Published by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux
November 2000
paperback, 341 pages
$10.00 US
ISBN: 0-374-52722-9

Also available in hardcover:
October 1998
176 pages
$18.00 US
ISBN: 0-374-14860-0

Read an excerpt

Anne Fadiman is -- by her own admission -- the sort of person who learned about sex from her father's copy of Fanny Hill, whose husband buys her nineteen pounds of dust books for her birthday, and who once found herself poring over a 1974 Toyota Corolla manual because it was the only written material in her apartment that she had not read at least twice.

Ex Libris recounts a lifelong love affair with books and language. For Fadiman, as for many passionate readers, the books she loves have become chapters in her own life story. Writing with remarkable grace, she revives the tradition of the well-crafted personal essay, moving easily from anecdotes about Coleridge and Orwell to tales of her own pathologically literary family. As someone who played at blocks with her father's twenty-two-volume set of Trollope ("My Ancestral Castles") and who considered herself truly married only when she and her husband had merged collections ("Marrying Libraries"), she is exquisitely well equipped to expand upon the art of flyleaf inscriptions, the perverse pleasures of compulsive proofreading, the allure of long words, and the satisfactions of reading aloud. Perfectly balanced between humor and erudition, Ex Libris establishes as one of our finest contemporary essayists.

Reviews
"Each essay is a model of clarity and lightly worn erudition, and speaks volumes about the author's appreciation for people as well as books." --The New Yorker

"A smart little book that one can happily welcome into the family and allow to start growing old." --Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times

"A lovely collection of essays on a family's love affair with books and words, a passion passed from her parents to her children." --Bob Minzesheimer, USA Today

"A book for bookworms . . . 18 stylish, dryly humorous essays. . . [a] charmingly uncommon miscellany on literary love." --Entertainment Weekly

"Intimate, humorous, informative, and perceptive. . . delightful reading." --Jack Matthews, The Washington Times

"For Fadiman, books are the building blocks with which a life is made. . . With breezy, self-effacing humor and dollops of literary trivia, the essays in Ex Libris try to cajole us into restoring books to the heart of family life." --Lucia Perillo, Chicago Tribune

"In the literary Eden that forms Anne Fadiman's life, the air remains pure allusion, the marginalia flows, and the only snake in the grass is a typo . . . Lissome essays on bibliophilism and language." --Renee Tursi, The New York Times Book Review

"Anne Fadiman is no ordinary reader . . . [Ex Libris] is an unapologetic confession of raging bibliophilia . . . a modest, charming, lighthearted gambol among the stacks. It serves up neither ideas nor theories, but anecdotes about the joys of collecting and reading books. Like Calvin Trillin, Fadiman believes that family members, however lovable, are best considered as joke material." --Dan Cryer, Salon

"Pure joy from beginning to end." --Bob Hale, Duxbury Clipper