Reading Copy Book Blog

Oh boy, there’s trouble at the Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Montana. Last spring, the college library’s annual book sale took place and it seems someone accidently put one of the library’s rare books up for the sale. History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by Edward Hyde, first Earl of Clarendon, should not have [...]

JRR Tolkien’s unfinished book will be finished and published in April, according to the BBC. His son, Christopher, has completed The Children of Hurin – a book his father started and abandoned in 1918.

One of the America’s most influential rare book dealers, Glenn Horowitz, was profiled in yesterday’s New York Times.

Hello, here we go again with another week in the book world. It seems that it isn’t getting any easier for first-time novelists to win a publishing deal, according to yesterday’s Observer newspaper in the UK. The article explains how a two-book deal might yield rarely above £12,000.

Hello to Dan and Rachel at Old Saratoga Books in the upstate New York village of Schuylerville. Check out their excellent, and wonderfuly named, blog Book Trout.  Old Saratoga Books is an example of a classic used and rare bookstore – the sort that you’d like to visit on a Saturday morning and just browse. [...]

Budding writers in the UK can enter the Daily Mail’s first novel competition and win £30,000. Joanne Harris and Lee Child explain how they got publishing deals in the competition’s blurb.

The endless stream of Jane Austen stories continues. This time, the BBC reports that a publisher of a book about her has touched up her ‘ugly’ face. If novelists are judged by looks alone then there’s plenty of ugly writers who need ‘photoshopping’.

To go along with our recently launched Books for Cooks, the 2007 James Beard awards for Cookbooks nominees were announced a little while ago. There lots of fantastic books in the list – Category: Asian Cooking Cradle of Flavor – James Oseland Into the Vietnamese Kitchen: Treasured Foodways, Modern Flavors – Andrea Nguyen The Sushi [...]

Growing up we had a lot of the Richard Scarry books. The illustrations were charming, as was the accompanying text (though at the time I am sure I didn’t consider it charming, just funny). My favourite was the worm – with the hat and one shoe. Sadly, some of this charm has been lost when [...]

The AbeBooks.com Avid Reader e-newsletter for March has just gone out. It’s packed with interesting things, including this article on collecting rare bibles from Scott Brown – editor of Fine Books & Collections Magazine. You can sign up to receive future issues here.