Portal:Books
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A book is a written work of substantial length created by one or more authors, these writings are typically printed on many sheets of paper as pages bound together into a bookblock, this bookblock is glued to the middle of a foldable cover that protects the pages. Before the wide adoption of the modern printing press, codices were used to create handwritten manuscripts. Older writing media include scrolls and clay tablets. Nowadays, books can be distributed in other forms like audiobooks, and electronic books (ebooks). Books are broadly classified into fiction, which contains invented or imaginary narratives; and non-fiction, which contains content intended as factual truth.
The book publishing process is the series of steps involved in its creation and dissemination, often undertaken in modern times by a commercial publishing company. The publishing industry has recently seen major changes due to new technologies, including ebooks and audiobooks (recordings of books read aloud). Awareness of the needs of people with print disabilities has led to a rise in accessible publishing formats such as braille printing and large-print editions. Google Books estimated in 2010 that roughly 130 million total unique books have been published.
Books are sold at general retail stores and specialized bookstores, as well as online, and can be borrowed from libraries or public bookcases. The reception of books has led to several social consequences, including censorship.
Books are sometimes contrasted with periodical literature, such as newspapers or magazines, for which new editions are published according to a regular schedule. Some objects broadly described as "books" are left empty for personal use, such as notebooks, diaries, sketchbooks, account books, and autograph books. (Full article...)
Featured articles -
Featured articles are displayed here, which represent some of the best content on English Wikipedia.
I Never Liked You is a graphic novel by Canadian cartoonist Chester Brown. The story first ran between 1991 and 1993 under the title Fuck, in issues #26–30 of Brown's comic book Yummy Fur; published in book form by Drawn & Quarterly in 1994. It deals with the teenage Brown's introversion and difficulty talking to others, especially members of the opposite sex—including his mother. The story has minimal dialogue and is sparsely narrated. The artwork is amongst the simplest in Brown's body of work—some pages consist only of a single small panel.
Brown established his reputation in the early alternative comics scene of the 1980s with the surreal, taboo-breaking Ed the Happy Clown. He brought that story to an abrupt end in 1989 when, excited by the autobiographical comics of Joe Matt and Julie Doucet, he turned towards personal stories. The uncomplicated artwork of his friend and fellow Toronto cartoonist Seth inspired him to simplify his own. Brown intended I Never Liked You as part of a longer work with what became his previous book, The Playboy (1992), but found the larger story too complex to handle at once. I Never Liked You was the last work of Brown's early autobiographical period. (Full article...)- The Playboy is a graphic novel by the Canadian cartoonist Chester Brown, serialized in 1990 in Brown's comic book Yummy Fur and collected in different revised book editions in 1992 and 2013. It deals with Brown's guilt and anxiety over his obsessive masturbation to Playboy Playmate models.
The story begins with Brown's first purchase of an issue of Playboy as a teenager. His obsessive masturbation gives him great guilt and anxiety, and out of fear of being caught he repeatedly rids himself of copies of the magazine, only to retrieve them later. His conflicting emotions follow him into adulthood until he purges them by revealing himself through his comics. The free, organic arrangement of odd-shaped panels of simple, expressive artwork contrasts with Brown's more detailed grid-like pages in his 1980s work, such as Ed the Happy Clown. (Full article...) - A Song Flung Up to Heaven is the sixth book in author Maya Angelou's series of autobiographies. Set between 1965 and 1968, it begins where Angelou's previous book All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes ends, with Angelou's trip from Accra, Ghana, where she had lived for the past four years, back to the United States. Two "calamitous events" frame the beginning and end of the book—the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Angelou describes how she dealt with these events and the sweeping changes in both the country and in her personal life, and how she coped with her return home to the U.S. The book ends with Angelou at "the threshold of her literary career", writing the opening lines to her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
As she had begun to do in Caged Bird, and continued throughout her series, Angelou upheld the long tradition of African-American autobiography. At the same time she made a deliberate attempt to challenge the usual structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing, and expanding the genre. Most reviewers agreed that the book was made up of a series of vignettes. By the time Song was written in 2002, sixteen years after her previous autobiography, Angelou had experienced great fame and recognition as an author and poet. She recited her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at the inauguration of President Bill Clinton in 1993, becoming the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy's in 1961. She had become recognized and highly respected as a spokesperson for Blacks and women. Angelou was, as scholar Joanne Braxton has stated, "without a doubt, ... America's most visible black woman autobiographer". She had also become, as reviewer Richard Long stated, "a major autobiographical voice of the time". (Full article...) 
