Reading Copy Book Blog

Top 10 bestselling signed books on AbeBooks 1. City of Bohane by Kevin Barry 2. Sacre Bleu by Christopher Moore 3. The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan 4. Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power by Rachel Maddow 5. The Beginner’s Goodbye by Anne Tyler 6. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson 7. Game of Thrones by [...]

A lucky man unknowingly purchased an original Andy Warhol sketch Warhol drew as a child, when he paid $5.00 for some paintings at a Las Vegas garage sale.

A book about mushrooms topped AbeBooks’ most expensive sales in March 2012. Wait…don’t click off. This is a special book and sold for $13,916. Published in 1675, Theatrum Fungorum by Franciscus van Sterbeeck was the first book to be dedicated entirely to fungi. Frans van Sterbeeck was a Flemish priest with a passion for botany, [...]

AbeBooks.com top 10 bestselling books of March 2012 1. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins 2. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins 3. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey 4. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins 5. Investigating the Social World by Russell K. Schutt 6. The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman [...]

An interesting article from Commentary Magazine yesterday. In 1929, two psychologists proposed a plan to survey literary critics, having them answer a questionnaire and rank living American novelists according to various points of merit. 65 critics took part, and the results were ranked and compiled, based on how many of the critics listed each name, [...]

The BC Book Prizes have announced the shortlist for the 2012 awards. Esi Edugyan and Carmen Aguirre are the big names on the list. Edugyan has already won the Giller Prize for Half-Blood Blues. What’s especially interesting and noteworthy is that while Edugyan is up for the fiction prize, so is her husband, Steven Price, [...]

I am a fan of The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham and was thrilled to see a signed copy sell for $14,500 during February on AbeBooks. I read it after seeing the BBC adaptation in 1981. I loved the book and the TV series. It sounds crazy but Wyndham’s storyline works extremely well. [...]

As someone who has often wistfully dreamed of opening my own bookstore (with a lovely soft couch-and-cushion section with story hour for kids, free coffee for grown-ups, and a leave-a-book-take-a-book section for swaps..), I enoyed reading this blog post called “25 Things I Learned From Opening a Bookstore”. It further confirmed my suspicion that not [...]

The scariest books, to keep you awake, alert to every sound, and eventually lull you into sweet nightmares.

We sell a lot of very interesting books and ephemera on AbeBooks each month. I love researching and putting together the monthly list of most expensive sales because beautiful first editions, amazing photography books and insightful inscriptions from influential authors are routinely found on the lists and December 2011 was no different. The oldest and [...]