Hello everyone! Please help me get this out? Registration is open for the Eliot Summer program at Oxford, 5-13 July 2025. Scholarships and partial week tuition available. See you there? Send your students. Happy to support them!

"A warm, personal paean to Merriam-Webster and its staffers." 🙏 for this thoughtful, positive @washingtonpost.com review of UNABRIDGED by @djbduncan.bsky.social

C17 commonplace book index belonging to Whitelock Bulstrode (MS 3244, container 1.1) @ransomcenter.bsky.social. Can’t help but think immediately of @djbduncan.bsky.social and his splendid work on the history of the book index

Gimme a book with an INDEX. 😌

“The line between engagingly informal and distractingly unfiltered is a delicate one…” An observation for the ages from @djbduncan.bsky.social's sharp review of Stephen Pinker’s new book in the New York Times. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/22/b...

I really enjoyed answering @mathewlyons.bsky.social's questions about my favourite books, which brought out patterns I hadn't noticed in the things I like. I'd recommend to anyone having a think about how you'd answer. open.substack.com/pub/mathewly...

New on the Writer’s Bookshelf: eight questions about writers, books, and reading with the brilliant @djbduncan.bsky.social – featuring Alistair MacLean, Georges Perec, Charlotte Brontë, Iris Murdoch and much more! (It also includes a surprise appearance from a would-be prime minister.)

On S. Pinker's new book, by @djbduncan.bsky.social: "There is a certain charm to the affable, playfully bumptious professor who can’t resist the provocation of scare quotes around the word 'microaggressions'", "A book can be bad without its thesis being untrue." #Booksky #psychology #anthropology

I reviewed Steven Pinker's new book on common knowledge. Tl;dr: "A book can be bad without its thesis being untrue".

Did the Middle Ages really happen? Couple of recent reviews of Marcus Glatt's "The Greatest Hoax in History".

A blog about Perec, cafes, and what I did on my birthday open.substack.com/pub/scrapsan...

Much to love in this "Out of the Ordinary" auction catalogue, but the thing that tickled me the most is this advertising poster for lemonade "bottled by pretty girls". The past sure is a foreign country. www.sworder.co.uk/auction/lot/...

A little blog about Posh Spice and What We Talk About When We Talk About Reading open.substack.com/pub/scrapsan...

[Lady Bracknell voice]: “A yearwig?!”

Found today pasted into a 1744 Oxford-printed Bible: an unrecorded ephemeral printing of ‘A cure for the bite of a mad dog’, directing us to ‘give three spoonfuls morning & evening; one pint is sufficient for man or beast’. It is ‘never known to fail’. @theulspeccoll.bsky.social 7100.b.73. #ephemera

Would *you* return a puppy to a Mr D'Wolf? Some thoughts on a two-hundred-year-old lost dog poster. open.substack.com/pub/scrapsan...

Would *you* return a puppy to a Mr D'Wolf? Some thoughts on a two-hundred-year-old lost dog poster. open.substack.com/pub/scrapsan...

Scathing personal critisism via an indexn has excellent entertainment value. Courtesy of 'Index, A History of the: A bookish adventure' by @djbduncan.bsky.social

Still circling around scraps, a blog about Donne, Hamlet, Virginia Woolf and metaphors of people as books. scrapsandorts.substack.com/p/on-reading...

I did a little diary for the @litreview.bsky.social about picking up scraps in the street. literaryreview.co.uk/sacred-scraps

In which I blog about How to Do the Uffizi! open.substack.com/pub/scrapsan...

A little thing I wrote about Freud, Agatha Christie & Dorothy L. Sayers open.substack.com/pub/scrapsan...

Looking at guitars on the internet. Here’s a brand I hadn’t heard of before.

More blogging. On collecting ephemera from people in the street. Also contains advice on how to look after a duck. open.substack.com/pub/scrapsan...

"Why did everyone think it was so funny?" A little blog I wrote about The Bill-Poster's Dream - an example of the nineteenth-century genre of art depicting walls covered in posters. open.substack.com/pub/scrapsan...

You know that thing in detective films/stories where the sleuth makes a pencil rubbing from the top sheet of a notepad to reveal the impression of the last message written? Where have you seen this? Is it ever in Agatha Christie?

