Dave Eggers

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Vermont

A Hologram for the King

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Nicholas A. Basbanes

The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World

In A Splendor of Letters, Nicholas A. Basbanes continues the lively, richly anecdotal exploration of book people, places, and culture he began in 1995 with A Gentle Madness (a finalist that year for the National Book Critics Circle Award) and expanded in 2001 with Patience & Fortitude, a companion work that prompted the two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and biographer David McCullough to proclaim him "the leading authority of books about books." Basbanes now offers a consideration of the many pressing issues that surround the role of books in contemporary society, such as the willful destruction of books and libraries in Sarajevo, Tibet, and Cambodia, and the spirited efforts to restore them. The matter of "discards" at various libraries takes on an entirely new dimension as well, with fully researched stories about the kind of attitudes that may lead to the loss of “last copies” of important works. In vivid detail, Basbanes examines the many materials that have been used over the centuries to record information -- among them clay tablets, papyrus scrolls, slabs of stone, palm leaves, animal skins, and hammered sheets of gold and copper. Also discussed are the various debates that continue to rage about preservation, which may mean saving and storing books on paper indefinitely, or as electronic data, which are by nature ephemeral. In this beautifully packaged edition, Nicholas Basbanes brings to a close his wonderful trilogy on the remarkable world of books and bibliophiles.

A Splendor of Letters

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Twenty Years on the Book Beat

General Adult. From the acclaimed author of A Gentle Madness comes a new collection of more than thirty dispatches from the world of books. Reports on a nascent library in Iraq and a firsthand account of a high-stakes book auction combine with provocative discussions of the deliberate destruction of books and insightful profiles of book collectors, writers, and librarians to create a panoramic view of bibliomania.

Editions and Impressions

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Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

A Roving Chronicle of Book People, Book Places, and Book Culture

In 1995 Nicholas Basbanes introduced a resonant phrase to describe the obsessive passion people have had over the past twenty-five hundred years to possess books, a condition more commonly known as bibliomania, one he christened in his book A Gentle Madness. Reviewing the work in the Washington Post, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Michael Dirda judged it to be a gallery of wonderful characters, "each more appealing than the last." Now, in Patience & Fortitude, Basbanes continues his discursive adventures among the gently mad, expanding his focus to probe the more comprehensive concept of book culture. Visiting many key "book places" around the world, he talks with a striking variety of kindred spirits, each one a living testament to the unending relevance of these essential artifacts in our lives. Drawing its title from the unofficial names of the marble lions that guard the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, Patience & Fortitude explores the changing form of the book over the centuries and describes the nature of the institutions that have evolved to contain them, including academic, public, private, and national repositories. Using the same narrative technique that made A Gentle Madness a national bestseller, Basbanes employs a lively balance of scholarly research with investigative journalism to document many pertinent book stories that have not been told before, and offers unprecedented depth to others that have barely scratched the surface. Picking up seamlessly where its predecessor left off, Patience & Fortitude profiles the experiences and thoughts of all kinds of dedicated "book people," be they librarians, readers, writers, bookmakers, booksellers, preservationists, or collectors.

Patience and Fortitude

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Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Inside the Creative Process

"Companion Book to Edition & Impressions: Twenty Years on the Book Beat The final quarter of the last century was a period of extraordinary fervor in American letters. About the Author: Inside the Creative Process collects together more than forty of Nicholas Basbanes's interviews and essays that grew from this unique period of publishing. About the Author publishes for the first time the full interviews with important writers such as novelists A. S. Byatt, Joseph Heller, Edna O'Brien, and Kurt Vonnegut; the critic Alfred Kazin a few months before he died; and columnist Jimmy Breslin just after he had suffered an aneurysm. With the loss of so many of these writers and the imposing behemoth called the Internet, this sort of collection may never again be culled from the morning papers. As alive and refreshing as the day they were published, About the Author explores the creative process that was--and is--the foundation of books and publishing. This superbly crafted edition of About the Author is styled after the limited edition of Editions & Impressions. It is bound in a delightful hunter green linen-finished cloth on the spine with matching khaki toned cloth on the boards. The khaki toned slipcase with the book is embossed in gold foil. The book includes a hunter green ribbon bookmark and matching headbands. The limited edition is printed on Mohawk Superfine smooth finish stock in a soft-white shade, and is Smythe sewn into its binding. A total of 255 copies will be signed and numbered, and 250 will be for sale."--Publisher's website.

About the Author

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Withdrawn library book. Damage is pictured. 

