This one came in the mail today and it set me back on my heels a bit: I bought it on the strength of Mark Forsyth's other work and didn't pay a whole lot of attention to the physical details, so I was rather surprised to pull out this little booklet from the packaging. It's only about 6 inches tall, maybe?, and 31 pages long.
But oh is it wonderful; an ode to the joys of physical books and the brick and mortar bookshop. Now, that sounds like he's slamming ebooks, and he's not; this is about the one limitation of the internet and ebooks: the unknown unknown. What's the unknown unknown? Well, the known are the books you've read and the known unknown are the books out there that you know exist but you haven't yet read (he uses War and Peace as a fitting example). But the unknown unknown are those books you don't know even exist, just waiting for you to stumble across them in some obscure and perfect bookshop.
I have so many books I've found this way; books I'd never have discovered no matter how great Amazon's recommendation algorithm because they were so completely off the beaten path, so I really connected with this perfect little gem. The writing is perfect and Forsyth has that dry British humour and wit I adore. I have two of his other books waiting in my TBR and I can't wait to rip into them and I'm definitely going to be checking out his blog, The Inky Fool.