Today marks the birthday of Ernest Hemingway – born July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois. His career reshaped modern prose, and his life unfolded across continents and decades. Over the years, we have handled…
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Nearly three thousand years after they were first composed, the Iliad and the Odyssey remain the foundation stones of Western literature. Homer’s epics gave us the wrath of Achilles and the long homeward voyage of…
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Some inscriptions reveal more in their modesty than a page of praise ever could. On the front free endpaper of a 1940 first edition of For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway wrote to his…
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It is one of the great near-misses in modern publishing history. In 1953 a forty-one-year-old schoolmaster named William Golding finished a short, strange novel about a group of English boys stranded on a tropical island…
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There is a particular category of rare book that transcends the ordinary parameters of the collecting field. These are not simply early printings of significant texts they are the physical embodiments of cultural turning points,…
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Some books exist in multiple registers simultaneously. There is The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam as a text — the collection of quatrains composed in eleventh-century Persia by the mathematician and astronomer Omar Khayyám, rendered into…
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