AbeBooks' Reading Copy

Today’s interesting old-timey find on the site is The Good House-Wife Made a Doctor by Thomas Tryon, 1692. We only have one original copy, priced at just over three grand, so one would have to be very interested indeed to purchase it. But for those chiefly interested in its contents and text, there are several [...]

To describe this video in only one word would never do it justice, but if I had to: bizarre. Featuring a stern, turtlenecked librarian named Betty Glover, this is nearly five minutes of surreal, spoof workout advice for librarians, made in 1987 by an Arizona State University student. While disturbingly sizeist and focused on the [...]

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 [...]

These are fantastic and I would like to own one. The images come from Antikamnia Skeleton Calendars, put out by the Antikamnia Chemical Company, St. Louis, MO. Antikamnia’s analgesic compound, which was never patented, was marketed as a ‘proudly ethical drug’ and used to treat headaches, fever, stomach aches, nervousness, insomnia and ‘the blues’. It [...]

There are few things I like to do better than play a good game. Rummoli, Texas Hold ‘Em, Charades, Cribbage, Pictionary – you name it, I’ll probably love playing it. And of course it goes without saying that I adore books, so I was happy to find that Flavorwire has a list of 10 Literary [...]

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 [...]

Flavorwire found 20 Tolkien-themed tattoos, and they are totally worth scrolling through. Many of them are beautifully done, still more of them are surprisingly elaborate, and one of them – the eye of Sauron on the back of that chap’s neck – is terrifying. Imagine waking up with that looking at you? I would never [...]

In 2010, I was lucky enough to visit Key West, Florida. A wonderful escape from Canadian winter. While there, I spent an enjoyable couple of hours touring the grounds and house of Ernest Hemingway’s Key West Home, where Hemingway lived from 1931 until 1939 with his second wife (of four!), Pauline. We were certainly enchanted [...]

“The smell of a freshly printed book is the best smell in the world.” Karl Lagerfeld To a real booklover, the smell of books is a glorious and varied thing. New ones smell of ink and laminate and cardboard and sometimes a little like the store you bought them at, if it’s one of those [...]

I recently took a trip to Atlanta, and was lucky enough to stumble across word of Gladys Knight’s Chicken and Waffles restaurant. We went, we ate (fried chicken! waffles! macaroni and cheese! collard greens! etc.) and it was glorious. One of my true disappointments in life thus far is that we were too full to [...]