High Barn Books

13/08/2026

At the South-Eastern extremity of the Kintyre peninsula in Argyll the footprints of St Columba are by local legend visible in the rocks, close to St Columba’s well. This is a special place for book lovers, since Columba (a renowned scholar) is the patron saint of both poets and bookbinders. From the Mull of Kintyre, close by, there are spectacular views of Northern Ireland, well known to the saint, who travelled these seas a millenium and a half ago.

12/08/2026

The hill fort of Dunadd, situated at the heart of Argyll, was the seat of power from which the kings of Dal Riata ruled their Gaelic kingdom for some 500 years. The placing of the king’s foot in this stone symbolised his right to dominance in this area.

12/08/2026

We were very pleasantly surprised by the small town of Lochgilphead, beautifully situated on Loch Fyne in western Argyll, even more so when we found the Argyll Book Centre, a new bookstore with a very good selection in all categories. Highly recommended if you want to escape the endless river, loch and mountain scenery.

11/08/2026

Heading into the wilds of Argyll, we passed through the village of Alexandria, where we stopped at the imaginatively named Caffeinated Escapism Bookstore. Just a small stock and almost all in the romance/fantasy genres. Not my choice of reading, but the coffee was excellent.

09/08/2026

I have always been fascinated by Jorge Luis Borges’ short story ‘The Library of Babel’, which imagines a library composed not just of all the books ever written, but of all the books that could be written, that is, every arrangement of letters and punctuation marks possible over a 410 page book. Thus it contains a version of ‘Jane Eyre‘ where, for example, Jane marries Heathcliff. The superb novella ‘A Short Stay in Hell’ by Steven L Peck imagines a Hell based on this idea. Its hero spends eternity endlessly trying to find the book that contains his own life story and makes disconcerting reading for any collector of more books than can be read in a lifetime.

02/08/2026

We were unknowingly caught up in this. But is it worse than those days when books were broken up just for their illustrations?

Leave books alone!

02/08/2026

We have been caught up in this unawares.

Secondhand booksellers believe they may have been caught up in the AI supply chain that sees old books scanned then destroyed

01/08/2026

01/08/2026

The Christopher Nolan film of ‘The Odyssey’ is justly acclaimed and is well worth watching. When it comes to reading the work there are various options. Harvard classicist Robert Fitzgerald’s 1985 version in Everyman’s Classics was perhaps the first of the modern attempts to do justice to Homer. The current bestselling 2018 translation by Emily Wilson uses a lively iambic pentameter, whilst the 2025 translation by Daniel Mendelsohn eschews modern approaches and returns the poem to its original hexameter structure and line length. As to prose versions E V Rieu’s Penguin edition (revised) is unlikely to be superceded, whilst the graphic form by Gareth Hinds is really very good.

29/07/2026