NBA basketball coach Arnold “Red” Auerbach passed away Saturday. For those who do not know, Auerbach was the fiesty Boston Celtics coach who helped build one of the most celebrated dynasties in the game. Between 1950 and 1966, he won nine championships, including eight in a row from 1959 to 1966. Red not only coached but he wrote and co-wrote a few books, including an autobiography in 1977.
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Looking a tiny bit like an author is apparently enough to publish a book. Chuck Young, who says he is mistaken for the horror writer all the time, wrote a fan-fiction/spoof where a man who looks like Stephen King gets sucked into a parallel universe on his way to work in which he is forced to live out the storylines in some of King’s actual works!
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On Saturday, a group of Abers put on a workshop for kids at one of our local libraries in Victoria, BC. A group of 8-12 year-olds signed up to make books with us. We supplied the paper, pencils, stickers and pipe cleaners, and they supplied the stories.
I was excited to attend, though a little unsure of how I could help make books, having no experience with this myself. However, I didn’t have to fear - the kids wrote out their rough drafts, and then we used smaller thicker paper for the final copies, which we bound with pipe cleaners and they decorated with drawings, stickers, and magazine collages.
Their creativity was astounding: stories ranged from a magical kingdom called Animalia, the “true” story of WWII, a Titanic love story, and stories about lady pirates and gypsies. There were also several haunted house stories (one with a shark!), and one with a pumpkin that grew so big it took over a town.
When I see so many local kids hanging out with cell phones and MP3 players, and I communicate with my own 13-year-old brother using MSN, I worry that children don’t take joy in reading and writing the same way I did (and still do). These children proved me wrong - they couldn’t wait to write their own books, and many even asked for extra pages in theirs so they could write more when they got home. I can’t wait to see their first novels listed on AbeBooks.
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True fans of Stephen King are exceptionally passionate about his books… even if it means paying $8,000 for a bullet-decorated copy of The Regulators.
Check out the 10 most expensive Stephen King books ever sold through AbeBooks.
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Virgil’s, The Aeneid will be easily understood with Robert Fagles’ translated version of the epic poem due out this week. Fagles isn’t new to translations; He’s also translated The Iliad and Odyssey, both of which became bestsellers. Read more about Fagles’ labours in today’s New York Times.
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A new book called The Anger Scale by Katie Degentesh - a founding member of the avant-garde poetry group, Flarf Collective - just received a glowing review in Publishers Weekly. Flarf, for those who don’t know, is loosely described as a new genre of modern poetry where the poets mine the Internet for odd search terms and use the results to fuel the poem.Â
An interesting point brought up by the good people at the Fine Books Blog is that when an avant-garde genre is featured in a magazine such as Publishers Weekly, is it still avant-garde? (If a tree falls in the woods does it still make a sound?) Read up on works by other Flarfists here and here.
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Recently, a few book publishers have reported an increase in sales after the launch of the controversial program.
Does knowing what is inside the book make you more likely to buy it?
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Collectors of religious books might be interested to hear that one particular AbeBooks seller is listing books from the personal library of Professor emeritus at Princeton Theological Seminary, Bruce Metzger.
Bruce is on the board of the American Bible Society and a respected scholar of Greek, as well as the New Testament and Old Testament Bibles. As you would expect with an academic of his stature, there are some very rare religious books available, including this one.
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While doing some homework on science fiction authors, I was deeply impressed by Isaac Asimov’s incredible mutton chops. Is there any other author with such impressive facial hair? Karl Marx….
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Barack Obama, the Democratic senator for Illinois and maybe/maybe not presidential candidate, is a hot property right now. If you’re looking for that $1,698 signed first edition of Dreams From My Father - here it is.
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Do you love and collect books but are still a little in the dark as to their value? Or why they are valuable?
There was a good article the other day in the Fine Books Blog on “points†(which are errors or parts of a book which differentiate that printing or edition from others thus possibly making it more valuable).  This got me thinking about how daunting book collecting may seem to a newbie. I just started working here at AbeBooks about a month ago and there is definitely a lot you can learn. So in hopes of turning a book lover into a book collector, here are a few places you can look if your feeling a little lost.
AbeBooks Glossary of terms for bookies
The ever popular FAQ
The Avid Collector section of our website where you can sign up for our e-newsletter, chat with other collectors in the forums, and more
And of course when in doubt…. Pick up a book: John Carter - ABC for Book Collectors
It’s not so hard once you get into it, happy hunting!
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Next time I walk into my local library, I want to see the librarians wearing these t-shirts and pushing some very pimped out bookcarts.
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Our office has quotes about books on the walls (journalists love to work these into stories about AbeBooks), but to add an even more literary touch, maybe we should add Scrabble furniture as well? 
These were created for a London company’s employee break area. They look slightly uncomfortable, but fun too.
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Good luck to Kristen at Meiser Books. She’s been selling online with AbeBooks since 2002 but has just signed a lease to take her bookselling business into the bricks and mortar world for the first time.
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I’ve tried so hard to like baseball but it’s just not happening. But I am interested in some of the better books about its icons - Richard Ben Cramer’s Joe DiMaggio: A Hero’s Life is a great read, especially for a Brit like me who had no real idea about the true nature of his status in American society.
With the World Series going strong, we did a little experiment at AbeBooks this week and started searching for the signed baseball books offered for sale on the site. Top of the pile is an $18,500 copy of Babe Ruth’s Own Book of Baseball - a 1928 first edition, which was one of 1,000 signed copies. However, a more interesting book would probably be Baseball Has Done It by Jackie Robinson - a 1964 book where Robinson, who signed it, conducted interviews with black major leaguers.
And bottom of the pile? It takes just $16 to pick up a signed copy of Power, Sex and Money: How Success Almost Ruined My Life by Deion Sanders.
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