Secret Library
How much do you know about the Victorian novelist who outsold Dickens? Or the woman who became the first published poet in America? Do you know what connects Homer’s Iliad to Aesop’s Fables?
The Secret Library explores these intriguing morsels of lesser-known history, along with the familiar literary heavyweights we know and love. Bringing together an eclectic literary mix of novels, plays, travel books, science books and joke books, author Oliver Tearle explores how the history of the Western World has intersected with all kinds of books over the last 3,000 years.
Delve into this treasure trove of curious literary examples to learn how our history and books are inextricably linked.
Oliver Tearle is a lecturer in English at Loughborough University (UK), where he completed a PhD (in 2010) and has taught for the last seven years, having also taught at the University of Warwick.
He runs the blog Interesting Literature: A Library of Literary Interestingness, which gets 1.5 million views a month and has a weekly feature where he reveals a little-known work of literature. The blog also has an accompanying Facebook page and Twitter feed, the latter of which is followed by, among many others, the makers of the television series QI, the Oxford English Dictionary, the British Library, the British Museum, the Times Literary Supplement, and numerous comedians, writers, academics, journalists, politicians, and celebrities.
Oliver is the author of two academic books, Bewilderments of Vision: Hallucination and Literature, 1880–1914 (Sussex, 2013) and T. E. Hulme and Modernism (Bloomsbury, paperback edition 2015), as well as the co-editor of an experimental volume of critical and creative pieces, Crrritic! (Sussex, 2011). His proudest achievement is coining the word 'bibliosmia' to describe the smell of old books.