Title page from the first edition of Original Stories (1788)
Original Stories from Real Life; with Conversations Calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness is the only complete work of children's literature by the 18th-century English feminist author Mary Wollstonecraft. Original Stories begins with a frame story that sketches out the education of two young girls by their maternal teacher Mrs. Mason, followed by a series of didactic tales. The book was first published by Joseph Johnson in 1788; a second, illustrated edition, with engravings by William Blake, was released in 1791 and remained in print for around a quarter of a century.
In Original Stories, Wollstonecraft employed the then-burgeoning genre of children's literature to promote the education of women and an emerging middle-class ideology. She argued that women would be able to become rational adults if they were educated properly as children, which was not a widely held belief in the 18th century, and contended that the nascent middle-class ethos was superior to the court culture represented by fairy tales and to the values of chance and luck found in chapbook stories for the poor. Wollstonecraft, in developing her own pedagogy, also responded to the works of the two most important educational theorists of the 18th century: John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. (Full article...)- The General in His Labyrinth (original Spanish title: El general en su laberinto) is a 1989 dictator novel by Colombian writer and Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez. It is a fictionalized account of the last seven months of Simón Bolívar, liberator and leader of Gran Colombia. The book traces Bolívar's final journey from Bogotá to the Caribbean coastline of Colombia in his attempt to leave South America for exile in Europe. Breaking with the traditional heroic portrayal of Bolívar El Libertador, García Márquez depicts a pathetic protagonist, a prematurely aged man who is physically ill and mentally exhausted. The story explores the labyrinth of Bolívar's life through the narrative of his memories, in which "despair, sickness, and death inevitably win out over love, health, and life".
Following the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), García Márquez decided to write about the "Great Liberator" after reading an unfinished novel by his friend Álvaro Mutis. He borrowed the setting—Bolívar's voyage down the Magdalena River in 1830—from Mutis. García Márquez spent two years researching the subject, encompassing the extensive memoirs of Bolívar's Irish aide-de-camp, Daniel Florencio O'Leary, as well as numerous other historical documents and consultations with academics. (Full article...) 
Cover to the first edition of Gods' Man (1929) by American artist Lynd Ward (1905–1985).
Gods' Man is a wordless novel by American artist Lynd Ward (1905–1985) published in 1929 . In 139 captionless woodblock prints, it tells the Faustian story of an artist who signs away his soul for a magic paintbrush. Gods' Man was the first American wordless novel, and is considered a precursor of the graphic novel, whose development it influenced.
Ward first encountered the wordless novel with Frans Masereel's The Sun (1919) while studying art in Germany in 1926. He returned to the United States in 1927 and established a career for himself as an illustrator. He found Otto Nückel's wordless novel Destiny (1926) in New York City in 1929, and it inspired him to create such a work of his own. Gods' Man appeared a week before the Wall Street crash of 1929; it nevertheless enjoyed strong sales and remains the best-selling American wordless novel. Its success inspired other Americans to experiment with the medium, including cartoonist Milt Gross, who parodied Gods' Man in He Done Her Wrong (1930). In the 1970s, Ward's example of wordless novels inspired cartoonists Art Spiegelman and Will Eisner to create their first graphic novels. (Full article...)
Title page from the second volume of Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of France (1838)
The Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men comprised ten volumes of Dionysius Lardner's 133-volume Cabinet Cyclopaedia (1829–1846). Aimed at the self-educating middle class, this encyclopedia was written during the 19th-century literary revolution in Britain that encouraged more people to read.
The Lives formed part of the Cabinet of Biography in the Cabinet Cyclopaedia. Within the set of ten, the three-volume Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain and Portugal (1835–37) and the two-volume Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of France (1838–39) consist of biographies of important writers and thinkers of the 14th to 18th centuries. Most of them were written by the Romantic writer Mary Shelley. Shelley's biographies reveal her as a professional woman of letters, contracted to produce several volumes of works and paid well to do so. Her extensive knowledge of history and languages, her ability to tell a gripping biographical narrative, and her interest in the burgeoning field of feminist historiography are reflected in these works. (Full article...)- The Log from the Sea of Cortez is an English-language book written by American author John Steinbeck and published in 1951. It details a six-week (March 11 – April 20) marine specimen-collecting boat expedition he made in 1940 at various sites in the Gulf of California (also known as the Sea of Cortez), with his friend, the marine biologist Ed Ricketts. It is regarded as one of Steinbeck's most important works of non-fiction chiefly because of the involvement of Ricketts, who shaped Steinbeck's thinking and provided the prototype for many of the pivotal characters in his fiction, and the insights it gives into the philosophies of the two men.
