Though not necessarily known for being a bookish time of year, literary-minded Pittsburgh residents have compelling reasons to brave the elements this New Year's Eve: Amazing Books & Records is hosting the 3rd annual Booklovers Bash at its three stores throughout the city. Blues band Chillent will perform at the Carson Street location, and the Squirrel Hill stores will serve free libations and spin the turntable. The store will also open its new cafe to customers as well. Festivities start at 8:30 p.m. on December 31. RSVP here.

                                                                                                                                                                                          Will you be ringing in 2018 with a beloved book in your lap or at a lit-themed soirée? Let us know on Twitter @finebooks

                                                                                                                                                                                           Happy New Year to all, and may it contain many great books. 

It's always an enlightening end-of-year undertaking to dig into the data and ascertain which stories were the most popular with our online readers. News items? Auction previews? Interviews with book world folks? Book reviews? Turns out, it's a little bit of everything. Here's the rundown:

#1 Thieves Steal Over 160 Rare Books in Major Heist
A summary of the January 30 theft in London (that could have been a James Bond plot).   

#2 Bright Young Booksellers: Rebecca Romney
Author and antiquarian bookseller Rebecca Romney on how she got into the business and her new book, Printer's Error.

Stallone-1.jpeg#3 Sylvester Stallone, Book Collector
That's right: the Hollywood hunk's library of roughly 1,000 volumes was sold at Heritage Auctions last March. His The Complete Writings of Walt Whitman (1902), bound in blazing red morocco (pictured above), sold for $3,000.

#4 Photo Claimed to be Jesse James Surfaces
A man who claims to be a distant cousin of Jesse James took his never-before-seen ambrotype of the notorious outlaw to auction.  

#5 1916 Bestsellers: A Conversation with Linda Aragoni
Which books were booksellers a hundred years ago, and how well did they hold up? We ask Linda Aragoni of the Great Performances blog.

#6 A Library--and a Love--Rediscovered
A trip to the 2017 Washington Antiquarian Book Fair prompted occasional FB&C contributor Chris Lancette to return to book collecting.  

LOC Poster.jpg#7 Bookfinder's Most Sought Books in 2016
The annual list of most searched for out-of-print books is always ... interesting reading!

#8 New Digs for One of London's Oldest Antiquarian Bookshops
Maggs Bros. relocated to 48 Bedford Square, having spent eighty years at its previous residence.

#9 Books About Books Holiday Roundup
Five just-released titles that are worthy of attention, particularly if you're a bibliophile.    

#10 Cartoonist Roz Chast Designs National Book Festival Poster
This year's whimsical poster (pictured right), created by New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast, depicts the National Book Festival from the books' point of view.

Images: Top: Courtesy of Heritage Auctions; Bottom: Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

In a few days, we'll be raising a glass to bid farewell to 2017 and toast the arrival of the new year, which will certainly bring all sorts of bibliocentric events with it. One Philadelphia-based soirée to put on your calendar in 2018 is the Rosenbach Library's Bibliococktail hour. The event on Friday, January 12, will honor the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. (Be sure to check out Jonathan Shipley's cover story in the winter issue dedicated to the bicentennial.)


Held on the second Friday of each month, the Bibliococktail series is dedicated to celebrating great literature while quaffing light libations created especially for the occasion by local distiller and distributor Quaker City Mercantile.


This 21+ event is free for Delancey Society members, and tickets (available here) start at $15 for Rosenbach members, $30 for general admission. 

Calling all American Francophiles: the Albertine Prize needs your vote! Organized by the Fifth Avenue bookstore, Albertine, and co-presented by jeweler Van Cleef & Arpels  and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, the award recognizes American readers' favorite French-language fiction titles translated into English and distributed in the U.S. within the preceding calendar year.                                                                                                                     

Albertine  copy.jpgThis year's nominees are winnowed to five titles covering a range of perspectives and narrative styles; UCLA professor Alain Mabanckou's Black Moses (Petit Piment, 2015) follows a Congoloese boy who escapes a terrifying orphanage and is raised by thieves in Pointe-Noire, and Christine Angot's controversial story about molestation, Incest (Inceste, 1999) also makes the shortlist. 

                                                                                                                                                                The Albertine Prize selection committee includes author and translator Lydia Davis, French literary critic and La Grande Librairie host François Busnel, and the staff at the Albertine bookstore in New York City. 

                                                                                                                                                               Not sure which book to vote for? Albertine will host a springtime Book Battle, where five critics and professors will defend their favorite title.


Anyone can vote, just follow the link here. Ballots close May 1, 2018, with an awards ceremony on June 6. The winner will receive a $10,000 prize, to be split between author and translator. Bonne lecture! 

