John Baker’s Blog

In this 1936 essay, the novelist recollects working in a second-hand bookshop “on the frontier between Hampstead and Camden Town” and tells how the experience caused him to lose his love of books:
Like most second-hand bookshops we had various sidelines. We sold second-hand typewriters, for instance, and also stamps — used stamps, I mean. Stamp-collectors [...]

A taster:
I had in a drawer an illuminated parchment on which was written in elegant characters that on Primo Levi, of the Jewish race, had been conferred a degree in Chemistry summa cum laude. It was therefore a dubious document, half glory and half derison, half absolution and half condemnation. It had remained in that [...]

The Cafe Andros is not Greek. It has white, smoothly plastered Romanesque, mirrored arches along one wall. Piped music further confuses the senses. They are mainly old folk at the tables, enmeshed in a low buzz of conversation. At one table is a young woman with a baby. When she moves towards the toilet everyone [...]

Robert Fulford in the National Post discusses why art is his religion. The cons and the pros.
. . . we also can’t claim that immersion in the arts will create a lively mind. Art education has produced armies of learned bores. I knew a man who had Shakespeare, Verdi, Beethoven and the rest of the [...]