Briefly Noted: Beautiful Alices, Bookshops, and New Books

I'm of the school that believes you can't be too rich or own too many copies of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.  I know I'm not alone in this which is why I wanted to share this beautiful edition with wood engravings by George S. Walker produced by Porcupine's Quill.  I spotted it on display last night at Montreal's Argo Bookshop,  a lovely little broom closet of a bookstore (200 square feet!) with a fantastically curated stocklist.  Argo has been part of Montreal's literary landscape since 1966 and is currently owned and run by Meaghan Acosta, Jesse Eckerlin & J.P. Karwacki. 

I may have to go back and pick up a copy of this for myself to keep my other Alices company.  This, however, was my purchase last night:

It's a great joy to visit the website of Lemony Snicket and be greeted with this:  "Dear Colleague, Welcome to this website.  Please leave."  You can read an excerpt on the site or you can go straight out and support a local bookseller by buying a copy.

While on the subject of author websites here are a few more you might want to check out.  Betsy Bird, children's librarian and blogger extraordinaire now has taken to wearing another hat: picture book writer.  Her first book Giant Dance Party pubs this week and you can find her online here.  Oliver Jeffers, a perennial favourite around here has a great website where he talks about his picture books and other projects.  And today on twitter he gave a sneak peek of his latest book.

From bookshops to one of my other great loves: libraries.  One of the things that makes the place where I live feel like a community is our community, volunteer-run library.  To my mind, it's practically everything a library should be.  The Hudson War Memorial Library is self-supporting and actually generates enough money through book sales and weekly thrift sales to support local charities.  Pretty impressive.

Finally, you can now listen to Neil Gaiman's keynote address from this year's London Book Fair.  His advice to those in publishing: "try everything. Make mistakes. Surprise ourselves. Try anything else. Fail. Fail better. And succeed in ways we never would have imagined a year or a week ago."