                                                                                                                                                           Image credit: Joe David

War Bride.jpgBack in 2011, we were enamored of Caroline Preston's "scrapbook novel," The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt (see our review; and our interview with Preston) for the innovative way the author paired vintage ephemera with smart storytelling. Now Preston has produced an equally endearing follow-up in The War Bride's Scrapbook: A Novel in Pictures (Ecco, $29.99). Set during World War II, she tells the story of "furlough bride" Lila Jerome as she navigates her marriage to an army engineer she hardly knows during the darkest days of the war.

Preston, a former archivist and voracious collector, conceived the idea for this story while paging through one of her collections, she told us. "I collect vintage scrapbooks and I was inspired by the WWII scrapbooks kept by young women on the home front while their husbands were at war. They were an interesting mixture of grim newspaper clippings, letters, military souvenirs, and memorabilia from their lives on the home front." Her novel recreates that concept, with baseball cards, telegrams, postcards, and vintage advertising providing a dynamic backdrop for her narrative.

home front copy.jpegShe said that her favorite pieces are "v-mail letters," adding, "These were form letters used by soldiers overseas which were then microfilmed and miniaturized. People at home would receive tiny photostats in tiny envelopes. I recreated these v-mails in my book, which work like captions."

vmail stationery.jpgAnd she was influenced by another intriguing collection, pictured below. "My earliest images of WWII came from the powder room of my childhood house in Lake Forest, Illinois. My mother had papered the entire bathroom with New Yorker covers from the 1940s! I spent hours trying to understand the jokes about food rationing, home front jobs, gasoline shortages, and soldiers' adventures overseas." If this isn't the neatest bathroom decor we've ever seen...

New Yorker 1 copy.jpgIn short, The War Bride's Scrapbook will gladden the hearts of readers with a penchant for retro flair.

Images: Book cover courtesy of Ecco/HarperCollins; others courtesy of Caroline Preston.

There's change afoot along Boston's historic Freedom Trail. Activists have launched a campaign on Change.org to convert the Old Corner Bookstore (OCB) into a museum reflecting the city's literary history.


Constructed in 1718 on the site of Puritan dissident Anne Hutchinson's cottage at the corner of Washington and School Streets, Boston's oldest commercial building was saved from demolition in 1960 by its current owner, Historic Boston, Inc.,which has leased out the space since 2011 to raise money for the organization's various preservation endeavors such as the Everett Square Theater and the Malcolm X house. The OCB's current tenant is a Chipotle Mexican Grill--not quite a bastion of literature and the impetus behind this current petition.


Sstarting in the 1840s, the OCB was the home of Ticknor & Fields, an American publisher perhaps best known for publishing H.D. Thoreau's Walden and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, as well as work by Julia Ward Howe and Henry Longfellow.


The entire area surrounding the OCB was a hub of literary activity in the early 19th century: 180 magazines were published in the area known as "Publisher's Row," like the short-lived Pioneer that first ran Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" in January 1843. The Atlantic Monthly, launched in 1857 still exists today, and first published Longfellow's now-famous poem, "Paul Revere's Ride" in 1861. The OCB was the center of Boston's literary community and, for a time, the country.


Though Chipotle's current lease runs through 2020 and will likely be extended through 2025, the petition's creators suggest that the non-profit develop a "workable plan that will support both Historic Boston Inc. and the broader goals of the project," but the nonprofit has not been responsive to such a request.


The OCB Petition Project was co-authored by a veritable "who's who" in the field of American letters: Boston College English professor Paul Lewis; Beacon Press director Helene Atwan; Ticknor Society president Michael Barton; American Literature Association executive director Alfred Bendixen; Notre Dame English professor Sandra Gustafson; The Dante Club author Matthew Pearl, and many others.


As of pub date, the group has 452 of 500 requested signatures. Read more about the cause here

Dickens Reading.jpgIt's an inevitable match: Charles Dickens and Christmas. And this year marks the 150th anniversary of Dickens' famous reading tour of the United States, which means more mania than usual (e.g., a film starring Dan Stevens as Dickens). It prompted me to reread "On Stage with Charles Dickens," a feature story by Jonathan Shipley that we published several years back which highlights the author's theatrical readings. The article also provided a peek at Dickens' prompt copy of A Christmas Carol, i.e., the annotated and scribbled-upon copy he used as a script during public performances.

That prompt copy is back in the spotlight this season as part of the New York Public Library's exhibition, A Writer's Christmas: Dickens & More, on view through January 8. Culled from the Berg Collection of English and American Literature, this exhibition focuses on "holiday spirit" among several literary luminaries.

