, borne on wings. The dust jacket and interior paintings were gorgeous, still my favorite illustrations of prehistoric animals. Four decades later the dust jacket is gone, the binding split and frayed, some pages scribbled on by a brother lucky to still be alive, but I have that book and count it amongst my most cherished possessions. It has directly inspired some of my own writing and illustration.

Jeff Topham

About 10 years ago, my then-girlfriend and I spent two delirious months on a rambling cross-country road trip. The only book I brought was Tom Robbins’ Another Roadside Attraction, whose endpapers, and eventually even its margins, became filled with my travel journal. It traveled with me to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. It was soaked during a thunderstorm at Glacier National Park. Its front cover was singed during a hilariously inept attempt to smoke a small amount of opium we’d bought. It is a ruin of a book. It is priceless to me.

Alan Wall

I was in Florence. I realised that I wanted to try to read Dante in Italian, though my Italian was minimal to sub-zeroic. I went to a bookshop. No parallel text in English and Italian. But they had Dante, of course, how could they not? And so I bought a serviceable Divine Comedy and an Italian-English dictionary. A man intervened while all this was going on. A small, bearded man who, in my memory, has half-transmuted into Primo Levi, someone else I’ve only ever met in books. He asked why I needed it. His English was impeccable, though I knew he was Italian, probably because he was so exquisitely dressed.

‘I found myself walking round the city, thinking of Dante. Everything I looked at in Florence made me think of Dante. It seemed a shame that I’d never tried to read one of the world’s greatest writers in his own language.’ Then I shrugged. What more could I say?

I left the shop with my little brown bag containing the two books. Half-way down the street there was a tap on my shoulder. It was the man who had intervened in the bookshop.

‘I just wanted to wish you well,’ he said and bowed slightly. ‘You have so much pleasure ahead of you, reading Dante. A lifetime’s pleasure.’

‘What do you do?’ I said.

‘I am the Professor of English at the University.’

We smiled at each other and parted. Words written six hundred years before, in a language I didn’t understand, now held in their thousands of stanzas in a book in my hand, had brought us briefly together. I still have the book somewhere, though it’s mingling at present and doesn’t seem unduly inclined to surface. It will return, no doubt, when the time is right. In the meantime I now have David Jones on my desk. I thank you for that.

Liz Williams

Many to share, but too many to mention. Books hold me up in this difficult world.

Richard Winters

There’s nothing like the thrill of finding something you’ve searched for (in a vague way) for years, like my musty three-volume, turn of the last century edition of Dampier’s Voyages, for example. But for emotion, the feeling of sitting in a chair with my nine-year-old son and reading him a child’s edition of Homer… well, that’s what literature is all about. Passing to the next generation the best stories we know, and hearing it anew in the process. Unforgettable, irreplaceable.

Paul Witcover

I once squashed seven cockroaches with a single copy of Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop.

Gene Wolfe

Of course I have ten thousand memories connected with books. How about being introduced to Dickens by my friend David Taylor, who had been reading Pickwick and talked like Mr. Jingle when he described the book? David has been dead for more than 40 years, but you will find him as David Arimaspian in my story “The Arimaspian Legacy.”