Sixpence House
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
"Sixpence House is the bookworm's answer to A Year in Provence." -Boston Globe
Paul Collins and his family abandoned the hills of San Francisco to move to the Welsh countryside-to move, in fact, to the village of Hay-on-Wye, the "Town of Books" that boasts fifteen hundred inhabitants-and forty bookstores. Taking readers into a secluded sanctuary for book lovers, and guiding us through the creation of the author's own first book, Sixpence House becomes a heartfelt and often hilarious meditation on what books mean to us.
A #1 BookSense Pick
"A delightful book."-Los Angeles Times
"Collins' gift is that you don't care where you end up. The journey is enough."-Readerville
"The real, engaging heart of the tale is Collins' love of books and other people who love them...Collins muses on antiquarian books the way the rest of us remember lost loves."-San Francisco Chronicle
"Funny, informative, somewhat chaotic and full of interesting references...there are numerous meanders into peripheral subjects, seen through the astute eyes of an Anglophile American."-Washington Post
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hay-on-Wye, a Welsh town of 1,500, is heaven on earth for people who love books, especially old books. It has 40 bookstores, and if you can't find what you want in one of them, you can fork over 50 pence and visit the field behind the town castle, where thousands more long-forgotten books languish under a sprawling tarp. McSweeney's contributor Collins moved his wife and baby son from San Francisco to Hay a few years ago, intending to settle there. This book is Collins's account of the brief period when he organized American literature in one of the many used-book stores, contemplated and abandoned the idea of becoming a peer in the House of Lords, tried to buy an affordable house that wasn't falling apart (a problem when most of the buildings are at least a century old) and revised his first book (Banvard's Folly). Collins can be quite funny, and he pads his sophomore effort with obscure but amusing trivia (how many book lovers know that the same substance used to thicken fast-food milk shakes is an essential ingredient in paper resizing?), but it's hard to imagine anyone beyond bibliophiles and fellow Hay-lovers finding enough here to hold their attention. Witty and droll though he may be, Collins fails to give his slice-of-life story the magic it needs to transcend the genre. BecausePW was unable to run this review in Lifestyles Forecasts, April 7, it is appearing in this week's Nonfiction Forecasts.