A crowded bus in south London. A well-dressed man with a long step ladder is trying to get on. Driver says no way, but he’s arguing, incredulous. “Where does it say no ladders? Show me the rules.”

“Almost every second person on Earth speaks Indo-European.” I reviewed “Proto” by @lauraspinney.bsky.social, all about the spread of the biggest language family on Earth. wapo.st/3FHxXDk

My brilliant friend @drblacklock.bsky.social on the Beadlean Library - Jeremy Beadles's 22,000-volume treasury of esoterica, true crime, joke books, porn... (I think you might need a subscription to @thefence.bsky.social to read it, but I'd recommend that anyway.) www.the-fence.com/the-beadlean...

So, I've started a SubStack to put together some thoughts for my book on ephemera. Please do have a look, and if you have any thoughts/comments/feedback I'd be very grateful to hear. open.substack.com/pub/scrapsan...

The American photographer Joanne Leonard is having a retrospective show in London. She’s terrific, and Suede fans might recognise her photo “Another Morning” from the cover of Dog Man Star. Opens 6 June, and will be well worth seeing. @themildonessuede.bsky.social hackelbury.co.uk/exhibitions/...

A reminder that THIS is coming up next month. A week-long deep dive into the artists' book, with some amazing guest speakers and visits to key collections. Places still available so PLEASE SHARE!!! 16-20th June, London Rare Books School Book here: ies.sas.ac.uk/london-rare-...

Mrs Dalloway was published 100 years ago today. It’s now recognised as a masterpiece, but what did its first readers - the literary critics of the day - think it it? Responses were varied, it’s fair to say… mathewlyons.substack.com/p/first-sigh...

I read this whole book thinking it was a novel. Can’t remember why I thought that but I went out and bought it specially, thinking it was a novel I’d enjoy. And I did. In particular I thought it was very clever & playful the way it embeds its fiction within fact. Just found out it’s a history book.

Listen, put down that copy of Hello! and take a trip through the wilder side of magazines. We'll be exploring the inky world of alternative publishing: poets, artists, innovators and visionaries. 23rd May in London - still places left and not much time to register. Please SHARE SHARE SHARE!

Cambridge people! I’m going to be giving a talk on TJ Wise, detritus, stolen leaves, and made-up books on Thursday at 5pm. Do come along! www.english.cam.ac.uk/cmt/?cat=6

If you pick up a New York Times today, have a look at the books section. I’ve got a fun piece in it about spelling reforms.

V cool beer can

Come hang out with @gillpartington.bsky.social @uclartlibrarian.bsky.social @djbduncan.bsky.social , me and UCL’s @uclspeccoll.bsky.social brilliant collections of magazines!

“At what point do you find yourself saying, ‘Oh, stop it!’?” @djbduncan.bsky.social

I rivyood a kupl uv fun buks abowt thee Inglish langwij www.nytimes.com/2025/04/15/b...

Book historians! How much do you know about the history of books? www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Fully funded (4 year) PhD studentship supervised across Keele Univ. and the British Library: "Eighteenth-Century Knowledge Work in the Harleian Collection". You'll generate your own project focused on how this unique collection was created and used: www.keele.ac.uk/study/postgr...

“You’ve Got Male (Erectile Dysfunction)”

Call for Papers: ‘Built with books: shaping the shelves of the early modern library’ Deadline 16th May 2025 9 –10 September 2025 at UCL, London

“I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that she is the most commercially successful English poet since Tennyson”. A terrific little essay on Julia Donaldson, Alexander Pope, and what children do with their books. Clever and sweet.

Spring has sprung so I’ve gambolled off to @gladlib.bsky.social to do some book-writing. It’s gwychaf!

Thanks to the enthusiasm for her craft of @baindex.org and the much-vaunted work of @djbduncan.bsky.social, this is now heading for my bedside table, to be enjoyed as soon as I can get to the end of Moby Dick …

Recently printed an homage to stationery items, built from metal type & ornaments. Got a handful for sale here: https://www.starshaped.com/small-prints/stationery #letterpress #metaltype #stationery

What a privilege to design the cover of the forthcoming @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social edition of Mrs. Dalloway. Thinking of rebirth, renewal etc on this surprisingly sunny day here in London, 84 years after Virginia's death www.nyrb.com/products/mrs...