The Log from the Sea of Cortez is the narrative portion of an earlier work, Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research, which was published by Steinbeck and Ricketts shortly after their return from the Gulf of California, and combined the journals of the collecting expedition, reworked by Steinbeck, with Ricketts' species catalogue. After Ricketts' death in 1948, Steinbeck dropped the species catalogue from the earlier work and republished it with a eulogy to his friend added as a foreword. (Full article...) 
Title page from the first edition of Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)
Some Thoughts Concerning Education is a 1693 treatise on the education of gentlemen written by the English philosopher John Locke. For over a century, it was the most important philosophical work on education in England. It was translated into almost all of the major written European languages during the eighteenth century, and nearly every European writer on education after Locke, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, acknowledged its influence.
In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke outlined a new theory of mind, contending that the mind is originally a tabula rasa or "blank slate"; that is, it did not contain any innate ideas at birth. Some Thoughts Concerning Education explains how to educate that mind using three distinct methods: the development of a healthy body; the formation of a virtuous character; and the choice of an appropriate academic curriculum. (Full article...)
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The St Cuthbert Gospel, also known as the Stonyhurst Gospel or the St Cuthbert Gospel of St John, is an early 8th-century pocket gospel book, written in Latin. Its finely decorated leather binding is the earliest known Western bookbinding to survive, and both the 94 vellum folios and the binding are in outstanding condition for a book of this age. With a page size of only 138 by 92 millimetres (5.4 in × 3.6 in), the St Cuthbert Gospel is one of the smallest surviving Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. The essentially undecorated text is the Gospel of John in Latin, written in a script that has been regarded as a model of elegant simplicity.
The book takes its name from Saint Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, North East England, in whose tomb it was placed, probably a few years after his death in 687. Although it was long regarded as Cuthbert's personal copy of the Gospel, to which there are early references, and so a relic of the saint, the book is now thought to date from shortly after Cuthbert's death. It was probably a gift from Monkwearmouth–Jarrow Abbey, where it was written, intended to be placed in St Cuthbert's coffin in the few decades after this was placed behind the altar at Lindisfarne in 698. It presumably remained in the coffin through its long travels after 875, forced by Viking invasions, ending at Durham Cathedral. The book was found inside the coffin and removed in 1104 when the burial was once again moved within the cathedral. It was kept there with other relics, and important visitors were able to wear the book in a leather bag around their necks. It is thought that after the Dissolution of the Monasteries in England by Henry VIII between 1536 and 1541, the book passed to collectors. It was eventually given to Stonyhurst College, the Jesuit school in Lancashire. (Full article...)
The Smyth Report (officially Atomic Energy for Military Purposes) is the common name of an administrative history written by the American physicist Henry DeWolf Smyth about the Manhattan Project, the Allied effort to develop atomic bombs during World War II. The subtitle of the report is A General Account of the Development of Methods of Using Atomic Energy for Military Purposes. It was released to the media on August 11, 1945, and the public on August 12, 1945, just days after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9.
Smyth was commissioned to write the report by Major General Leslie R. Groves, Jr., the director of the Manhattan Project. The Smyth Report was the first official account of the development of the atomic bombs and the basic physical processes behind them. It also served as an indication as to what information was declassified; anything in the Smyth Report could be discussed openly. For this reason, the Smyth Report focused heavily on information, such as basic nuclear physics, which was either already widely known in the scientific community or easily deducible by a competent scientist, and omitted details about chemistry, metallurgy, and ordnance. According to historian Rebecca Press Schwartz, this would ultimately give a false impression that the Manhattan Project was all about physics. (Full article...)
