A celebration of the greatest kind of shop in the world, by an award-winning cast of writers including Ali Smith, Michael Dirda, Elif Shafak and Daniel Kehlmann. A cabinet of curiosities, a time machine, a treasure trove - we love bookshops because they possess a unique kind of magic. In Browse , Henry Hitchings asks fifteen writers from around the world to reveal their favourite bookshops, each conjuring a specific time and place. These inquisitive, enchanting pieces are a collective celebration of bookshops - for anyone who has ever fallen under their spell. Contributors include Alaa Al Aswany, Stefano Benni, Michael Dirda, Daniel Kehlmann, Andrey Kurkov, Yiyun Li, Pankaj Mishra, Dorthe Nors, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, Elif Shafak, Ian Sansom, Iain Sinclair, Ali Smith, Saša Stanišic, and Juan Gabriel Vásquez. A dazzling collection of original essays about the bookshop by fifteen bestselling international authors. "Lives up to its inviting title." - Times Literary Supplement "Very worthwhile but not too worthy, this is a timely call to arms." - Monocle 'All these writers convey the magic of bookshops, while also making their vulnerability in recent times a recurrent theme.' - Guardian 'If you have ever lost yourself in a bookshop, felt the world fall away as you took a book off the shelves, this spell-binding collection will carry you off to shops near, far, lost and imagined.' - Mail on Sunday 'Everywhere bookshops are fast disappearing. Sixteen writers from around the world remind us why we should cherish them at all costs.' - Spectator ‘A lovely collection of touching and personal accounts of books and bookshops. Each author’s writing style is unique and transports you across the globe.’ — Cub Magazine 'In celebrating bookshops, Browse heralds humanity, with all its glorious eccentricities.' - Country Life Henry Hitchings is an award-winning writer, reviewer and critic. He has written for the Guardian, London Review of Books , TLS, Financial Times and New Statesman , and is currently the Evening Standard 's theatre critic. He is the author of several acclaimed books on language, literature and culture, including Dr Johnson's Dictionary , How to Really Talk About Books You Haven't Read and The Language Wars . In 2008, he was shortlisted for the title of Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, and in the same year his book The Secret Life of Words won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award. From time to time over the past few years I’ve done volunteer stints a few hours a week selling books at our local Amnesty International second-hand bookshop, Books for Amnesty. I live in a university town in the south of England and the book donations that come in, sometimes seven or eight in a plastic bag, sometimes a whole vanful, a house clearance, someone’s whole library, are endlessly interesting, tend towards the eclectic and are almost always unexpected repositories of the lives they’ve been so close to. Open this copy of Ballerinas of Sadler’s Wells (A. & C. Black Ltd, 1954) with its still bright-orange-after-sixty- years cover and its black and white photo of Margot Fonteyn on the front, its original price of six shillings on the back (now selling at £2). In blue ink on its first page, in neat child’s handwriting: Christmas 1954 To Caroline From Christopher . Tucked in beside this there’s a postcard of a swaggering tabby cat wearing a collar, and written on the back of it in an adult hand in faded blue, DARLING CAROLINE, PLEASE do send me a list of things you would like to have so that I can have some help to find YOU a birthday present. I shall be stopping at LIZZIE’S next week so please tell Nannie that my address will be Trumpeter’s House. Lots of love xx from Mamma xxxxx I thought Papa’s present from you lovely. Or inside The Book of the Art of Cennino Cennini (Allen and Unwin, 1930) a ticket, single, dated 20th July 1936, Chatham and District Traction Company. Or inside an American first edition of The Buck in the Snow by Edna St Vincent Millay (Harpers and Brothers, 1928) a business card for Miss Katzenberger’s Piano Lessons and an address in Queens, New York. We leave ourselves in our books via this seeming detritus: cigarette cards with pictures of trees or wildlife; receipts for the chemist; opera or concert or theatre tickets; rail or tram or bus tickets from all the decades; photographs of places and long-gone dogs and cats and holidays; once even a photo of someone’s Cortina. Now when I donate books to the shop I have a flick through to make sure that anything tucked into them isn’t something I might mind losing. The volunteers, like the books, are of all ages and all lifewalks. They all have some things in common; they’re doing this for nothing, for Amnesty, most of them because they really love books, many of them because they love the shop, and all of them because
