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(Photo credit: Lion Hudson)

Long before the massively successful The Lord of the Rings films, J.R.R Tolkien’s creations and characters had captured the imagination of millions of readers.

Today, it is difficult to imagine a world without Tolkien’s stories of Middle-earth, elves, wizards and hobbits. But who was the man who dreamt up the intricate languages and perfectly crafted world of Middle-earth?

Colin Duriez has written an engaging and accessible biography examining the man behind the legend.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien had a difficult life for many years: orphaned and poor, his guardian forbad him to communicate with the woman he had fallen in love with, and he went through the trauma of serving in the Battle of the Somme during the First World War.

An intensely private and brilliant scholar, he spent over fifty years working on the languages, history, people and geography of Middle-earth, with a consistent mythology inspired by a formidable knowledge of early northern European history and culture.

When he sought to get The Lord of the Rings published – after spending a dozen or so years on it – he had difficulty settling on a publisher. When he did, his publisher, though enthusiastic, treated it as a loss-making venture, little realising the wealth it would create both for the company and its author.

You can find further details of J.R.R. Tolkien: the making of a legend on our catalogue.

(Photo credit: Westholme Publishing)

Born in Berlin at the end of the nineteenth century, Walter Mehring inherited both his father’s respect for the power of literature and his formidable library of thousands of books.  Like his father, Walter believed that books and reading were essential to progress, mutual understanding, and contentment.

After having served in World War I, Mehring spent the years between the world wars as part of Europe’s avant-garde coffeehouse culture; he was a poet, cabaret lyricist, and founder of the Dadaist movement in Berlin.

But with the rise of fascism, Europe became a dangerous place for free-thinking artists and Mehring was forced to leave Berlin and roam Europe as a literary fugitive.

Mehring never envisioned that the culture of books celebrated in his father’s library would be rejected by the rise to prominence of the Nationalist Socialist Party.

From a precarious exile in Vienna, he arranged for his father’s books to be smuggled out of Germany, but their fate would be worse than his–while Mehring managed to slip out of Austria and avoid capture, his library was confiscated and destroyed by the Nazis in 1938.

In The Lost Library: The Autobiography of a Culture, Mehring takes the reader with him as he unpacks the crates of books in his mind, and in the process recalls what each book meant to him and his father.

Writing with great insight, Mehring successfully compares the humanism of his father’s era with the chaos of Europe at war, using his father’s library as a metaphor for how the optimism of nineteenth-century progress gave way to the disorder and book-burning of the twentieth.

You can find further details of The lost library on our catalogue.

(Photo credit: Hodder & Stoughton)

Alice’s sister, Kathy, was in fourth grade when she said she no longer wanted her father to read to her. But Alice was different. When Alice was nine years old, she and her father – a school librarian – made a promise to read aloud together for 100 consecutive nights.

But once the pair met their goal, they didn’t stop. 100 became 1000, and they decided to continue for as long as they possibly could. The Streak, as they called it, ultimately lasted 3, 218 nights.

The story of their amazing commitment to reading, and to each other, is chronicled in Alice Ozma’s book The reading promise.

From L. Frank Baum to Dickens to J.K. Rowling to Shakespeare, Alice’s father read to her every night without fail until the day she entered college, a remarkable eight years later.

In this warm and tender memoir, Alice Ozma tells the story of her relationship with her father – from his steadying hand on the back of her wobbly bike to his one-man crusade to keep reading in schools – the words they shared and the spaces in between.

The Reading Promise poignantly illustrates the unbreakable bond between father and daughter, the books they treasured and the life lessons learned along the way.

 You can further details of The reading promise on our catalogue.

(Photo credit: Frances Lincoln)

Most book titles simply describe the contents of the book they are attached to. Crime and Punishment is about crime and punishment, and Brideshead Revisited is about revisiting Brideshead. But a small number of book titles have a rather odd, separate existence. The stories behind the titles are quite different from the stories behind the books themselves.

In his fascinating book, Gary Dexter looks at 50 such titles, from ancient Greece to the 1990s. The book grew out of a weekly newspaper colomn and Dexter’s short engaging essays, arranged chronologically, make it easy to dip in and out of the book.

You can find further details of Why not Catch-21? on our catalogue.