(Also, it says “Published by Penguin books”).

But that’s about all I could find out. There aren’t many Ptarmigan Books available for sale on the site, andf I could find very little information about the Ptarmigan brand, which seems to have been short-lived. From what I could find, the Ptarmigan name appeared in the mid-1940s on penguin books devoted to puzzles, trivia, word games and the like. And almost all of them were written by a man named Hubert Phillips, who was an English economist, journalist and author, as well as an expert on puzzles and games. I love these covers.

Kingsolver has primarily written fiction (some of her best-known include The Bean Trees, The Poisonwood Bible, and The Lacuna, though Prodigal Summer might be my favorite), but is also no stranger to non-fiction. One of the books for which she received a lot of attention was her 2008 book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, an exploration of her family’s attempts to eat more locally and environmentally sustainably.

The new title, Flight Behavior, is fiction again. The novel is a Tennessee-based story of love, science and spirituality. Kingsolver says the spark of inspiration for the tale came to her all of a sudden, in a dreamlike vision, and all went smoothly from there.

“Often there is a moment when I can see the novel sort of unrolling like a carpet in front of me and that did happen with this book. I think the novel is very much about how we understand and process what we see and how very true it is how we decide first what we believe and then collect evidence to support it, rather than the reverse. When you look at the conversation about climate change it’s baffling that everyone is presented with the same facts but people come away with very different convictions about what’s going on.”

Has anyone read this book? Share your thoughts in the comments.

via MentalFloss

In an era when a woman’s place was in the home, these remarkable pioneer women made history, built communities and took the wild out of wilderness.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving

“This list is a starting point,” said Librarian of Congress James H. Billington. “It is not a register of the ‘best’ American books – although many of them fit that description. Rather, the list is intended to spark a national conversation on books written by Americans that have influenced our lives, whether they appear on this initial list or not.”

We hope you will view the list, nominate other titles, and most importantly, choose to read and discuss some of the books on this list, reflecting America’s unique and extraordinary literary heritage, which the Library of Congress makes available to the world.

Here they all are, chronologically, spanning 1751-2002. Interesting that only one book is from the 21st century.

“Experiments and Observations on Electricity” by Benjamin Franklin (1751)
“Poor Richard Improved and The Way to Wealth” by Benjamin Franklin (1758)
“Common Sense” by Thomas Paine (1776)
“A Grammatical Institute of the English Language” by Noah Webster (1783)
“The Federalist” by anonymous (1787)
“A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible” by anonymous (1788)
“A Survey of the Roads of the United States of America” by Christopher Colles (1789)
“The Private Life of the Late Benjamin Franklin, LL.D.” by Benjamin Franklin (1793)
“American Cookery” by Amelia Simmons (1796)
“New England Primer” by anonymous (1803)
“History of the Expedition Under the Command of the Captains Lewis and Clark” by Meriwether Lewis (1814)
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Washington Irving (1820)
“McGuffey’s Newly Revised Eclectic Primer” by William Holmes McGuffey (1836)
“Peter Parley’s Universal History” by Samuel Goodrich (1837)
“The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” by Frederick Douglass (1845)
“The Scarlet Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
“Moby-Dick; or The Whale” by Herman Melville (1851)
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852)
“Walden; or Life in the Woods” by Henry David Thoreau (1854)
“Leaves of Grass” by Walt Whitman (1855)
“Little Women, or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy” by Louisa May Alcott (1868)
“The American Woman’s Home” by Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe (1869)
“Mark, the Match Boy” by Horatio Alger Jr. (1869)
“Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain (1884)
“How the Other Half Lives” by Jacob Riis (1890)
“Poems” by Emily Dickinson (1890)
“The Red Badge of Courage” by Stephen Crane (1895)
“The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” by L. Frank Baum (1900)
“Harriet, the Moses of Her People” by Sarah H. Bradford (1901)
“The Call of the Wild” by Jack London (1903)
“The Souls of Black Folk” by W.E.B. Du Bois (1903)
“The History of Standard Oil” by Ida Tarbell (1904)
“The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair (1906)
“Pragmatism” by William James (1907)
“The Education of Henry Adams” by Henry Adams (1907)
“Riders of the Purple Sage” by Zane Grey (1912)
“Tarzan of the Apes” by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1914)
“Family Limitation” by Margaret Sanger (1914)
“New Hampshire” by Robert Frost (1923)
“Spring and All” by William Carlos Williams (1923)
“The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes (1925)
“The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
“The Sound and the Fury” by William Faulkner (1929)
“Red Harvest” by Dashiell Hammett (1929)
“Joy of Cooking” by Irma Rombauer (1931)
“Gone With the Wind” by Margaret Mitchell (1936)
“How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie (1936)
“Idaho: A Guide in Word and Pictures” by Federal Writers’ Project (1937)
“Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston (1937)
“Our Town: A Play” by Thornton Wilder (1938)
“The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck (1939)
“Alcoholics Anonymous” by anonymous (Bill W. – Bill Wilson) (1939)
“For Whom the Bell Tolls” by Ernest Hemingway (1940)
“Native Son” by Richard Wright (1940)
“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” by Betty Smith (1943)
“A Treasury of American Folklore” by Benjamin A. Botkin (1944)
“A Street in Bronzeville” by Gwendolyn Brooks (1945)
“The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care” by Benjamin Spock (1946)
“The Iceman Cometh” by Eugene O’Neill (1946)
“A Streetcar Named Desire” by Tennessee Williams (1947)
“Goodnight Moon” by Margaret Wise Brown (1947)
“Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” by Alfred C. Kinsey (1948)
“Howl” by Allen Ginsberg (1956)
“The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger (1951)
“Charlotte’s Web” by E.B. White (1952)
“Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison (1952)
“Fahrenheit 451″ by Ray Bradbury (1953)
“On the Road” by Jack Kerouac (1957)
“Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand (1957)
“The Cat in the Hat” by Dr. Seuss (1957)
“To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee (1960)
“Catch-22″ by Joseph Heller (1961)
“Stranger in a Strange Land” by Robert E. Heinlein (1961)
“Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson (1962)
“The Snowy Day” by Ezra Jack Keats (1962)
“Where the Wild Things Are” by Maurice Sendak (1963)
“The Feminine Mystique” by Betty Friedan (1963)
“The Fire Next Time” by James Baldwin (1963)
“The Autobiography of Malcolm X” by Malcolm X and Alex Haley (1965)
“Unsafe at Any Speed” by Ralph Nader (1965)
“In Cold Blood” by Truman Capote (1966)
“The Double Helix” by James D. Watson (1968)
“Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” by Dee Brown (1970)
“Our Bodies, Ourselves” by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective (1971)
“Cosmos” by Carl Sagan (1980)
“And the Band Played On” by Randy Shilts (1987)
“Beloved” by Toni Morrison (1987)
“The Words of Cesar Chavez” by Cesar Chavez (2002)

