Our Holiday Gift Guides are here to help you find the perfect page-turner for every bookworm on your list this year!
This collection features books about… books! Also books about writers, genre, language, and even individual words.
A Book Lover’s Guide to the Zodiac
Charlie Castelletti (Editor)
Macmillan Collector’s Library
Astrology and literature have so much in common: our star signs help us to understand ourselves, our motivations and our behavior, whilst reading enables us to make sense of the world, our ow n characters and those around us. Read how the passionate and overly idealistic Madame Bovary from Flaubert’s masterpiece exhibits all the traits of a Gemini, whilst the unconventional Virginia Woolf and Lewis Carroll, with his groundbreaking stories, are typical Aquarians. With a chapter devoted to each star sign, and featuring entertaining extracts and poetry by classic writers, there’s much to learn and entertain here about books, poetry and astrology, guided by Charlie Castelletti’s witty and expert commentary running through the book.
Rejected Books : The Most Unpublishable Books of All Time
Graham Johnson, Rob Hibbert
Clarkson Potter
Have you ever had a great idea for a book but then thought, “Nobody would ever read that”? Well . . . you’re probably right. But you’re not alone! Enter Rejected Books, a rollicking collection of the best book covers for books that were never meant to be. These awful pitches were turned down for any number of reasons: they’re either too long, too sad, too raunchy, or just plain bad. The compilation of imagined book covers in Rejected Books will have you scratching your head and guffawing with every page turn. Though Pranks with Sausages and Holy Bible II don’t actually exist, Rejected Books offers up a professionally produced series of photos imagining just what these wacky ideas (and plenty more) could look like.
Dictionary People
Sarah Ogilve
Knopf
The Oxford English Dictionary is one of mankind’s greatest achievements, and yet, curiously, its creators are almost never considered. Who were the people behind this unprecedented book? As Sarah Ogilvie reveals, they include three murderers, a collector of pornography, the daughter of Karl Marx, a president of Yale, a radical suffragette, a vicar who was later found dead in the cupboard of his chapel, an inventor of the first American subway, a female anti-slavery activist in Philadelphia . . . and thousands of others. Of deep transgenerational and broad appeal, a thrilling literary detective story that, for the first time, unravels the mystery of the endlessly fascinating contributors the world over who, for over seventy years, helped to codify the way we read and write and speak. It was the greatest crowdsourcing endeavor in human history, the Wikipedia of its time.
Grandiloquent Words : A Pictoric Lexicon of Ostrobogulous Locutions
Jason Travis Ott
Countryman Press
This recondite caboodle of glosses panegyrizes the boggles of our palaver.* Words confirm and deny, guarantee and deceive, elucidate and obfuscate. The more words you know, the better you can express yourself and the more you can do in life. The founder of Grandiloquent Word of the Day accordingly presents a voluptuary of verbiage encompassing rare and obscure terms that confound or delight, antiquated argot from myriad epochs, and lexemes for venturesome bibliophiles. Featuring a short, insightful introduction, Grandiloquent Words offers more than 250 preternatural terminologies for you to ingurgitate and brandish with aplomb for countless occasions. Bask in cataracts of mundane morphemes, bookish locutions, beef-witted blatteroons, corporeal catastrophes, playful patois, and jolly jubilations. These always-extra expressions encompass timeless topics and modern phenomena, painting a group portrait of our foibles and joys. Replete with pronunciations, etymologies, examples, and whimsical illustrations, it will edify and entertain.
*This rare collection of definitions celebrates the marvels of our language.
Bartleby and Me : Reflections of an Old Scrivener
Gay Talese
Mariner Books
“New York is a city of things unnoticed,” a young reporter named Gay Talese wrote sixty years ago. He would spend the rest of his legendary career defying that statement by noticing those details others missed, celebrating the people most reporters overlooked, understanding that it was through these minor characters that the epic story of New York and of America unfolded. Inspired by Melville’s great short story “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Talese now remembers the unforgettable “nobodies” he has profiled in his pioneering career—from the New York Times’s anonymous obituary writer to Frank Sinatra’s entourage. In the book’s final act, a remarkable piece of original reporting titled “Dr. Bartha’s Brownstone,” Talese introduces readers to a new “Bartleby,” an unknown doctor who made his mark on the city one summer day in 2006. Rising within the city of New York are about one million buildings. These include skyscrapers, apartment buildings, bodegas, schools, churches, hospitals, and homeless shelters. Also spread through the city are more than 19,000 vacant lots, one of which suddenly appeared some years ago—at 34 East 62d Street, between Madison and Park Avenues—when the unhappy owner of a brownstone at that address blew it up (with himself in it) rather than sell his cherished 19th-century high stoop Neo-Grecian residence in order to pay the court-ordered sum of four-million dollars to the woman who had divorced him three years earlier. This man was a physician of sixty-six named Nicholas Bartha. On the morning of July 10th, 2006, Dr. Bartha had filled his building with gas that he had diverted from a pipe in the basement, and then he set off an explosion that reduced the four-story premises into a fiery heap that would soon injure ten firefighters, five passersby, and damage the interiors of thirteen apartments that stood to the west of the crumbled brownstone.
AstroLit: A Bibliophile’s Guide to the Stars
McCormick Templeman, Rachel Feder
Clarkson Potter
AstroLit is a cosmic voyage through the lives and works of literary giants from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. Renowned literary history scholars McCormick Templeman and Rachel Feder bring the twelve signs of the zodiac to glimmering life by analyzing the astrological influence of over fifty illustrious writers’ sun signs on the shape and depth of their work. Each of the twelve sections focuses on a particular zodiac sign, featuring profiles of three celebrated authors, analyzing their works and lives through the prism of their astrological sign. You’ll uncover connections between writers’ signs and their realms of creative influence, including the Capricornian ambition of Edgar Allan Poe and Zora Neale Hurston, the Sagittarian influence on William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and the Taurean gothiness evident in Mary Wollstonecraft’s work. Each chapter also includes writing advice and reading recommendations for readers, no matter your sign.