The Power of the Printed Word to Stir the World

Inspired by a landmark exhibition mounted by the British Museum in 1963 to celebrate five eventful centuries of the printed word, Nicholas A. Basbanes offers a lively consideration of writings that have "made things happen" in the world, works that have both nudged the course of history and fired the imagination of countless influential people. In his fifth work to examine a specific aspect of book culture, Basbanes also asks what we can know about such figures as John Milton, Edward Gibbon, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Adams, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Henry James, Thomas Edison, Helen Keller -- even the notorious Marquis de Sade and Adolf Hitler -- by knowing what they have read. He shows how books that many of these people have consulted, in some cases annotated with their marginal notes, can offer tantalizing clues to the evolution of their character and the development of their thought. Taking the concept one step further, Basbanes profiles some of the most articulate readers of our time -- David McCullough, Harold Bloom, Robert Fagles, Robert Coles, Helen Vendler, Elaine Pagels, Daniel Aaron, Christopher Ricks, Matthew Bruccoli, and Perri Klass among them -- who discuss such relevant concepts as literary canons, classic works in translation, the timelessness of poetry, the formation of sacred texts, and the power of literature to train physicians, nurture children, and rehabilitate criminal offenders. "Basbanes has a deep and abiding passion for books -- a joyful addiction," Dan Smith wrote in the Toronto Star of Patience & Fortitude, characterizing his body of work as "part travelogue, part scholarship, and all story." The tradition continues with Every Book Its Reader.

Every Book Its Reader

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Allison Hoover Bartlett

The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession

A full-length narrative account of the author's original article as included in Best American Crime Reporting 2007 describes the lucrative heists of book thief John Charles Gilkey and the cat-and-mouse efforts of book dealer Ken Sanders to bring him to justice.

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much

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Jeremy Mercer

A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare and Co

"Some bookstores are filled with stories both inside and outside the bindings. These are places of sanctuary, even redemption---and Jeremy Mercer has found both amid the stacks of Shakespeare & Co."
---Paul Collins, author of "Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books"
In a small square on the left bank of the Seine, the door to a green-fronted bookshop beckoned. . . .
With gangsters on his tail and his meager savings in hand, crime reporter Jeremy Mercer fled Canada in 1999 and ended up in Paris. Broke and almost homeless, he found himself invited to a tea party amongst the riffraff of the timeless Left Bank fantasy known as Shakespeare & Co. In its present incarnation, Shakespeare & Co. has become a destination for writers and readers the world over, trying to reclaim the lost world of literary Paris in the 1920s. Having been inspired by Sylvia Beach's original store, the present owner, George Whitman, invites writers who are down and out in Paris to live and dream amid the bookshelves in return for work. Jeremy Mercer tumbled into this literary rabbit hole and found a life of camaraderie with the other eccentric residents, and became, for a time, George Whitman's confidante and right-hand man.
"Time Was Soft There" is one of the great stories of bohemian Paris and recalls the work of many writers who were bewitched by the City of Light in their youth. Jeremy's comrades include Simon, the eccentric British poet who refuses to give up his bed in the antiquarian book room, beautiful blonde Pia, who contributes the elegant spirit of Parisian couture to the store, the handsome American Kurt, who flirts with beautiful women looking for copies of "Tropic of Cancer," and George himself, the man who holds the key to it all. As "Time Was Soft There" winds in and around the streets of Paris, the staff fall in and out of love, straighten bookshelves, host tea parties, drink in the more down-at-the-heels cafes, sell a few books, and help George find a way to keep his endangered bookstore open. Spend a few days with Jeremy Mercer at 37 Rue de la Bucherie, and discover the bohemian world of Paris that still bustles in the shadow of Notre Dame.
"Jeremy Mercer has captured Shakespeare & Co. and its complicated owner, George Whitman, with remarkable insight. "Time Was Soft There" is a charming memoir about living in Whitman's Shakespeare & Co. and the strange, broken, lost, and occasionally talented, eccentrics and residents of this Tumblewood Hotel."
---Noel Riley Fitch, author of "Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties & Thirties"
"There does seem to be something about the odd ducks that work at bookstores. Jeremy Mercer has captured the story of a wonderful, unique store that could only be born out of a love for books and the written word."
--- Liz Schlegel, the Book Revue bookshop, Huntington, New York

"

Time Was Soft There

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John Le Carré

Otto Penzler

A retired undercover agent, a charming but dangerous woman, and an aging intellectual are drawn together by murder among England's upper crust.

A Murder of Quality

23a8c4fc-ef3b-4289-b669-09af0e99cbc2-1

David Mitchell

Interweaves six narratives spanning the period between 1984 and the 2030s to chronicle a secret war between a cult of soul-decanters and a small group of vigilantes who would take them down. By the award-winning author of Cloud Atlas. 200,000 first printing.