The Negro Motorist Green Book (also, The Negro Travelers' Green Book, or Green-Book) was a guidebook for African American roadtrippers. It was founded by Victor Hugo Green, an African American postal worker from New York City, and was published annually from 1936 to 1966. This was during the era of Jim Crow laws, when open and often legally prescribed discrimination against African Americans especially and other non-whites was widespread. While pervasive racial discrimination and poverty limited black car ownership, the emerging African American middle class bought automobiles as soon as they could but faced a variety of dangers and inconveniences along the road, from refusal of food and lodging to arbitrary arrest. In the South, where Black motorists risked harassment or physical violence, these dangers were particularly severe. In some cases, African American travelers who got lost or sought lodging off the beaten path were killed, with little to no investigation by local authorities. In response, Green wrote his guide to services and places relatively friendly to African Americans. Eventually, he also founded a travel agency.
Many black Americans took to driving, in part to avoid segregation on public transportation. As the writer George Schuyler put it in 1930, "all Negroes who can do so purchase an automobile as soon as possible in order to be free of discomfort, discrimination, segregation and insult". Black Americans employed as athletes, entertainers, and salesmen also traveled frequently for work purposes using automobiles that they owned personally. (Full article...)- A Journey is a memoir by Tony Blair of his tenure as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Published in the UK on 1 September 2010, it covers events from when he became leader of the Labour Party in 1994 and transformed it into "New Labour", holding power for a party record three successive terms, to his resignation and replacement as prime minister by his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown. Blair donated his £4.6-million advance, and all subsequent royalties, to the British Armed Forces charity the Royal British Legion. It became the fastest-selling autobiography of all time at the bookstore chain Waterstones. Promotional events were marked by anti-war protests.
Two of the book's major topics are the strains in Blair's relationship with Brown after Blair allegedly reneged on the pair's 1994 agreement to step down as prime minister much earlier, and his controversial decision to participate in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Blair discusses Labour's future following the 2010 general election, his relations with the Royal Family, and how he came to respect President of the United States George W. Bush. Reviews were mixed; some criticised Blair's writing style, but others called it candid. (Full article...) - Expedition to the Barrier Peaks is a 1980 adventure module for the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game written by Gary Gygax. While Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is typically a fantasy game, the adventure includes elements of science fiction, and thus belongs to the science fantasy genre. It takes place on a downed spaceship; the ship's crew has died of an unspecified disease, but functioning robots and strange creatures still inhabit the ship. The player characters fight monsters and robots, and gather the futuristic weapons and colored access cards that are necessary for advancing the story.
Expedition to the Barrier Peaks was first played at the Origins II convention in 1976, where it was used to introduce Dungeons & Dragons players to the science fiction game Metamorphosis Alpha. In 1980, TSR published the adventure, updated for first edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules. The adventure was not updated for later rules systems, but a Wizards.com article did provide a conversion to Future Tech. It included a separate booklet of illustrations, in both color and black and white. The adventure is an old-time favorite of many Dungeons & Dragons fans, including Stephen Colbert. It was ranked the fifth-best Dungeons & Dragons adventure of all time by Dungeon magazine in 2004, and received positive reviews from White Dwarf and The Space Gamer magazines. The other adventures in the S series include S1 Tomb of Horrors, S2 White Plume Mountain, and S4 The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth. (Full article...) - Race Against Time: Searching for Hope in AIDS-Ravaged Africa is a non-fiction book written by Stephen Lewis for the Massey Lectures. Lewis wrote it in early to mid-2005 and House of Anansi Press released it as a corresponding lecture series began in October 2005. Each of the book's chapters were delivered as a different lecture in a different Canadian city, beginning in Vancouver on October 18 and ending in Toronto on October 28. The speeches were aired on CBC Radio One between November 7 and 11. The author and orator, Stephen Lewis, was at that time the United Nations Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa and former Canadian ambassador to the United Nations. Although he wrote the book and lectures in his role as a concerned Canadian citizen, his criticism of the United Nations (UN), international organizations, and other diplomats, including naming specific people, was called undiplomatic and led several reviewers to speculate whether he would be removed from his UN position.
In the book and the lectures, Lewis argues that significant changes are required to meet the Millennium Development Goals in Africa by their 2015 deadline. Lewis explains the historical context of Africa since the 1980s, citing a succession of disastrous economic policies by international financial institutions that contributed to, rather than reduced, poverty. He connects the structural adjustment loans, with conditions of limited public spending on health and education infrastructure, to the uncontrolled spread of AIDS and subsequent food shortages as the disease infected much of the working-age population. Lewis also addresses such issues as discrimination against women and primary education for children. To help alleviate problems, he ends with potential solutions which mainly require increased funding by G8 countries to levels beyond what they promise. (Full article...)
