Bibliomaniac: An Obsessive's Tour of the Bookshops of Britain

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Includes interviews with Tim Minchin, Josie Long, Ricky Gervais, Barry Crimmins, Sara Pascoe, Sofie Hagen, Lenny Henry and more. This is the story of how he fell in love with comedy thanks to The Goodies and Rik Mayall and how after 30 years he started to find his voice. The Times Literary Supplement described Bibliomaniac as ‘joyous, irreverent – liberating and life-affirming’ while Eric Idle said ‘one of the most delightful books I have ever read… always making me laugh’.

Bibliomaniac; She and Her Cat; The Babel Message In brief: Bibliomaniac; She and Her Cat; The Babel Message

I've laughed out loud many times reading it, it's like the reading equivalent of a nice cup of tea and a biscuit. I am too anxious for some of the hallucinogens that my confident friends experiment with, so my trips are fuelled by turning pages. Nevertheless, I can invoke the Moliere’s Maid strategy: I gave it to my Mum and asked what she thought of it. Award winners Robin Ince and Johnny Mains team up for this second exploration of the relationship between comedy and horror, the dark follow up to 2014’s smash hit debut, Dead Funny.He recounts how some books are especially valuable despite first appearances, and reveals that he really knows his books. If all that wasn’t enough, he has the good sense to appreciate the word ‘mither’, therefore, he has made the upper echelons of ‘my favourite book’ so far, this year.

Bibliomaniac by Robin Ince | Goodreads

We both are likely to find, say, the Maleus Malificorum resting alongside a book on quantum physics next to an Edwardian hardback copy of Bessie Marchant's The Girl Captives on our shelves. I really wanted to like this book more than I did in the end; I love books about books and I like to read about travel. Everyone’s very good at laughing loudly in a scary way late at night drunk on a train, but that vulnerability of exposing yourself in the cold light of day by saying ‘I love this! Recently, Ince has criticised Ricky Gervais's new Netflix special SuperNature for its transphobic material, warning him that he is becoming a "pin-up for the alt-right". The whole atmosphere of this book made it a great read for me; I enjoyed the geographical confusion, the tangents in the text, the digressions and the sometime self-denigrating observations.Ince braves the mean streets of Cardiff, the back stacks of Canterbury (reciting naughty Chaucerian bits), and of course Hay-on-Wye, about which he concludes, “there are too many books…. In 2010, Ince published a book entitled Robin Ince's Bad Book Club about his favourite books that he has used for his shows.