I can't say that Jane Mount's Bibliophile: An Illustrated Miscellany (2018) makes particularly good reading or has much in the way of interesting information, but that's OK. It's a book about books, but it's mainly an art book about books, more a pleasure to leaf through than to read.
Mount says she kicked off her art career when, out of ideas, she started drawing the books on her own bookshelves. Then she moved on to the books on the shelves of friends, and soon she was in business. I am another of those people who love the sight of books on shelves. I spend a moment or two practically every day just admiring the spines of my own books. I can understand why readers would be willing to spend a few bucks for a Jane Mount painting of their favorite books.
And that is mostly what Bibliophile amounts to — paintings of books. True, she also includes paintings of striking bookstores and libraries, writers' pets and the rooms where famous writers did their writing, but mostly it's books. She divides them into two-page groupings: choice books of short stories, choice fantasy books, cult classics, choice picture books for kids, choice cookbooks, choice graphic novels, choice mysteries, choice nature books and so on.
She tosses in a few paragraphs about some of these books and their authors and adds lists of other books in these categories that aren't pictured. You may want to read Bibliophile with a notepad handy to take down all those books you may want to read — or even even to acquire just to decorate your own bookshelves.
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