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Selected picture
Credit: Leonardo da Vinci
A page from Leonardo Leonardo da Vinci's journal showing his study of a foetus in the womb (c.1510) Royal Library, Windsor Castle.
More Did you know (auto generated)
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This is a Good article, an article that meets a core set of high editorial standards.
- Maiden & Princess is a 2019 picture book written in rhyming verse by Daniel Haack and Isabel Galupo and illustrated by Becca Human. The story, described in some press outlets as a lesbian fairy tale, concerns a maiden attending a ball centered on finding a wife for the prince; at the ball, the maiden instead falls in love with his sister, the princess.
The book is a companion to and shares a fictional world with Haack's earlier work, Prince & Knight (2018); both books were the product of a partnership between Bonnier Publishing USA and LGBTQ media organization GLAAD. Galupo and Haack sought to write an uncomplicated queer romance for children using recognizable fairy tale tropes. The work was launched on Lesbian Visibility Day and received positive reviews for its subversion of common fairy tale story beats and Human's artwork. (Full article...) 
Giovanni da Verrazano
The Cèllere Codex (officially, Del Viaggio del Verrazzano Nobile Fiorentino al Servizio di Francesco I, Ri de Francia, fatto nel 1524 all'America Settentrionale, also Morgan MS. MA. 776) is one of three surviving copies of a manuscript letter sent by Giovanni da Verrazzano (1481–1528) in 1524 to King Francis I of France describing the former's navigation of the East Coast of the United States. It is nowadays preserved at the Morgan Library of New York.
Verrazzano was an Italian who lived in France, and he undertook his voyage in Francis' service. The King, prompted by the French mercantile community, charged Verrazzano to discover whether there was a direct passage from the Atlantic to China and Japan. (Full article...)
Beowulf was traditionally believed to have been composed for performance and chanted by a scop to musical accompaniment. Illustration by Joseph Ratcliffe Skelton, c. 1910
The difficulty of translating Beowulf from its compact, metrical, alliterative form in a single surviving but damaged Old English manuscript into any modern language is considerable, matched by the large number of attempts to make the poem approachable, and the scholarly attention given to the problem.
Among the challenges to the translator of Beowulf are whether to attempt a verse or prose rendering; how closely to stick to the original; whether to make the language archaic or to use distinctly modern phraseology; whether to domesticate or foreignize the text; to what extent to imitate the original's laconic style and understatement; and its use of intentionally poetic language to represent the heroic from what was already an ancient time when the poem was composed. (Full article...)- Lady Gaga x Terry Richardson is a photo-book by American singer Lady Gaga and American photographer Terry Richardson, released on November 22, 2011, by Grand Central Publishing. The book features more than 350 pictures of Gaga as taken by Richardson during a ten-month period from Gaga's performance at The Monster Ball Tour until the 2011 Grammy Awards. In addition to photographs, it includes a foreword written by the singer about her relationship with Richardson. The duo had already collaborated on other projects prior to the book.
Upon release, Lady Gaga x Terry Richardson received positive reviews from critics, who praised both the provocative pictures as well as simpler shots of Gaga without makeup and stage costumes. The book appeared at number five on The New York Times Best Seller list, before fluctuating down the ranking in subsequent weeks. Due to a lawsuit against Gaga by her former assistant, in 2013 the photos taken by Richardson were asked to be submitted as evidence for the case. (Full article...) - The Number Devil: A Mathematical Adventure (German: Der Zahlenteufel. Ein Kopfkissenbuch für alle, die Angst vor der Mathematik haben) is a book for children and young adults that explores mathematics. It was originally written in 1997 in German by Hans Magnus Enzensberger and illustrated by Rotraut Susanne Berner. The book follows a young boy named Robert, who is taught mathematics by a sly "number devil" called Teplotaxl over the course of twelve dreams.
