Just left Barnes and Nobles - they have none of these in stock. Will have to order online.

Try joining bookmooch.com, you might find some on there and theyre free.

If you don't mind used books, even ex/ library books, you can purchase most of these online for under five dollars including shipping I now have a large music book library, but all of them fit the category of used and cheap

Having completed the entire "Song of Fire and Ice" series, which took more or less six months, I'm finally going to get serious about piano reading. Just ordered the two recommended by Rocket88, as these seem most appealing to me. "The Piano on the Left Bank" and "Chopin in Paris". As Dogperson suggested, I'm getting them used, hardcover, on Amazon.

Anyone have anything to add to the list?

I love Liszts

Well...I love both books and lists so this was a good oppprtunity to organize my piano related library

There may be ones that you already listed above and some of mine are in Finnish but may also be available in English. I excluded those that I am sure are not. Many are not light reading, but I love to read stuff that makes my head spin...some may also be a little controversial but reading is supposed to make you think yourself, right?

Chopin a Graded Practical Guide by Eleanor Bailie
Chopin Pianist and Teacher by Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger
Chopin's Letters by Dover Publications
The Cambridge Companion to Chopin ed. by Jim Samson

Composers on Music ed. by Josiah Fisk
Off The Record by Peres Da Costa
18th Century Keyboard Music ed. by Robert L Marshall
19th century Piano Music ed. by R.Larry Todd
20th Century PIano Music by David Burge
Practicing Perfection by Chaffin, Imreh, Crawford
The Secret Life of Musical Notation by Roberto Poli
The Art of Piano by David Dubai
A Natural History of the Piano by Stuart Isacoff
Cesar Franck His Life and Times by R.J.Stove
Eric Satie: Music, Art and Literature ed. by Caroline Potter
The Composer-Pianists Hamelin and the Eight by Robert Rimm
The Untold Story of Adele aus der Ohe by LaWayne Leno
Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli as I knew him by Lidia Kozubek
Playing the Piano for pleasure by Charles Cook
Nicolas Medtner by Barrie Martyn

Pianistic Problems by William S.Newman
The Art of Practicing by Madeline Bruser
Piano Notes by Charles Rosen
Mastering Piano Technique by Seymour Fink
What Every Pianists Needs to Know About The Body
Adaptive Strategies for Small Handed Pianists by Lora Wreal and Brenda Wristen
The Pianists Guide to Pedalling by Joseph Banowetz

The Pianists Guide to Standard Teaching and Performance Literature (A must have to adult beginners who like to choose their own pieces)
Guide to Pianist's Repertoire by Maurice Hinson (recommended only if you love to explore repertoire whether you can play it or not)

Samuel Feinberg: Pianism as Art (in Finnish)
Discussions with Horowitz by David Dubal (in Finnish)
The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich (in Finnish)
Memoiries of Ashkenazy (in Finnish)
Rubinstein's self biography (in Finnish)
Chopin by Andre Gide (in Finnish)

I love Baroque Keyboard music, so I'll add these even if not from the era of the modern piano:
Domenico Scarlatti by Ralph Kirkpatrick
The Keyboard Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti by W.Dean Sutcliffe
Domenico Scarlatti Master of Music by Malcom Boyd
Keyboard Music Before 1700 ed. by Alexander Silbiger
Francois Couperin and the French Classical Tradition by Wilfrid Mellers

Oooh thanks for resurrecting this thread, I'm taking notes like crazy here!

If I may add my own Chopin to-reads:

"Chopin's Piano" by Paul Kildea, as suggested by Tyrone Slothrop
"Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times" by Alan Walker

My personal recommendation for anyone who can read German, although it's not about the piano, would be the German soprano Frieda Hempel's autobiography, "Mein Leben dem Gesang". Wonderful book, written with much wit and humour and such a great document especially of the pre-WWI era.

Great contributions. I'll try to update the first post when time and motivation coincide, but Outo, that's a lot of updating!

Could I suggest using Bold or the traditional Underline for titles? The list becomes a pretty formidable Wall of Text.

If you don’t have the time, I would be happy to do the formatting after you update the list, and send it to you by whatever means preserves the formatting BBCode instead of executing it.

ETA: this is the kind of rote mechanical task I find soothing.

OMG! I dare not look at this thread due to my obsessive collecting (especially books)! Is there any way to block a thread on this forum that isn't healthy for my mental sanity?

A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould's Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano by Katie Hafner

Feel free! Just quote the very first post, make the revisions, add on any others from today such as John, Outo, Sybille's, and then I will edit the first post with the revisions.Might want to eliminate the quotation marks then while you're at it.

Have fun!

Sorry....you're just going to have to exert some will power! Just Say No!

And then buy them anyway.

#nothelping #sorrynotsorry

On my Christmas list this year (and duly received) were Debussy: A Painter in Sound by Stephen Walsh and Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph by Jan Swafford. I've started the Debussy book, but not the Beethoven (at nearly a thousand pages).

I bought The Perfect Wrong Note by W. Westney a while back and I didn't get very far into it. I guess I need to give it another shot.

This is what I do...I borrow interesting non fiction books from the library if possible. I read for a while and realize it's something I will want to return to in the future. Take the book back to the library and buy one for myself...

Lately I have borrowed mostly fiction books..it's a lot cheaper

And you can borrow online now. Jealous of NYC folks - they have the entire NY public library system - virtually anything. My small library doesn't have much.

We also have a wonderful library system in my area: You can reserve any book (or record) from any of the libraries free of charge online and then just pick it up and return to the one close to you. And I happen to live about 300 meters from one
This is public libraries though. If I want something really rare, I'd have to go to the local conservatory.

I can also borrow many e-books but I prefer paper ones, because I already accumulate a lot of screen time at work.

These days, my sense is that much of the borrow from libraries, at least in my area, is of e-books and not paper books. But I could be wrong. From the libraries around her, you can even borrow e-books without going to the library with a special app.


I used to read e-books on my iPad. But the screen was an eye-strain since I read so much (often about 1 book per day). So I bought a Kindle with a backlight (I had one years ago, but it got old and out-of-date). The pages for me, just like reading from a paper book. And my Kindle houses my personal library of over a thousand e-books, not including those I borrow from the library.

You read a book per day? And play piano and visit multiple forums?? How do you possibly have so much time? Retired?