„I cannot recall just how and when we first met. It must have been during the 1980s, when I was a student at university and he had been dead for almost fifty years.“ This is the opening passage of an article I wrote for issue 32 of „Matrix – A Review for Printers and Bibliophiles“. It was published in 2014, …

When on holidays in Scotland some years ago we went into an antiquarian bookshop where we found “The British Encyclopedia In10 Volumes Illustrated”. It was ever so cheap – for the simple reason that volumes 7 to 10 were missing. Being book lovers we couldn’t resist bying it anyway. It had been published back in 1933. Vol 3 said “CHI-DUN”, …

There is something special to a pen-pal relationship bridging the enormous distance between Germany and Australia. The nations are different in so many aspects, the most obvious of which are climate and history. Both shaped everyday life in the respective locations.  It appears that there is some preconception in the sense that the more distant or farther away something is, …

The Book About Awayness   Those past years got me thinking a lot about what away means. I took to dictionaries. There was a wealth of meanings and usages. I remembered an old lady who used to live in my mother’s neighbourhood. She had a lovely little pet companion, a dachshund by the name of Wastel. And one day he …