An enchanting book about books: a beautiful hardcover Pocket Poets anthology that testifies to the passion books and libraries have inspired through the ages and around the worldBooks have long captured the love, imagination, even the veneration, of readers everywhere. Emily Dickinson envisions these precious objects as Frigates that take us Lands away; Alberto Rios calls them the deli offerings of civilization itself. This affection extends to the hallowed gathering places of the written word: the libraries and bookshops where one can best hear a choir of authors murmuring inside their books, as Billy Collins has it.

The poets collected here range from the writer of Ecclesiastes in the third century BCE through such pillars of world literature as Catullus, Horace, Tao Chien, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Pierre de Ronsard, Lope de Vega, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Wordsworth; more recent luminaries include Jorge Luis Borges, C. P. Cavafy, Gabriela Mistral, Wallace Stevens, Iku Takenaka, Pablo Neruda, Wislawa Szymborska, Maya Angelou, and Derek Walcott.

A remarkably diverse treasury of literary celebrations,Books and Librariesis sure to take pride of place on the shelves of the book-obsessed.