AbeBooks' Reading Copy

I’ve always admired and respected Harper Lee for being the best literary one hit wonder I’ve ever come across. There is something so noble and restrained about doing something extremely well, and then stopping. I always felt as though she put every ounce of every word she had to say into To Kill a Mockingbird, [...]

We at AbeBooks do so love a good literary letter. This 1917 example to Winston Churchill, written a year before the end of WWI, includes an early usage of “OMG”. It also includes a lot of exclamation marks. Lord Fisher (I assume naval fleet Admiral John Arbuthnot Fisher) was an enthusiastic writer, also seemingly randomly [...]

Another great find from Letters of Note, this time of the science-fiction variety. In March 1964, legendary film director Stanley Kubrick (who by ’64 already had Lolita, The Killing and Dr. Strangelove under his belt, among others) wrote to also-legendary science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke (who had already been Hugo-nominated by then), proposing a [...]

It’s easy to love a man who loves his dog. In 1951, E.B. White, author of the beloved children’s stories Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little got in trouble with the SPCA for allegedly not paying the tax to license his daschund, and thus “harboring an unlicensed dog”. The letter he wrote them in return is [...]

We have a feature exploring the post-war writing of authors who went to war. Many young men with an urge to write have gone to war and then produced a masterpiece on their return. One such young man was Ernest Hemingway, who fought in World War I. This letter to his family about his experiences [...]