Booked Up is a massive bookstore which currently houses about 450,000 books spread over four different buildings and apparently running a business of that size is taking its toll on the 75 year old. He as recently announced that he is going to be holding an auction this summer in order to sell off the stock being held in three of the four buildings his business currently occupies.

Americana Exchange writes about the impending sale:
With some 300,000 – 350,000 books going up for auction, most, naturally, will be sold as shelf lots. This explains why Mr. McMurtry considers the auction a great opportunity for young booksellers. Asked whether most books are collectible or reading copies, he emphatically states, “most of what we have is collectible.” This is not to say that it is all expensive material too good for reading. No one has 350,000 books appropriate for the rare book rooms. What he means is that the condition of his books, and the interest of their content, be they more recent or old, is at a high level. “We purge twice a year,” he explains, removing books whose condition or interest is unsuitable for the shop. It is not so much that every book is a great book as it is that they make a point not to have “bad” books. “We are picky.”

Along with the shelf lots McMurtry has handpicked 100 books which will be auctioned off as single book lots for bibliophiles who wish to take part in the auction but don’t want to purchase entire shelves.  Mr. McMurtry was careful to explain that these are not nessisarilly the most valuable books that will be sold, but merely a sample of items he finds interesting.

The auction will be conducted from 10:00 a.m. – 7:00 p.m. August 10^th and 11^th.  On Friday (August 10), approximately 930 lots will be sold, including the “McMurtry 100” single book lots. On Saturday, another 615 shelf lots will be sold, along with a large sign. That is the Goodspeed’s sign. Years ago, Mr. McMurtry picked up the sign that hung on the legendary Goodspeed’s shop in Boston. Goodspeed’s career roughly paralleled the Twentieth Century.

After the sale Booked Up will continue to operate from its main location and will still house over 140,000 books. You can read more about McMurtry in Books: A Memoir

Louis “Studs” Terkel died in 2008, but today would have been his 100th birthday. Born to Russian-Jewish parents in the Bronx, Terkel spent the bulk of his life in Chicago. He married his wife, Ida in 1939, and the couple remained together until her death in 1999.

Terkel was interested in oral history, and jazz, and very politically outspoken. He was best-known for the jazz column he wrote regularly for the Chicago Sunday Times, and his long-running radio show on WFMT, called The Studs Terkel Show. His contributions to literature, music, the theater, journalism and Chicago won’t soon be forgotten.