The Bone Clocks

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Coming September 5, a new novel from New York Times bestselling author John le Carr�

A Legacy of Spies

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Ann Mah

From Paris Bistros to Farmhouse Kitchens, Lessons in Food and Love

A foodie journalist's visions of 3-year romantic adventure in Paris are dashed when her husband is reassigned to a year-long post in Iraq--alone-- and she must make a life for herself without him in a new city.

Mastering the Art of French Eating

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M. F. K. Fisher

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Map of Another Town and a Considerable Town, a Celebration of Aix-En-Provence and Marseille

This volume brings together two delightful books—Map of Another Town and A Considerable Town—by one of our most beloved food and travel writers. In her inimitable style, here M.F.K. Fisher tells the stories—and reveals the secrets—of two quintessential French cities. Map of Another Town, Fisher’s memoir of the French provincial capital of Aix-en-Provence is, as the author tells us, “my picture, my map, of a place and therefore of myself,” and a vibrant and perceptive profile of the kinship between a person and a place. Then, in A Considerable Town, she scans the centuries to reveal the ancient sources that clarify the Marseille of today and the indestructible nature of its people, and in so doing weaves a delightful journey filtered through the senses of a profound writer.

Two Towns in Provence

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David Lebovitz

The Delights and Disasters of Making My Paris Home

"A chef buys an apartment in Paris and endures the headaches and excitement of renovating his own corner of paradise in the City of Light"--

L' Appart

44a7b9f9-af5c-48cf-864e-897e7f6e3542-1

Gregory Benford

Loops in the Timescape

In this thematic sequel to Gregory Benford’s award-winning bestseller Timescape, a history professor finds that he is able travel back to 1968, the year he was sixteen—here, he finds a slew of mentors with the same ability, including Robert Heinlein, Albert Einstein, and Philip K. Dick and becomes a successful Hollywood screenwriter until some wicked time travelers try to subvert him. It’s 2002, and Charlie, in his late forties, is a bit of a sad-sack professor of history going through an unpleasant divorce. While flipping the cassette of an audiobook he gets into a car accident with a truck, and wakes up, fully aware as his adult mind, in his sixteen-year-old body in 1968. Charlie does the thing we all imagine: he takes what he remembers of the future and uses it for himself in his present, the past. He becomes a screenwriter, anticipating the careers of Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg, and then, in a 1980s life of excess, he dies, and wakes up again in his bedroom at sixteen in 1968. Charlie realizes things he didn’t see the first time: that there are others like him, like Albert Einstein, Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein. In fact, there is a society of folks who loop through time to change the world for their agenda. Now, Charlie knows he has to do something other than be self-indulgent and he tries to change one of the events of 1968 in this clever thriller.

Rewrite

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Jo Nesbø

Don Bartlett

Investigating the contract killing of a musician at the height of the Christmas season in Oslo, maverick detective Harry Hole discovers that the assassin killed the wrong person and is frantically searching for his target, a situation that leads to a race against time in the darkest corners of former Yugoslavia.

The Redeemer

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Jo Nesbo

A Harry Hole Novel

From the author of The Devil's Star and The Snowman comes another entry in the Harry Hole series.

The Leopard

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Louis Osteen

Bret Lott

Recipes from a Lowcountry Chef

The owner of the acclaimed Charleston Grill delivers more than 170 creative recipes structured around the seasons that allow the home cook to recreate his sophisticated dishes. Foreword by Bret Lott.

Louis Osteen's Charleston Cuisine

dba50c8e-6962-447d-b1ac-a35cf93deb8a-0

Paula Hawkins

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

A Novel

The #1 New York Times Bestseller, USA Today Book of the Year, soon to be a major motion picture starring Emily Blunt. The debut psychological thriller that will forever change the way you look at other people's lives. "Nothing is more addicting than The Girl on the Train."--Vanity Fair "The Girl on the Train has more fun with unreliable narration than any chiller since Gone Girl. . . . [It] is liable to draw a large, bedazzled readership."--The New York Times "Marries movie noir with novelistic trickery. . . hang on tight. You'll be surprised by what horrors lurk around the bend."--USA Today "Like its train, the story blasts through the stagnation of these lives in suburban London and the reader cannot help but turn pages."--The Boston Globe "Gone Girl fans will devour this psychological thriller."--People EVERY DAY THE SAME Rachel takes the same commuter train every morning and night. Every day she rattles down the track, flashes past a stretch of cozy suburban homes, and stops at the signal that allows her to daily watch the same couple breakfasting on their deck. She's even started to feel like she knows them. Jess and Jason, she calls them. Their life--as she sees it--is perfect. Not unlike the life she recently lost. UNTIL TODAY And then she sees something shocking. It's only a minute until the train moves on, but it's enough. Now everything's changed. Unable to keep it to herself, Rachel goes to the police. But is she really as unreliable as they say? Soon she is deeply entangled not only in the investigation but in the lives of everyone involved. Has she done more harm than good?

