Happy New Year! I’ve returned from holiday travels and am settling back into work for 2025. Here are three, quick, bookish recommendations from links that have crossed my desk recently.

First, a newsletter: Katie Clapham’s Receipt from the Bookshop is a new favorite of mine.

Katie runs an independent bookshop in Lancashire, and every Friday when she opens the shop she also starts a new draft of the newsletter. Throughout the day she fills it up with commentary on running a bookshop in these modern times, quips from the shoppers, witty observations, a record of books sold and purchased, etc. At the end of the day, she closes the shop and sends the newsletter.

One of my favorite genres of art is “totally mundane but fascinating and engaging for reasons that are hard to explain,” and Receipt from the Bookshop fits that bill perfectly.

More than just being fascinating, though, it’s a good reminder for us all how creativity and fulfillment as a writer can come from mundanity. There is beauty in the mundane! We can find it if we look hard enough.

Whatever this is: more of it please.

Books are powerful cultural artifacts, and so much of human history is wound around them. It should be no surprise then that notebooks carry a similar significance.

Well that’s just what Roland Allen’s book, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, is all about. I picked it up recently after seeing it recommended by a few folks in their 2024 reading recaps.

The cast of historical characters that pop up throughout the book is a lot of fun, and the author does a great job of showing just how critical notebooks were to the development of civilization and culture as we know it today.

Another truly great example of something unassuming (notebooks) being explored with a contagious enthusiasm. There is, repeatedly, poetry in the mundane.

By the way, I love reading books which tell history non-linearly through the lens of ultra-niche subtopics. Another great example that comes to mind is Fallen Glory: The Lives and Deaths of History’s Greatest Buildings by James Crawford. Books and buildings both make great portals back in time.

Finally, a celebration of the book collectors, dealers, sellers, and conservators who preserve the art of books and bring the most important ones along into the future.

While reading The Notebook: A History, I stumbled upon a 2019 documentary that resonated on the same frequency.

The Booksellers, which (from what I can tell) has recently been made free to watch on YouTube, focuses primarily on rare book dealers in New York City and their bookshops, and it’s a visual feast for book lovers. But more importantly it’s an homage to those still dedicating their lives to preserving the written word and the book as a form.

There’s a clear and present danger to the world of books that is felt palpably in the documentary, with many sellers and collectors worried about a diminishing market for book collectors. There are also those in the film who see a bright future. It’s nice to hear both takes.

As for myself, I am a huge fan of collecting physical books, and maintain a digital version of my collection which you can browse if you’d like. Whether you collect books or not, I recommend giving The Booksellers a watch.