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Illustrated highlights from the Judaica Collection of the Library of Congress.
 
Books Like Sapphires showcases a wide range of Hebraic treasures from the storied collection at the Library of Congress, many of them for the first time. Tracing the history of Judaica collecting in the twentieth-century United States, the book illuminates varied works, telling their stories alongside vibrant color images. These include a unique manuscript about a betrothal scandal in Renaissance Crete, an illustrated Esther Scroll, a poem from 1477 celebrating the new technology of printing, amusing rhymed couplets in sixteenth-century Padua, and the Washington Haggadah. This book also tells the story of the patrons and collectors, first among them Jacob Schiff, as well as archivists and curators, who made the storied Judaica archive at the Library of Congress the precious resource that it is today.

A chronological account of the depiction of books, libraries, and reading in fiction from the medieval period to the present.

Books and libraries appear in fiction from the earliest times onwards, in works for all age groups, in canonical literature, and in books that form part of popular culture. Fiction enables writers to teach readers how to read, but it can also portray subversive acts of reading that engage with contemporary cultural anxieties or moral debates. The reading material of fictional personae is part of their characterization; we are often reading readers.

Drawing on approaches from literary studies, book history, library history, and theories and histories of reading, Books, Readers and Libraries in Fiction examines what fictional representations of reading tell us about changing cultural attitudes to different reading practices, and the use (and abuse) of books beyond actual reading, both in the context of specific works and about the reception of books more widely. Through detailed case studies from primarily British fiction that address common themes such as gender, genre, and the relation between reading and writing itself, this collection catalogs the ways in which authors of fiction mediate and interpret books, libraries, and the act of reading to their own readers.