Booking in the Heartland

Library Journal

Matthews travels 30,000 miles a year in search of old books. When he writes of his book-hunting adventures and the treasures he finds, he is informative and entertaining. He introduces the reader to untraveled byways in collectingbarely literate letters and old diaries that reveal the beauty and harshness of frontier life, obscure biographies of pioneers in the Ohio Valleyand he details the joyous discoveries awaiting the lucky finder. In places the account is marred by excessive philosophizing, but generally this is a pleasant, readable book on the rewards of book-collecting.Joseph Rosenblum, English Dept., Univ. of North Carolina, Greensboro