We meet Oliver Darkshire, author of Once Upon a Tome - a memoir that describes his experiences as an antiquarian bookseller at Henry Sotheran’s Ltd in London.

We speak to architectural historian Catherine W. Zipf about the Green Book, which was an important travel guide for African Americans during the Jim Crow era. Catherine is working on a project to record and study all the historical sites listed in the Green Books between 1938 and 1967.

Our guest is author and copywriter Louise Willder, and we are talking about blurbs – those little snippets of promotional text on the covers of books. Louise has been a copywriter at Penguin for more than 25 years and estimates she has written around 5,000 blurbs.