The Morgan Library is also hosting a Dickens-themed exhibit during the holidays (through January 14) called Charles Dickens and the Spirit of Christmas. It brings together, for the first time, all five manuscripts of the author's Christmas books: A Christmas Carol (1843), The Chimes (1844), The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), The Battle of Life (1846), and The Haunted Man (1848).

Should you find yourself in New York for the holidays, there will undoubtedly be a million ways to engage with Father Christmas--not Santa, but Charles Dickens! These two will bring you closest to the real thing.

Image: Illustration of Charles Dickens' reading tour from Harper's Weekly, Dec. 7, 1867.      

For many of us, the next few weeks will be a flurry of holiday parties, last-minute gift runs, and the chance to see family and friends. In a bid to remember why we go through so much trouble to be with loved ones this time of year, consider picking up the third literary anthology in the Freeman's collection entitled Home (Grove, $16). Thirty-seven writers from around the world focused on the idea of home, each bringing a new perspective and interpretation.

 

In the narrative nonfiction piece "Vacationland," author Kerri Arsenault returns to her hometown of Mexico, Maine, which sits on the banks of the Androscoggin River. Now a derelict relic of a bygone era, the townspeople's former prosperity came from toiling in the paper mill in nearby Rumford. "That's money coming out of those smokestacks," Arsenault's father used to say, but there was plenty else coming out of those stacks, too--dioxin, cadmium, arsenic, mercury, and other by-products of contemporary mass-produced papermaking, slowly poisoning the surrounding environment and its inhabitants. (Read "At the Crossroads" in On Paper for a look inside the modern commercial papermaking experience.)

                                                                                                                                                                  By 1970, oxygen levels in the Androscoggin were zero, choking out the fish, while the toxic brew spewed from the plant plastered the riverbanks with rainbow-colored foam. Esophageal cancer, prostate cancer, and leukemia cases skyrocketed in Rumford and Mexico, yet the mill kept churning out the high glossy paper demanded by its customers, ironically like the National Geographic Society. Though a boon for the town's coffers, a century of mismanagement had its price.

 

As she deals with her father's slow demise from asbestosis of the lungs cultivated from forty-three years of work in the paper mill, Arsenault contemplates the contradictions between how the rest of the country sees Maine--as a pristine wilderness filled with pine trees--and the one she experienced growing up in a town that smelled like eggs and where the tap water made her gag. Indeed, she wonders whether the Maine so beloved by E.B. White and Henry Thoreau has even existed since the Abenaki Native Americans managed the land as their own.

 

"When we leave home, we leave behind our past and encounter a version of home when we return, built of legends true and false," Arsenault concludes. Perhaps the contradictions ring louder for her than for others, but "Vacationland" is a clear-eyed meditation on what happens when the place you grew up is suddenly unrecognizable. At once unsentimental yet surprisingly nostalgic, "Vacationland" and other stories in Home refuse to be forgotten.

 

Maine_state_coat_of_arms_(illustrated,_1876).jpg

Mitchell, Henry (1876) The State Arms of the UnionBostonL. Prang & Co.

Book Lovers Misc.jpgLast year we featured "5 Facts You Might Not Know About the Bodleian Library," a listicle based on Claire Cock-Starkey's book, Bodleianalia. In that same sprit, we share five tidbits gleaned from her newest work, The Book Lovers' Miscellany ($17.50), a perfect little gift book of bibliophilic wisdom with topics ranging from how to identify a first edition to a brief history of the Frankfurt Book Fair to book towns around the world. 

1. The rarest book in the world is a 1593 first edition of Venus and Adonis by William Shakespeare. The Bodleian's copy "is the only known copy of this book in existence."

2. The first book ordered on Amazon was a scientific tome called Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought by Douglas Hofstadter.

3. Agatha Christie is the most translated author in the world with 7,233 distinct translated editions. Jules Verne runs a distant second with 4,751 distinct translated editions.

4. James Joyce's Dubliners was rejected twenty-two times before a publisher agreed to a small print run.

5. At 1,466 years old, the Leiden Herbaria at Leiden University Library is one of the oldest surviving intact books in the world.

Image: Courtesy of the University of Chicago Press

If Arthur Ransome's classic series, Swallows and Amazons, is a favorite, you'll be chuffed to learn of a new tourism initiative that allows visitors to "cast off into your very own Swallows & Amazons adventure."

Brought to you by Craig Manor Hotel, which recently released another literary itinerary in England's Lake District, this treasure map (infographic) leads you in the characters' footsteps.

SwallowsAmazonForest_6 copy2.jpgCourtesy of Craig Manor Hotel