An essential read for those who love books, for those who love words and, above all, a read that will make us understand that many other people share this very particular passion.
As with many voracious readers, for Anne Fadiman the books she has read have become so many chapters in her personal story. The eighteen chapters that make up this volume reveal a passionate relationship with books and language. Ex Libris is a book that deals with other books: how to buy them, where and how to read them, how to treat them. In charming prose, Fadiman moves easily from anecdotes about the likes of Coleridge and Orwell to humorous stories about her family. Given that as a child she played constructions with the volumes of the paternal library ("My ancestral castles") and that she only considered herself truly linked by the marriage bond when she and her husband finally managed to devise a system to unite their respective libraries (" Matrimonio de bibliotecas"), the author is undoubtedly the best person to talk about the art of dedications, the perverse pleasures of searching for misprints, the charms of long words and the satisfactions of reading aloud.

An essential read for those who love books, for those who love words and, above all, a read that will make us understand that many other people share this very particular passion.