The novelist Barbara Pym was no stranger to rejection: 'The letter I wrote to The Author about not getting published was never published, which seems to be the final accolade of failure'. In The First Five Pages, literary agent Noah Lukeman offers 'a writer's guide to staying out of the rejection pile', and highlights what are often claimed to be the most difficult pages to write.
Over three hundred years ago Blaise Pascal wrote that 'The last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first'.
'A cornucopia of bookish information'
...is how the Sunday Telegraph has described the new Oxford Companion to the Book, the ground-breaking 2-volume reference work on all aspects of the book from ancient times to the present day. Written by over 400 of the world's best scholars in bibliography and book history, this Companion is made up of a unique combination of 48 essays followed by over 5,000 A-Z entries. Below is an extract from the essay on Children's books by Andrea Immel.
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