AbeBooks' Reading Copy

I was crawling the blogosphere looking for something interesting to tell you all and I couldn’t choose between three stories, so I decided you could enjoy all three. The first comes from the UK where The Belfast Telegraph reports that a publisher offered pop music superstar Adele a giant stack of money to produce a [...]

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 [...]

According to the fine folks at Guinness the current holder of the title “world’s smallest book” is a 30 page Russian volume called Chameleon which measures a just 0.9mm (0.035 inches) and was created by Anatoliy Konenko in 1996.  Now, in what could be described as a tiny case of one-downmanship, Toppan Printing of Japan [...]

Rudyard Kipling is one of those authors who are timeless; even though many of his stories were written over a hundred years ago his work is still sought after, and cherished, today with great zeal. Which is this is why the discovery, and imminent publication, of 50 of his previously unpublished poems has become such [...]

The Diagram Prize just may be my favorite literary award (although the Bad Sex Award is right up there), it’s an annual competition to determine the strangest book title published in the last 12 months – many previous winners can be found in the halls of the Weird Book Room.  From Stray Shopping Carts of [...]

Exciting and fascinating news from the BBC this morning – bones found beneath a parking lot in Leicester, England last August have been confirmed as those of King Richard III. Richard III was the King of England for a mere 26 months from 1483 until 1485. His defeat in battle and death in 1485 heralded [...]

The four bedroom, 3600 square foot, townhouse that F. Scott Fitzgerald lived in from 1933-1935 has just come onto the market. While not cheap, at 450,000, it’s probably one of the more modest homes that Fitzgerald lived in during his often opulent lifetime. Nestled in Baltimore’s historic Bolton Hill neighborhood, which contains a large number [...]

Students at Leicester University have answered the age old question of “Was Roald Dahl being scientifically accurate when he described 501 seagulls lifting a giant peach in his classic children’s story James and the Giant Peach.” The students estimated the size of the peach, described by Dahl as being tall and wide like a small [...]

It’s always interesting to find out what books people own, it gives you a small window into someone’s life and places their interests, passions, and sense of humor on display.  Most of my colleagues and I have admitted that when we get invited into someone’s home, we will often scan over our hosts bookshelves, just [...]

Our good friends over at LibraryThing.com have announced a new initiative to help local bookstores and libraries promote their literary events and help raise money for literary charities. How are they doing this? For every bookstore and library event added to LibraryThing Local from now until January 1, LibraryThing will donate up to 15 cents [...]