Instant National Bestseller Shortlisted for the 2023 Inc. Non-Obvious Book Award "Witty, literary and very funny." —Minneapolis Star Tribune Welcome to Sotheran’s, one of the oldest bookshops in the world, with its weird and wonderful clientele, suspicious cupboards, unlabeled keys, poisoned books, and some things that aren’t even books, presided over by one deeply eccentric apprentice. Some years ago, Oliver Darkshire stepped into the hushed interior of Henry Sotheran Ltd (est. 1761) to apply for a job. Allured by the smell of old books and the temptation of a management-approved afternoon nap, Darkshire was soon unteetering stacks of first editions and placating the store’s resident ghost (the late Mr. Sotheran, hit by a tram). A novice in this ancient, potentially haunted establishment, Darkshire describes Sotheran’s brushes with history (Dickens, the Titanic), its joyous disorganization, and the unspoken rules of its gleefully old-fashioned staff, whose mere glance may cause the computer to burst into flames. As Darkshire gains confidence and experience, he shares trivia about ancient editions and explores the strange space that books occupy in our lives—where old books often have strong sentimental value, but rarely a commercial one. By turns unhinged and earnest, Once Upon a Tome is the colorful story of life in one of the world’s oldest bookshops and a love letter to the benign, unruly world of antiquarian bookselling, where to be uncommon or strange is the best possible compliment.

A wry, unvarnished chronicle of a career in the rare book trade during its last Golden Age When Gary Goodman wandered into a run-down, used-book shop that was going out of business in East St. Paul in 1982, he had no idea the visit would change his life. He walked in as a psychiatric counselor and walked out as the store’s new owner. In The Last Bookseller Goodman describes his sometimes desperate, sometimes hilarious career as a used and rare book dealer in Minnesota—the early struggles, the travels to estate sales and book fairs, the remarkable finds, and the bibliophiles, forgers, book thieves, and book hoarders he met along the way. Here we meet the infamous St. Paul Book Bandit, Stephen Blumberg, who stole 24,000 rare books worth more than fifty million dollars; John Jenkins, the Texas rare book dealer who (probably) was murdered while standing in the middle of the Colorado River; and the eccentric Melvin McCosh, who filled his dilapidated Lake Minnetonka mansion with half a million books. In 1990, with a couple of partners, Goodman opened St. Croix Antiquarian Books in Stillwater, one of the Twin Cities region’s most venerable bookshops until it closed in 2017. This store became so successful and inspired so many other booksellers to move to town that Richard Booth, founder of the “book town” movement in Hay-on-Wye in Wales, declared Stillwater the First Book Town in North America. The internet changed the book business forever, and Goodman details how, after 2000, the internet made stores like his obsolete. In the 1990s, the Twin Cities had nearly fifty secondhand bookshops; today, there are fewer than ten. As both a memoir and a history of booksellers and book scouts, criminals and collectors, The Last Bookseller offers an ultimately poignant account of the used and rare book business during its final Golden Age.

Journey into the world of book collecting with the Goldstones-rediscover the joy of reading, laugh, and fall in love with books all over again. The idea that books had stories associated with them that had nothing to do with the stories inside them was new to us. We had always valued the history, the world of ideas contained between the covers of a book or, as in the case of The Night Visitor, some special personal significance. Now, for the first time, we began to appreciate that there was a history and a world of ideas embodied by the books themselves. Part travel story, part love story, and part memoir, Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone's Used and Rare provides a delightful love letter to book lovers everywhere.

A celebration of the greatest kind of shop in the world, by an award-winning cast of writers including Ali Smith, Michael Dirda, Elif Shafak and Daniel Kehlmann. A cabinet of curiosities, a time machine, a treasure trove - we love bookshops because they possess a unique kind of magic. In Browse, Henry Hitchings asks fifteen writers from around the world to reveal their favourite bookshops, each conjuring a specific time and place. These inquisitive, enchanting pieces are a collective celebration of bookshops - for anyone who has ever fallen under their spell. Contributors include Alaa Al Aswany, Stefano Benni, Michael Dirda, Daniel Kehlmann, Andrey Kurkov, Yiyun Li, Pankaj Mishra, Dorthe Nors, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, Elif Shafak, Ian Sansom, Iain Sinclair, Ali Smith, Saša Stanišic, and Juan Gabriel Vásquez. A dazzling collection of original essays about the bookshop by fifteen bestselling international authors.

From floral patterns to cityscapes, the boldest book designs of a golden age are gathered here in full color.

A collection of forty-eight stories and poems originally published in separate editions of Little Golden Books.

What can you do when the world is pushing you over the edge? More than you think. For some of us, it's the automated voice that answers the phone when we'd rather talk to a real person. For others, it's the fact that Starbucks insists on calling its smallest-sized coffee "tall." Or perhaps it's those pesky subscription cards that fall out of magazines. Whatever it is, each of us finds some aspect of everyday life to be particularly maddening, and we often long to lash out at these stubborn irritants of modern life. In Life's Little Annoyances, Ian Urbina chronicles the lengths to which some people will go when they have endured their pet peeves long enough and are not going to take it any more. It is a compendium of human inventiveness, by turns juvenile and petty, but in other ways inspired and deeply satisfying. We meet the junk-mail recipient who sends back unwanted "business reply" envelopes weighted down with sheet metal, so the mailers will have to pay the postage. We commiserate with the woman who was fed up with the colleague who kept helping himself to her lunch cookies, so she replaced them with dog biscuits that looked like biscotti. And we revel in the seemingly endless number of tactics people use to vent their anger at telemarketers, loud cellphone talkers, spammers, and others who impose themselves on us. A celebration of the endless variety of passive aggressive behavior, Life's Little Annoyances will provide comfort and inspiration to everyone who has ever gritted his teeth and dreamed of sweet retribution against the slings and arrows of outrageous people.

Russia is a country of contradictions: a nation of cultural refinement and artistic originality and yet also a country that rules by 'the iron fist', with an ingrained eagerness to sacrifice the individual for the collectivist cause.