The London Scene: Five Essays by Virginia WoolfFrank Hallman, 1975

An elegant little book of essays (an edition of 750 was printed by The Stinehour Press): the physical object, well-designed text on expensive paper, and, of course, Woolf’s prose. The essays were written in the early 1930s for Good Housekeeping, and they’re about modernity, democracy, Englishness, the present of London and the ever-present past, but what I like most is the motion of them, the rhythm of the sentences, meandering from one place in London to the next. And, of course, the details: sacks of cinnamon being unloaded at the docks; ships in the harbor ready to depart, flying the Blue Peter; Keats’s house and its windows, Carlyle’s house and its stairs.