The book was met with mostly positive reviews from critics, approving its description of math while praising its simplicity. Its colorful use of fictional mathematical terms and its creative descriptions of concepts have made it a suggested book for both children and adults troubled with math. The Number Devil was a bestseller in Europe, and has been translated into English by Michael Henry Heim. (Full article...) - Vertigo is a wordless novel by American artist Lynd Ward (1905–1985), published in 1937. In three intertwining parts, the story tells of the effects the Great Depression has on the lives of an elderly industrialist and a young man and woman. Considered his masterpiece, Ward used the work to express the socialist sympathies of his upbringing; he aimed to present what he called "impersonal social forces" by depicting the individuals whose actions are responsible for those forces.
The work is filled with symbolic motifs, and is in a more detailed and realistic style than Ward's Expressionistic earlier works. The images—one to a page—are borderless and of varied dimensions. At 230 wood engravings Vertigo was Ward's longest and most complex wordless novel, and proved to be the last he finished—in 1940 he abandoned one he was working on, and in the last years of his life began another that he never finished. For the remainder of his career Ward turned to book illustration, especially children's books, some of which he or his wife May McNeer authored. (Full article...) - The War for Late Night: When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy is a 2010 non-fiction book written by The New York Times media reporter Bill Carter. It chronicles the 2010 conflict surrounding the American late-night talk show The Tonight Show involving Conan O'Brien and Jay Leno. It is a sequel to Carter's 1994 book The Late Shift, which detailed the struggle for the hosting spot on The Tonight Show between David Letterman and Jay Leno in the early 1990s following the retirement of Johnny Carson. It was first published on November 4, 2010, by Viking Press.
The book received a generally favorable reception from reviewers including Associated Press, BusinessWeek, The Buffalo News, New York Magazine, Star Tribune, The Hollywood Reporter, The Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, New York Post, Los Angeles Times, Time, and ABC News. The Las Vegas Review-Journal said, "The War for Late Night ... offers an exhaustive, eye-opening, how-could-he-possibly-know-that look at the late-night feud that ultimately was a muddled victory for Leno: He won back The Tonight Show, but his ratings have fallen below O'Brien's." (Full article...) - Thrilling Cities is a travelogue by the author and The Sunday Times journalist Ian Fleming. The book was first published in the UK in November 1963 by Jonathan Cape. Fleming covered Hong Kong, Macau, Tokyo, Honolulu, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Chicago, New York, Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna, Geneva, Naples and Monte Carlo.
Thrilling Cities was initially a series of articles Fleming wrote for The Sunday Times, based on two trips he took. The first was in 1959, in which he travelled around the world, and the second was in 1960, in which he drove around Europe. The first trip was at the behest of The Sunday Times's features editor Leonard Russell; the paper's chairman, Roy Thomson, enjoyed the series so much he requested Fleming undertake a second trip. The book version includes material edited out of the original articles, as well as photographs of the various cities. Fleming is better known as the author of the James Bond series of books; Thrilling Cities is one of two non-fiction books he wrote, the other being The Diamond Smugglers, which was published in 1957. (Full article...) - Prelude to a Million Years: A Book of Wood Engravings is a 1933 wordless novel consisting of thirty wood engravings by American artist Lynd Ward (1905–1985). It was the fourth of Ward's six wordless novels, a genre Ward discovered while studying wood engraving in Europe, and delved into under the influence of the works of Frans Masereel and Otto Nückel. The symbol-rich story tells of a sculptor who, in his quest for ideal beauty, neglects the reality of the struggles of his neighbors in the depths of the Great Depression. The engravings are done in a softer Art Deco style in contrast to the German Expressionism-influenced artwork of Ward's earlier works. (Full article...)
- What's So Amazing About Grace? is a 1997 book by Philip Yancey, an American journalist and editor-at-large for Christianity Today. The book examines grace in Christianity, contending that people crave grace and that it is central to the gospel, but that many local churches ignore grace and instead seek to exterminate immorality. What's So Amazing About Grace? includes Bible stories, anecdotes from Yancey's life, accounts of historical events and other stories. These include a modern retelling of the Parable of the Prodigal Son, an account of Yancey's friendship with Mel White who came out as gay, a comparison of the teachings of early Christians Pelagius and Augustine of Hippo, and a summary of Karen Blixen's short story "Babette's Feast".
