Steven Gilbar's Bibliotopia (subtitled or, Mr. Gilbar's Book of Books & Catch-all of Literary Facts & Curiosities) is an amusing and interesting collection of lists about books, authors, and other literary trivia. Decorated with appropriate and lovely illustrations by Elliott Banfield, Bibliotopia is a well-designed and useful miscellany, often reminiscent of those by Ben Schott.
Gilbar's work is the kind of book to set on a bedside table or guest bedroom bookshelf, good for dipping in and out of at random. The absence of a table of contents makes sense for this type of collection, but somewhat diminishes the book's usefulness as a reference guide (as does the inexplicable omission of most - but not all - author names from the index).
I must mention a couple small areas of concern: Gilbar incorrectly dates the development of paper to 405 A.D. (page 3); the date typically given for that event is 105 A.D., and even that has been proven too late (by about two hundred years) by archaeological investigations during the last decade. In the same entry, Gilbar makes the overly trite statement "With the coming of the steam-driven printing press, wood-based paper transformed society: before then a book was a rarity and most people could not read." Neither books nor literacy were as uncommon before the mid-nineteenth century as that sentence seems to suggest. Finally, Gilbar falls prey to the dangerously seductive trap of conflating book "format" with book "size", on page 7; determing format is rarely as easy as simply measuring the book's height.
Those minor issues aside, Bibliotopia is a worthwhile diversion for the literary-minded; there are chuckles, "hmm" moments, and interesting new bits of knowledge aplenty to be found within.
