Fifty years ago four New York friends met for dinner and came up with a project which was to leave a lasting mark on American intellectual life.

There are two ways of looking at it: bookshops are about atmosphere, character, associations, romance; or they are about books. If we go for the former we soon won’t have any bookshops.

A dispute between France and Luxembourg and the European Commission seems to have implications for the question of whether individual European companies will be able to thrive in the electronic book market or if it will be a case of (American) winner takes all.

If Johann Gutenberg’s first money-making wheeze had gone just a little differently he might not have bothered inventing printing.

A major book prize has been won by David Hayton for his biographical study of the historian Lewis Namier, who believed that in the 18th century a man never entered parliament to benefit humanity any more than a child would dream of a birthday cake so that others might eat it.

British Labour’s seats in Scotland were always an important part of its majority – when it got a majority. Last week it recorded its lowest percentage vote there since 1910. Why? Because it behaved as if it owned its seats and failed to listen to what its working class voters told it they wanted.

Sitting at a laptop, for all that our curious fingers flit across cyberspace, confines us to our private space. We need the opportunity to wander and discover and be let loose among the materiality of paper and physical buildings. Peter Sirr writes on libraries, theft and the clutches of Hades.

Well of course we all love books. There’s absolutely nothing like a book. Nothing so gripping. Nothing so enthralling. So why do I sometimes fall asleep in my armchair?

Diana Athill was a publisher’s editor who worked with some of the most distinguished novelists of the twentieth century. She found a measure of fame at the end of her life through her wonderfully lucid and engaging memoirs, while she also fascinated with her frankness about her personal life.

It is not unusual today to pick up a book that is written by an Italian, published in London and printed in China. But the business of printing from the outset was no respecter of national boundaries and indeed had many globalist aspects as early as the sixteenth century.