Books like The joy of books by Eric Burns

During World War II, a foster girl in Nazi Germany steals books to share with neighbors and a hidden Jewish man, proving literature’s power to nourish the soul amid darkness.

Irene, a spy for the secretive Invisible Library, and her assistant Kai race through an alternate London to recover a stolen book that threatens the fabric of reality.

Francine Prose shows how studying great writers—from Dostoyevsky to Joyce—reveals the craft of storytelling, urging readers to analyze language and technique in order to improve their own writing.

David D. Burns explains how cognitive therapy techniques can help cure anxiety, guilt, pessimism, low self-esteem, and depression without drugs.

In 1959 a kindhearted widow opens the only bookshop in seaside town Hardborough, facing hostile shopkeepers, a local arts doyenne, and a haunted shop, while confronting the town’s reluctance to embrace books.

Alan Jacobs shows that reading is thriving in America and offers practical, playful advice to help readers enjoy books without judgment, covering literary fiction, poetry, nonfiction and digital reading.

A practical guide that examines book selling in Ohio, covering publisher dynamics, reading trends, author insights, and popular quotations and maxims to help retailers, authors, and readers navigate the state’s book market.

The director of the famed Bodleian Libraries at Oxford narrates the global history of the willful destruction -- and surprising survival -- of recorded knowledge over the past three millennia. Libraries and archives have been attacked since ancient times but have been especially threatened in the modern era. Today the knowledge they safeguard faces purposeful destruction and willful neglect; deprived of funding, libraries are fighting for their very existence. Burning the Books recounts the history that brought us to this point. Richard Ovenden describes the deliberate destruction of knowledge held in libraries and archives from ancient Alexandria to contemporary Sarajevo, from smashed Assyrian tablets in Iraq to the destroyed immigration documents of the United Kingdom's Windrush generation. He examines both the motivations for these acts -- political, religious, and cultural -- and the broader themes that shape this history. He also looks at attempts to prevent and mitigate attacks on knowledge, exploring the efforts of librarians and archivists to preserve information, often risking their own lives in the process. More than simply repositories for knowledge, libraries and archives inspire and inform citizens. In preserving notions of statehood recorded in such historical documents as the Declaration of Independence, libraries support the state itself. By preserving records of citizenship and records of the rights of citizens as enshrined in legal documents such as the Magna Carta and the decisions of the United States Supreme Court, they support the rule of law. In Burning the Books, Ovenden takes a polemical stance on the social and political importance of the conservation and protection of knowledge, challenging governments in particular, but also society as a whole, to improve public policy and funding for these essential institutions. - Publisher.