AbeBooks' Reading Copy

AbeBooks is seeing strong demand for signed copies of Tony Blair’s autobiography, A Journey. At the end of last week and over the weekend, signed copies were selling shortly after being listed on the site. The most expensive sale so far is $1,283 (that’s £830) for one of the signed numbered limited edition copies that [...]

President Barack Obama is going to be reading Jonathan Franzen’s new novel Freedom. Of course, he didn’t have to pay for it. The folks at the Bunch of Grapes bookstore on Martha’s Vineyard gave him an ARC (advance reader copy) that they had knocking around in the back.

Glenn Beck is a bookselling machine. Whatever happened to Oprah? It’s Beck who moves copies these days. Today’s hot Beck book is Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies by M. Stanton Evans. Yesterday, Beck told his army of followers that Senator Joseph McCarthy wasn’t such [...]

Glenn Beck, the right-wing commentator, doesn’t usually influence book sales at AbeBooks. We don’t really share the same audience but yesterday was a huge exception. Beck’s extensive discussion of The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Heyek meant AbeBooks enjoyed a huge scramble for copies yesterday. This influential economics book, published in 1944, argues against centrally-planned [...]

A signed first printing of Theodore Roosevelt’s first address to Congress has been sold on AbeBooks for $25,000. The speech occurred on December 3, 1901. The document was signed “Theodore Roosevelt.” Roosevelt (1858-1919) was the 26th president of the United States, and his enduring legacy as a politician and an outdoorsman ensures a strong following [...]

Nick Clegg’s hero is Samuel Beckett. My first encounter with Beckett was when I was studying in Minnesota and I acted in a student production of Krapp’s Last Tape. Back then I remember images of Beckett making as great an impression on me as his work. He always looked so impressive – that beak-like nose, [...]

A Southern California school district has pulled the 10th edition of Merriam-Webster’s dictionary from its shelves, because it contained the definition of “oral sex”. Really.

William J. Lederer, the former naval officer who co-wrote, The Ugly American – a novel blasted America’s foreign policy in Southeast Asia, ,died last month, reports the NY Times. He was 97

Loren Singer, the author of the 1970 conspiracy thriller, The Parallax View, has died at the age of 86. I have never read the book but I love the movie version with Warren Beatty.

The Guardian has a ‘digested read’ of Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue memoir. My proudest moment in office was seeing off an attempt by the police chief to introduce gun and alcohol controls. I hate liberals who don’t understand how things work in the 49th State. It is a God-given right for any Alaskan to get [...]