AbeBooks' Reading Copy

Modern science is rarely dull and there’s usually a fascinating story behind each new discovery. This was the formula that fuelled the Scientific Book Club for more than five decades. With a new title released each month, the Scientific Book Club covered a broad range of topics from geology to marine life and fossil fuels [...]

March’s most expensive sales on AbeBooks reveals the broad scope of collectible books. The list of top 10 sales includes a guest book but it’s no ordinary guest book. The book belonged to the Castello Bar from the Castle Schloss Mondsee near Salzburg in Austria, and it sold for $11,900. Castle Schloss Mondsee, now an [...]

Openculture.com has a post up called Six Postcards From Famous Writers: Hemingway, Kafka, Kerouac & More. It’s a neat collection and worth looking at: Perhaps the most curious and amusing of the cards is the whimsical note F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to himself. (See above.) Fitzgerald was working as a screenwriter in Hollywood during the [...]

Edith (E.) Nesbit was the queen of children’s literature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Her best-known work is The Railway Children (1906), a story of three children trying to prove the innocence of their father, who is falsely imprisoned for espionage. Nesbit’s writing went beyond children’s books to adult novels, political writing, [...]

Today’s gorgeous and unusual find is this hand-illuminated book. Not much appears to be known about it, but it’s just stunning (An illuminated manuscript is any manuscript whose text is accompanied by decoration. It originally referred only to silver or gilt adornments, but came to be acceptable terminology for any manuscript with drawings, paintings or [...]

February’s top 10 most expensive sales on AbeBooks included a ultra-rare $7,500 limited edition of The Moment by American poet Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972). The book was sold by Kim Herzinger of Left Bank Books from New York and Kim was kind enough to explain further why book collectors are fascinated with this enigmatic poet. Kim [...]

In the publishing world, pelicans are related to penguins. Famous for affordable paperbacks, Penguin launched a non-fiction imprint called Pelican and published thousands of titles between 1937 and 1984. The first Pelican was George Bernard Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism & Fascism, and today you will find these books in used [...]

The Saturday Book was an annual miscellany that featured art, literature and comment on British life during World War II and the decades that followed until 1975. The series was initially edited by Leonard Russell with John Hadfield taking over the reins in 1952. Each edition of The Saturday Book provides a wonderful glimpse into [...]

Happy birthday to Jules Verne, born 185 years ago today, on February 8th, 1828. Verne was a French science fiction author, most famous for Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. His imagination ran just as deep, and throughout his career he contributed immeasurably to the genre of science fiction. He is often called the father [...]

Our latest AbeBooks Video Book Review explores the seven-volume work from German portrait photographer August Sander, called People of the 20th Century (or Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts). Sander, whose work spanned the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was one of the most influential and well-respected photographers of his time in Germany and beyond. The [...]