Overnight at the Prime Minister’s Library & other Bookshop Hotels

If you’d rather camp outside than stay in a soulless hotel chain on holiday, join the club. But today, we’re taking our charming hotel search to another level. Bookworms and library lovers gather round, because we’ve got 5 overnight stays where you can eat, sleep and dream about books… (okay, maybe not eat books). Pack your…

In the Midst of War, He Gave the World Electrifying Fairytales

When the going gets tough, the art gets going. That’s the beautiful thing about human creativity – it can sprout in any soil. Especially for the late British-French illustrator Edmund Dulac, whose flair for Art Nouveau fantasy not only gave us brilliant literary illustrations, but flights of fancy and escape during the First and Second World…

The Vault

Your Dream Fairytale Library is Hiding in Midtown Manhattan

A miniature palace of rare books is hiding in one of the busiest parts of Manhattan. All you have to do to enter is walk past the foyer of 225 Madison Ave and push a button deep in the back right corner. A door will swing open into a space that feels like it rolled right out…

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Inside the Original Shakespeare and Company Bookshop in Paris

That’s Sylvia Beach ↑ founder of the Shakespeare and Company, pictured in 1945 in the apartment upstairs where she hid her books from the Germans during the occupation. They had closed her shop in 1940, allegedly because she would not sell her first edition of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” to a Nazi officer. Notice the American flag floating…

Jane Austen’s London Instagram Account

If Jane Austen was a time-travelling instagrammer, I think I’ve found her instagram account. While the English novelist wasn’t exactly a big-city girl, and her characters mostly lived sheltered lives out in the country, London does occasionally make a special cameo in her novels, which are set entirely during the reign of George III. Austen often visited…

An Ode to the Card Catalog

Before books were easily printed and accessible to nearly everyone, before they even took the form of books specifically, there was a different story. Information was scarce in its written form, and so scribes and scholars developed a meticulous system for organizing libraries of tablets. That’s right: the oldest known form of organizing books predates…

She Was a Black Librarian Who Could Equal America’s Most Powerful Man

Today, we meet a heroine by the name of Belle da Costa Greene. Under the honey-hued lights of Manhattan’s Morgan Library, she became the guardian of the world’s greatest cultural treasures: not one but three Gutenberg bibles, illuminated manuscripts, originals by Da Vinci, Mozart, Michelangelo, and others – the list goes on (in its very own…

The Question Is, Which Actress Should Play Lady Caroline Blackwood In A Hollywood Biopic?

She was legendary, and she was a legendary drunk, though she claimed her family’s stout was undrinkable. Perhaps you know her as the heiress to the Guinness fortune, or for her high-profile marriages, first to the artist Lucian Freud, who painted her famous 1952 portrait, “Girl in Bed.” Her third husband, poet Robert Lowell, described her as…

A Brief Compendium of Vintage Cocktail Recipe Books

Sometimes, you just strike internet gold – ya know, those obscure little corners of the internet where you can fall blissfully down the rabbit hole. Today’s find is a free online library of unearthed and collected bartender books; rare volumes dating from the 1820s through the 1940s, faithfully digitised – every last page – by…

Inside the Mystery of an Untranslatable 600 Year Old Book

It’s like Medieval Times, with a kiss of psychedelia. A book in which strange globules float freely, alien plants shimmy across the pages, and female figures slide into a pool of green plasma. Binding them all together? A beautiful, albeit entirely indecipherable script by an unknown author. The “Voynich Manuscript,” is an ancient codex that…