English schoolchildren are taught that Sir Richard Arkwright ‘invented the water-frame and was the father of the Industrial Revolution and the factory system.’ That is simply not true. The water-powered spinning frame and the ‘modern factory system’ were pioneered in Italy over 300 years before Richard Arkwright was born. This book tells the story of how the Industrial Revolution in textile manufacture really began. Not in England with Richard Arkwright and the English cotton industry, but in Italy, with Italian Renaissance engineers and the Italian silk industry. Proof lies in the achievements of medieval Italian engineering, English archives and English legal case records. Italy was the leading technological power in Europe from the 13th to the 17th centuries. The Italian Renaissance and the devastation caused by the Black Death (1347-49) brought forth a wealth of technological innovation and invention and the Italians automated much of the production of silk fabrics, using water as their power source, because there were no longer enough people left alive to carry out the work. English organzine was inferior to Italian organzine. In the first recorded case of industrial espionage a young Derby engineer resolved to steal Italian silk manufacturing secrets. Water powered silk throwing machinery, reconstructed by John Lombe from his stolen plans and drawings, provided the blueprint for water powered cotton spinning machinery (water frame), and Cromford Mill, (built 1771), was modelled on Derby Silk Mill (built 1719). This book marks the 300th anniversary of John Lombe’s premature death. Part of the mystery surrounding his actions is why has the truth been concealed for so long and why has the Italian connection remained unacknowledged? It is time to place this episode of history in a proper context, to set the record straight, and to fully acknowledge the part played by Italy in the English Industrial Revolution.

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"The Silicon Valley Road" tells about true experiences of Tom Maher starting as a supervisor and then proceeding up through the management ranks in several Silicon Valley Companies. Some of the experiences are truly educational and some are truly ugly. As the management experience is learned by Maher, he begins to list some of the management problems and some of the management requirements needed to run a successful company. He soon learns how to endow all the people in the factory to participate in solving the daily problems, which prompts operating costs to go down and morale to go up. Maher also learned how management must be involved in the daily factory issues by knowing what problems are present and how they are being solved. Tom Maher also found out that a "real time - on line" computer reporting system is mandatory to control the product cost, hourly schedule, inventories and raw material status.

In Thieves of Book Row, Travis McDade tells the gripping tale of the worst book-theft ring in American history, and the intrepid detective who brought it down. Both a fast-paced, true-life thriller, Thieves of Book Row provides a fascinating look at the history of crime and literary culture.

In a country where much of the prominent poetry seeks to affirm the fleeting present and its changing values, John Peck’s poetry comes as an important, if unlikely, gift. Peck’s verse deals the cards of the fragmentary, ideogramic, juxtapositional, and elliptical through the deck of normally discursive syntax. Echoing late high Modernism, Peck’s work, in the words of novelist Joseph McElroy, is “a way of seeing things,” confident “in the packed vividness of the referential.” Avoiding the narrow identity- or group-specific viewpoint of some of his contemporaries, Peck invites us to enter the larger humanscape and unearth with him unnoticed connections to our shared past and to one another. In Contradance, his ninth collection, Peck’s passion for inquiry and historical reflection has never been stronger or more beautifully embodied.