In most college and university libraries, materials published before 1800 have been moved into special collections, while the post-1923 books remain in general circulation. But books published between these dates are vulnerable to deaccessioning, as libraries increasingly reconfigure access to public-domain texts via digital repositories such as Google Books. Even libraries with strong commitments to their print collections are clearing out the duplicates, assuming that circulating copies of any given nineteenth-century edition are essentially identical to one another. When you look closely, however, you see that they are not. Many nineteenth-century books were donated by alumni or their families decades ago, and many of them bear traces left behind by the people who first owned and used them. In Book Traces, Andrew M. Stauffer adopts what he calls "guided serendipity" as a tactic in pursuit of two goals: first, to read nineteenth-century poetry through the clues and objects earlier readers left in their books and, second, to defend the value of keeping the physical volumes on the shelves. Finding in such books of poetry the inscriptions, annotations, and insertions made by their original owners, and using them as exemplary case studies, Stauffer shows how the physical, historical book enables a modern reader to encounter poetry through the eyes of someone for whom it was personal.

Thomas Jefferson considered the University of Virginia to be among his finest achievements--a living monument to his artistic and intellectual ambitions. Now, on the occasion of the University's bicentennial, Brendan Wolfe has assembled one hundred objects that, brought together in one fascinating book, offer a new, sometimes surprising history of Jefferson's favorite project. Mr. Jefferson's Telescope begins with the years leading up to the University's 1819 founding and continues to the triumphs and challenges of the present day, each entry joining a full-color image with an engaging description that both stands alone and contributes to an engrossing larger narrative about how the school has evolved over time. Considering an orange and blue silk handkerchief, Wolfe reveals that the University's school colors were originally cardinal red and gray--calling to mind a Confederate soldier's blood-stained uniform but ultimately deemed not bright enough to stand out on muddy football fields. The record of an overdue book checked out by a young Edgar Allan Poe speaks to a long literary tradition. On the subject of a key to the Rotunda's doors, Wolfe introduces us to its keeper, the Monticello-born ex-slave who rang the hourly bells on Grounds into the early twentieth century. Beautifully illustrated with over one hundred new and archival images, this book brings to life a remarkable array of significant objects while offering to the reader the best introduction available to the history of Jefferson's great institution.

Worshipped by her fans, denounced by her enemies, and forever shadowed by controversy and scandal, the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand was a powerful thinker whose views on government and markets shaped the conservative movement from its earliest days. Drawing on unprecedented access to Rand's private papers and the original, unedited versions of Rand's journals, Jennifer Burns offers a groundbreaking reassessment of this key cultural figure, examining her life, her ideas, and her impact on conservative political thought. Goddess of the Market follows Rand from her childhood in Russia through her meteoric rise from struggling Hollywood screenwriter to bestselling novelist, including the writing of her wildly successful The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Burns highlights the two facets of Rand's work that make her a perennial draw for those on the right: her promotion of capitalism, and her defense of limited government. Both sprang from her early, bitter experience of life under Communism, and became among the most deeply enduring of her messages, attracting a diverse audience of college students and intellectuals, business people and Republican Party activists, libertarians and conservatives. The book also traces the development of Rand's Objectivist philosophy and her relationship with Nathaniel Branden, her closest intellectual partner, with whom she had an explosive falling out in 1968. One of the Denver Post's Great Reads of 2009 One of Bloomberg News's Top Nonfiction Books of 2009 "Excellent." --Time magazine "A terrific book--a serious consideration of Rand's ideas, and her role in the conservative movement of the past three quarters of a century." --The American Thinker "A wonderful book: beautifully written, completely balanced, extensively researched. The match between author and subject is so perfect that one might believe that the author was chosen by the gods to write this book. She has sympathy and affection for her subject but treats her as a human being, with no attempt to cover up the foibles." --Mises Economics Blog

As a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a masterwork of Thomas Jefferson, the "Academical Village" at the heart of the University of Virginia has long attracted the attention of visitors and scholars alike. Yet today Jefferson’s original structures make up only a small fraction of a campus comprising over 1,600 acres. The Law School at the University of Virginia traces the history of one of the eight original schools of the University to study the development of the University Grounds over nearly two hundred years. In this book, Philip Mills Herrington relates the remarkable story of how the Law School and the University have used architecture to reconcile a desire for progress with a veneration for the past. In addition to providing a fascinating history of one of the oldest and most influential law schools in the United States, Herrington offers a valuable case study of the ways in which American universities have constructed, altered, and enhanced the built environment in response to the ever-changing demands of higher education and campus life.

