Dealer – DaneCobain.com

Title: The Small Hand

Author: Susan Hill

Type: Fiction

Page Count: 208

Rating: 3.75/5

Susan Hill has this certain style about her that truly is inimitable, although that hasn’t stopped me giving it a go for a recent short story that I wrote. She just spins a great ghost yarn, especially when she’s dabbling in historical fiction cum horror.

I also appreciated the fact that the protagonist of this book was a rare book dealer on the hunt for a first edition Shakespeare Folio for a client. The hunt took him to France, which made me kind of sad because reasons, but at least it gave me an excuse to practice my French some more.

I’ve read quite a few of Hill’s ghost stories by this point, and this one is up there with the best. At the same time, there’s kind of not too much to mark any of the different books out, and I’ll probably not remember too much about this six months along the line. But that’s good, because then I could re-read it, and I think it would hold up well. I imagine it would make for a cracking audio book, too. So yeah, I’d definitely recommend it.

Learn more about The Small Hand.

Rick Gekoski – Tolkien’s Gown | Review

Title: Tolkien’s Gown

Author: Rick Gekoski

Type: Non-Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 240

Rating: 7/10

Rick Gekoski – Tolkien’s Gown

If you’re a lover of books like I am then you’re going to love Tolkien’s Gown – it’s a collection of stories by Rick Gekoski, a rare book dealer known as “the Bill Bryson of the book world.” That pretty much tells you everything you need to know, and it should give you a good idea of what to expect.

Gekoski’s privileged position in the literary world gave him the chance to meet and work with some of the most influential writers of our time, and he handled rare books and artifacts by authors as varied as J. R. R. Tolkien, Beatrix Potter, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Oscar Wilde, Jack Kerouac and J. K. Rowling.

Tolkien’s Gown, his titular story, recounts the time when Tolkien was having a clear out and wanted to get rid of his old college gown, and Graham Greene was delighted to be doing business. Not all of his dealings with writers were pleasant, though – J. D. Salinger threatened a lawsuit, and William Golding ended up writing a parody of Gekoski.

The author’s stories come from a time that is no longer, when the world was populated by genuine greats instead of the celebrity autobiographies and ghost-written novels that litter the market today. It’s worth reading for these insights in to a culture that’s no more.