“There were always books in one’s home back then,” the ripened, white-haired literary lion said, reflecting on his youth in the 1930s from the stage of the Writers Guild (WGA) Theater in Beverly Hills in the summer of 2006. “And there were magazines with words, not just pictures like today.”

John Updike’s appearance at the WGA Theater that evening came in the waning days of an exhaustive and expansive global tour to support and promote his (then) new novel, Terrorist, an underestimated contribution to the catalogue of 9/11 Literature.

SEATTLE — According to his mother (in a position to know), Bradley Craft drew before he talked. Some children drop their obsession with drawing once they start to read and write, but Craft never quit.

Even a lifelong immersion in words as a bibliophile and bookseller didn’t choke off his drawing instinct. At Stacey’s, the venerated and now-closed San Francisco book store, Craft created literary caricatures for bookstore posters, sketching the hills and valleys of faces like that of California author Amy Tan. For his own amusement he labored over images of his 19th-century literary idols—Dickens, Thackeray. He even drew modern literary titans like Margaret Atwood in 19th-century dress (George Sand’s dress, to be specific).

For the second year in a row, Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol is the most borrowed book in UK libraries, and James Patterson is still the most borrowed author overall, a place he has occupied for the last five years.

The Public Lending Right (PLR) is the organistion that tracks the frequency of loans for any particular author’s work and enables the royalty payments to reach them. Their figures, released 3 February 2012, represent the shifting trends in popular tastes, consistently moving towards crime and thrillers in the last ten years; and American (or US-based) writers are favourite.

In the last chapter of her biography, Claire Tomalin speaks of one of Dickens’ earliest biographers: his daughter, Katey (Kate Perugini). “Katey spoke out,” Tomalin tells us, “as no one had done before, mixing love and anger, but clear in what she said.” Tomalin speaks in voices of both love and anger, but for the most part, succeeds in narrating a clear-eyed view of a man whose great fault was that almost no one in the real world could captivate him the way a creature of his own imagination could. Most of the real people to whom he did show consistent attention and affection were either unattainable in some way, or themselves set him up on such a pedestal that it was impossible for him to turn away such adoration.

This explains his neglect and eventual dismissal of his wife, Catherine, with whom he had ten children, who was rarely documented to have spoken a bad word about him, and of whom Katey Dickens said, “My poor mother was afraid of my father. She was never allowed to express an opinion—never allowed to say what she felt.” In Tomalin’s biography, Catherine appears as a model housekeeper and loving spouse, content to serve as a prop to Dickens for years while he set first one and then another of her sisters on pedestals far above her (he wanted to be buried next to one of her sisters, and the other was his housekeeper even after he divorced Catherine).

The Charles Dickens House Museum, 48 Doughty Street, represents the preservation of the author’s London home and proudly advertises the fact that it houses over 100,000 artefacts. These range from original manuscripts, personal belongings, images, and rare editions of the novels. It’s where he wrote Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby. All very significant, as their website, Dickens Museum.com, demonstrates.

But be warned, those of you who might be planning on following the Dickens trail during 2012, his bicentenary year. If you follow this link, “Great Expectations renovation project will start in April 2012”, you will find a surprise in store. As of April 2012 the Dickens House Museum in London will be closed for the remainder of the year. Yes, it pulled me up short as well! Of all the times to carry out refurbishments; and you’d have thought they would have seen this one coming.