In 1925, Edwin A. Alderman, president of the University of Virginia, fulfilled a long-held dream by establishing a magazine at the institution founded by Thomas Jefferson just over one hundred years earlier. Not only did Alderman initiate publication of the Virginia Quarterly Review, he contributed an essay to its inaugural issue. Appearing as the first selection in this new volume of nonfiction from the VQR, Alderman's "Edgar Allan Poe and the University of Virginia" reflects the rare combination of literary sensibility and immersion in the political and social issues of the day, which has characterized the journal throughout its seventy-five-year history. As Alderman writes, "I may be frank and say that there was a time when Poe did not greatly appeal to me. I felt the sheer, clear beauty of his song..., but his detachment from the world of men, where my interests most centered, left me unresponsive and simply curious.... I have come, however, to see the limitations of that view, and to behold something admirable and strange and wonderful in this proud, gifted man." While the style and diction of the contributions have changed in the years since that first spring issue, a similar clarity of thought, deep intelligence, candor, and command of language can be found in every one of the fifty one essays assembled here by Alexander Burnham. From its home at One West Range, a few doors down from Poe's own room, the VQR has welcomed to its pages scholars such as Dumas Malone and Robert Coles, and writers whose books have become international bestsellers, including Arthur C. Clarke and Frances Mayes. Included here are some of the twentieth century's most brilliant thinkers and stylists, such international literary, political, and intellectual figures as Andre Gide, D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, T. S. Eliot, Eleanor Roosevelt, Thomas Mann, Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertrand Russell, and Robert Graves. George F. Kennan muses on "The Experience of Writing History," Henry Steele Commager asks "Do We Have a Class Society?," and Edmund S. Morgan considers the aloof character of George Washington. Carlos Baker tracks Ezra Pound through Venice, and Scott Donaldson ponders "The Jilting of Ernest Hemingway." These leading lights share space, as they do in every volume of the journal, with lesser-known but no less talented writers ruminating on the Battle of the Bulge, the Berlin Wall, the Bomb, and Vietnam, on growing up in Hollywood and living in Charlottesville, Virginia. Writers of the South are fittingly represented by Thomas Wolfe, Mary Lee Settle, and Louis D. Rubin Jr., but a quick scan of the table of contents reveals that the VQR has never been a regional magazine. As the current editor, Staige D. Blackford writes in his preface, "Since its inception, the Virginia Quarterly Review has tried to offer its readers a variety of essays on a variety of topics ranging from foreign affairs to domestic politics, from literature to travel, from sports to sex, from music to medicine." On the occasion of its seventy-fifth anniversary, We Write for Our Own Time amply and entertainingly reflects what the VQR's masthead has always proclaimed as its identity: "A National Journal of Literature and Discussion."

A New York Times Notable Book of 2020 "'Saint X' is hypnotic. Schaitkin's characters...are so intelligent and distinctive it feels not just easy, but necessary, to follow them. I devoured [it] in a day." –Oyinkan Braithwaite, New York Times Book Review When you lose the person who is most essential to you, who do you become? Recommended by Entertainment Weekly, included in Good Morning America's 20 Books We're Excited for in 2020 & named as one of Vogue's Best Books to Read This Winter, Bustle's Most Anticipated Books of February 2020, and O Magazine's 14 of the Best Books to Read This February! Hailed as a “marvel of a book” and “brilliant and unflinching,” Alexis Schaitkin’s stunning debut, Saint X, is a haunting portrait of grief, obsession, and the bond between two sisters never truly given the chance to know one another. Claire is only seven years old when her college-age sister, Alison, disappears on the last night of their family vacation at a resort on the Caribbean island of Saint X. Several days later, Alison’s body is found in a remote spot on a nearby cay, and two local men–employees at the resort–are arrested. But the evidence is slim, the timeline against it, and the men are soon released. The story turns into national tabloid news, a lurid mystery that will go unsolved. For Claire and her parents, there is only the return home to broken lives. Years later, Claire is living and working in New York City when a brief but fateful encounter brings her together with Clive Richardson, one of the men originally suspected of murdering her sister. It is a moment that sets Claire on an obsessive pursuit of the truth–not only to find out what happened the night of Alison’s death but also to answer the elusive question: Who exactly was her sister? At seven, Claire had been barely old enough to know her: a beautiful, changeable, provocative girl of eighteen at a turbulent moment of identity formation. As Claire doggedly shadows Clive, hoping to gain his trust, waiting for the slip that will reveal the truth, an unlikely attachment develops between them, two people whose lives were forever marked by the same tragedy. For readers of Emma Cline’s The Girls and Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies, Saint X is a flawlessly drawn and deeply moving story that culminates in an emotionally powerful ending.

In the summer of 1978, the B-52's conquered the New York underground. A year later, the band's self-titled debut album burst onto the Billboard charts, capturing the imagination of fans and music critics worldwide. The fact that the group had formed in the sleepy southern college town of Athens, Georgia, only increased the fascination. Soon, more Athens bands followed the B-52's into the vanguard of the new American music that would come to be known as "alternative," including R.E.M., who catapulted over the course of the 1980s to the top of the musical mainstream. As acts like the B-52's, R.E.M., and Pylon drew the eyes of New York tastemakers southward, they discovered in Athens an unexpected mecca of music, experimental art, DIY spirit, and progressive politics--a creative underground as vibrant as any to be found in the country's major cities. In Athens in the eighties, if you were young and willing to live without much money, anything seemed possible. Cool Town reveals the passion, vitality, and enduring significance of a bohemian scene that became a model for others to follow. Grace Elizabeth Hale experienced the Athens scene as a student, small-business owner, and band member. Blending personal recollection with a historian's eye, she reconstructs the networks of bands, artists, and friends that drew on the things at hand to make a new art of the possible, transforming American culture along the way. In a story full of music and brimming with hope, Hale shows how an unlikely cast of characters in an unlikely place made a surprising and beautiful new world.

“Without question, this is McMillan’s best. A glorious novel....A moving tapestry of familial love and redemption.”—The Washington Post With her hallmark exuberance and a cast of characters so sassy, resilient, and full of life that they breathe, dream, and shout right off the page, Terry McMillan has given us a tour-de-force novel of family, healing, and redemption. A Day Late and a Dollar Short takes us deep into the hearts, minds, and souls of America—and gives us six more friends we never want to leave.