BOOKS IN MY BAGGAGE

A Passion for Books (1958) introduced to a book-loving market the man to whom people, books and places are the major part of life. Now with Books in my Baggage one is given more food for the omnivorous bibliomania which afflicts even some of the most hardened of us. It is an erudite book, which will give the average layman, with no claims to scholarship, a sense of having been cheated through life of some of the adventures in reading that Dr. Powell has experienced. But it is also an exciting book- a sort of literary detective story, as his journeyings in far places take him and his sixth sense -- his book geiger counter- to dusty cellars and odd corners where literary treasures are found and claimed joyously. And it is in a sense a travel book, leading one through literary bypaths of England and Scotland, and through much of our own southwest with its hardly sought literary heritage. Again a book for a specialized market.