by Vince McCaffrey | Aug 20, 2020 | Annotations
A friend has passed away. Given my own age, this in itself is not surprising, but James Wu was a considerably younger man and remembered that way even more so because we had not seen him in a bunch of years and when last we did, at a gathering of the old crew, his...
by Vince McCaffrey | Jul 16, 2020 | Annotations
So, it begins. This is the first draft of a declaration of independence—of a sort. Much like the novel that spawned it, an odd sort of novel, this declaration is not of the usual kind. It is intended to be made not to a public, but to yourself. How well you keep to...
by Vince McCaffrey | Apr 26, 2020 | Annotations
My favorite new website is most extraordinary in so many ways that a biblio-besotted Robert Browning would have to do it justice. But this is just me. I’ll do what I can. . . . In truth, it’s what I have been doing for my entire life: making note and...
by Vince McCaffrey | Apr 26, 2020 | Annotations
People ask me for book recommendations quite frequently and I have half a dozen ways of putting them off to avoid the matter, usually resorting to some commonly accepted classic but occasionally offering something that I like myself. This last thing is a problem for a...
by Vince McCaffrey | Apr 26, 2020 | News
When a narrator is not so much unreliable as imperfect, A Republic of Books might be a first refuge for scoundrels and saints. The perfect bookshop might not be, but then again . . . When failure is an option, a nation of books would have to be a republic as much as a...