It can have many symptoms and can appear as a diverse range of seemingly unrelated difficulties pertaining to books and reading. Bibliophobia can only occur when someone has, crudely stated, loved books to a dangerous degree.
You may have bibliophobia if you frequently experience intense reactions to books that somehow act on you, or activate you, in ways that you suspect are unhealthy or hurtful—or at times, simply bad for you. And yet they are necessary; you would not be you without them.
McNally considers herself a humble bookseller. She is also the founder and owner of an ever-expanding empire, McNally Jackson, now likely the third-largest buyer of books in the city, after only Barnes & Noble and the Strand. In December, the company celebrated its 20th anniversary. Over the course of the past two decades, as many independent booksellers closed their doors, what began as a single shop on Prince Street has become five. Among them, readings and launches are hosted most nights of the week, and happy are the authors who manage to secure a spot. “McNally Jackson,” one novelist said, “conveys prestige better than anyone else.”
Boasting the largest digital camera ever created, Rubin is expected to study the cosmos in the highest resolution yet once it begins observations later this year. And with a better window on the cosmic battle between dark matter and dark energy, Rubin might narrow down existing theories on what they are made of. Here’s a look at how.
For cleansing one’s mind and reconnecting with nature, there’s nothing like a calming walk in the pastoral splendor of the English countryside. Normally, it’s a safe and carefree experience—unless you’re in one of my Walk Through England mysteries. In that case, watch out! Danger can lurk behind every tree, around every bend, and even in the warm confines of a country pub.
There’s a scene near the end of Anne Tyler’s new novel, Three Days in June, where the two main characters, a divorced middle-aged couple named Gail and Max, compare their lives to the movie Groundhog Day, “where people live through the same day over and over until they get it right”, Gail reminds him. “Wouldn’t it be great if the world worked that way?” says Max. Instead, Tyler’s novels are records of the numerous ways people get things wrong and learn to live with it, and how the wrong things have a sneaky habit, eventually, of turning out to be right.
Stephen J. Campbell, a professor of art history at Johns Hopkins University, has a sleuth’s acuity about the “misinformation, cliché, and myth” that has always distorted biographical accounts of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519). His interest took root when he began teaching courses on Leonardo in the late 1990s. Now, in an erudite treatise, he argues that this species of wishful thinking has intensified dramatically over the last two decades. He targets cultural influencers who trick out the High Renaissance polymath as a “character” who resonates with many a current concern: the bastard; the loner; the religious agnostic; the vegetarian; the left-handed misfit sexually attracted to people of the same gender. Likewise, he scolds pundits who designate technological trailblazers as latter-day Leonardos.