Bill Belichick’s library is believed to contain the world’s third-largest collection of football books behind only the Library of Congress and the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

His collection of more than 800 titles is housed at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., where Belichick’s father coached 33 years.

Talking of sports, check out our just-updated Rare Book Room – there’s a carousel of collectible sports featuring eight gems, including this 1891 copy of American Football by Walter Camp. It belonged to General Matthew B. Ridgway who succeeded Dwight D. Eisenhower as supreme commander of the Allied Forces in Europe.

There is a wonderful quote in the interview.

As a teenager, O’Neill played cricket for the Netherlands’ under-19 side. He kept up the sport in England and, when he came to New York, he set about looking for a game. Eventually he called up the Staten Island cricket club. ‘Joe,’ asked the club official, ‘are you a white man?’ ‘Yes,’ O’Neill replied. ‘Well,’ said the official, ‘you better pack a helmet.’

For the past week Michael Phelps’ book Beneath the Surface was the second most searched for item on our website behind Stephenie Meyer and her million-plus selling Breaking Dawn, until yesterday when he actually surpassed her as people were looking for ultra scarce signed copies of his book which are selling for about $300.

If you ever wanted to know what it takes to make champion like Phelps, the BBC has the answer, and it’s a a whopping 12,000 calories, listed below is a regular day in the diet of Phelps….

Breakfast: Three fried egg sandwiches; cheese; tomatoes; lettuce; fried onions; mayonnaise; three chocolate-chip pancakes; five-egg omelette; three sugar-coated slices of French toast; bowl of grits; two cups of coffee

Lunch: Half-kilogram (one pound) of enriched pasta; two large ham and cheese sandwiches with mayonnaise on white bread; energy drinks

Dinner: Half-kilogram of pasta, with carbonara sauce; large pizza; energy drinks

Whispers of crisis in Beijing are nothing new to the Olympic Games. The Olympics have been plagued with accusations of lying, cheating, doping, racism, terrorism and warmongering almost since their modern inception.

Check out AbeBooks tribute to scandal at the Olympics.

9:45 A.M., Manhattan-bound D, Pacific to West Fourth. Young woman wearing red bandanna, light striped cotton T-shirt, and loose blue jeans, cuffed at the ankles. Smear of red lipstick. Intermittent scowls fail to cease even when acquiring a prime rush-hour seat. Green Crocs ventilate her feet. Large white plastic headphones hover over her ears. Just begun: a clean sepia paperback copy of Franklin Foer’s “How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization.” A glare, as though longing to kick something.

Sherman Alexie has never been one to back down from controversy, as is often demonstrated in his writings. Some of Alexie’s most acclaimed works include the PEN/Hemingway Award winning short story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, as well as the 1996 novel Indian Killer, which Alexie himself referred to as ‘a feel-good novel about interracial murder.’

While the historians hit for accuracy in their books, the autobiographies of players often swing and miss by miles. Many early players were barely literate, and if the books weren’t ghostwritten, then their stories were as whitewashed as Tom Sawyer’s fence.

The Chicago Sun-Times reviews the latest baseball books.

The St Louis Post Dispatch reviews some of the latest gardening books.