The Girl on the Train

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Rachel Eve Moulton

Joe Hill meets Carmen Maria Machado in this spellbinding debut about a young woman trapped in a Black Hills ghost town in the dead of winter Emma is hitchhiking across the United States, trying to outrun a violent, tragic past, when she meets Lowell, the hot-but-dumb driver she hopes will take her as far as the Badlands. But Lowell is not as harmless as he seems, and a vicious scuffle leaves Emma bloody and stranded in an abandoned town in the Black Hills with an out-of-gas van, a loaded gun, and a snowstorm on the way. The town is eerily quiet and Emma takes shelter in a diner, where she stumbles across Earl, a strange little boy in a tinfoil mask who steals her gun before begging her to help him get rid of “George.” As she is pulled deeper into Earl’s bizarre, menacing world, the horrors of Emma’s past creep closer, and she realizes she can’t run forever. Tinfoil Butterfly is a seductively scary, chilling exploration of evil—how it sneaks in under your skin, flaring up when you least expect it, how it throttles you and won't let go. The beauty of Rachel Eve Moulton's ferocious, harrowing, and surprisingly moving debut is that it teaches us that love can do that too.

Tinfoil Butterfly

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Cece Bell

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

The author recounts in graphic novel format her experiences with hearing loss at a young age, including using a bulky hearing aid, learning how to lip read, and determining her "superpower."

El Deafo

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Chris Whitaker

This is a book that will make you laugh, it will make you cry and it will break your heart. A triumph of a novel from the award-winning author of Tall Oaks.

We Begin at the End

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Rowan Coleman

What do you do when you are a child' s last hope? From bestselling author Rowan Coleman comes a deeply touching tale of a fast-track career woman whose life takes a sharp right turn when motherhood unexpectedly lands in her lap. Sophie and Carrie were childhood best friends, but in the last few years they've lost touch. While Carrie chose motherhood in a small town, Sophie is powering up the London career track. She's a corporate manager poised for her next promotion. Sure, she doesn't have much time for men, but she has a great shoe collection and a cat who's never going to let her down. And then Sophie is told that Carrie has died, with nobody left to care for her two daughters, Bella and Izzy, aged six and three. Their father, who left before Carrie's death, is nowhere to be found; their grandmother is moving into assisted living. Sophie once promised Carrie she would take care of her children if the worst ever happened...and now that day has come. Witty, wise, and filled with genuinely powerful emotion, The Accidental Mother is the heartwarming, heartbreaking story of a woman who is woefully under-equipped to be suddenly thrown into motherhood, but who through the eyes of two little girls learns more about loss, commitment, and true love than she had ever realized existed.

The Accidental Mother

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Robert James Waller

The author of the phenomenal New York Times bestseller The Bridges of Madison County once again brings characters and situations with his special blend of lyricism and magic. This is a bittersweet story about two good people who discover that true love, when it comes, is rarely fair, or right--or without pain.

Browse by categories

Dave Eggers

A Hologram for the King

Nicholas A. Basbanes

A Splendor of Letters

Nicholas A. Basbanes

Editions and Impressions

Nicholas A. Basbanes

Patience and Fortitude

Nicholas A. Basbanes

About the Author

Nicholas A. Basbanes

Every Book Its Reader

Allison Hoover Bartlett

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much

Jeremy Mercer

Time Was Soft There

John Le Carré; Otto Penzler

A Murder of Quality

David Mitchell

The Bone Clocks

John Le Carré

A Legacy of Spies

Ann Mah

Mastering the Art of French Eating

M. F. K. Fisher

Two Towns in Provence

David Lebovitz

L' Appart

Gregory Benford

Rewrite

Jo Nesbø; Don Bartlett

The Redeemer

Jo Nesbo; Don Bartlett

The Leopard

Louis Osteen; Bret Lott

Louis Osteen's Charleston Cuisine

Paula Hawkins

The Girl on the Train

Rachel Eve Moulton

Tinfoil Butterfly

Cece Bell

El Deafo

Chris Whitaker

We Begin at the End

Rowan Coleman

The Accidental Mother

Robert James Waller

Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend

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