Yancey was inspired to write What's So Amazing About Grace? after President Bill Clinton asked him, "Why do Christians hate so much?" Although Yancey initially intended to call the book What's So Amazing About Grace: and Why Don't Christians Show More of It?, Zondervan, its publisher, objected to this title despite the author's contention that he wrote the book to communicate the belief that grace is one of the best quality Christians, like himself, have to offer but are not necessarily identified with it. The book was successful at secular and Christian stores, selling more than 15 million copies by 2006 and becoming Yancey's best-known book. In it, Yancey coined the phrase "scandal of grace", referring to the idea that God forgives some of the worst people, citing the conversion of Paul the Apostle. (Full article...)
The Anarchist Cookbook, first published in 1971, is a book containing instructions for the manufacture of explosives, rudimentary telecommunications phreaking devices, and related weapons, as well as instructions for the home manufacture of illicit drugs, including LSD. It was written by William Powell at the apex of the counterculture era to protest against the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War. Powell converted to Anglicanism in 1976 and later attempted to have the book removed from circulation. However, the copyright belonged to the publisher, who continued circulating the book until the company was bought out in 1991. Its legality has been questioned in several jurisdictions. (Full article...)- Don't Forget the Bacon! is a children's book written and illustrated by Pat Hutchins. It was published by Bodley Head in 1976. The story is about a little boy who tries to memorise a list of groceries his mother has asked him to buy. The book has been used as a teaching tool to instruct children about early learning concepts.
In an analysis of teaching tools for remedial readers, Maurice Saxby notes in the book Books in the Life of a Child: Bridges to Literature & Learning, "Hutchins's Don't Forget the Bacon has been one of my most successful texts." Andrea Hillbrick's Tuning in with Task Cards includes a teaching lesson structured around the boy's shopping list from the story. The book Foundation Blocks suggests Don't Forget the Bacon! be used to teach children about the concept of miscommunication, and Bilinguality and Literacy lists the story among those used to help assist a bilingual child develop fluency in English. (Full article...) - Flying Blind, Flying Safe is a non-fiction book about the American airline industry and Federal Aviation Administration, written by Mary Schiavo with Sabra Chartrand. The book was first published in March 1997 in hardcover format by Avon Books. An updated paperback edition was published on April 1, 1998. Schiavo is a former Inspector General of the United States Department of Transportation, and Chartrand a journalist for The New York Times. Schiavo was Inspector General of the United States Department of Transportation for six years, and resigned in 1996 shortly after the ValuJet Flight 592 airline crash in the Florida Everglades. She became a whistleblower and was highly critical of the airline industry and its relationship with aviation safety agencies in the United States federal government.
The book is structured into two sections. The first portion of the book is critical of the aviation industry and the U.S. government agencies tasked with inspecting it. The second portion of the book addresses consumers and potential airline passengers. The book became successful shortly after publication. It reached number 10 on the New York Times Best Seller list and number 9 on a Chicago Tribune list of bestsellers in early April 1997. Most reviews of the book in media publications were positive. Some individuals within the airline industry claimed the book contained factual inaccuracies, and this was investigated as part of a class project at George Washington University. (Full article...) 
Waterstones Booksellers Limited, trading as Waterstones (formerly Waterstone's), is a British book retailer based in London, United Kingdom, owned by the American investment group Elliott Investment Management. As of 2025, it operates 316 shops, mainly in the United Kingdom and other nearby countries. As of 2024[update] it employed over 3,600 staff in Britain and Europe. The average Waterstones branch sells a range of approximately 30,000 individual books, as well as stationery and other related products.
Founded in 1982 by Tim Waterstone, the bookseller expanded rapidly until being sold in 1993 to WHSmith. In 1998 Waterstones was bought by a consortium of Waterstone, EMI, and Advent International. The company was taken under the umbrella of HMV, which later merged the Dillons and Ottakar's brands into the company. Following several poor sets of results for the group, HMV put the chain up for sale. In May 2011 it was announced that A&NN Capital Fund Management, owned by the Russian billionaire businessman Alexander Mamut, had bought the chain for £53.5 million and appointed James Daunt as the managing director. The company is incorporated in England and Wales as Waterstones Booksellers Ltd, with its registered office at 203–206 Piccadilly, London (which is also the location of its flagship shop). (Full article...)- The Making of the English Landscape is a 1954 book by the English local historian William George Hoskins. The book is also the introductory volume in a series of the same name which deals with the English Landscape county by county.
It is illustrated with 82 monochrome plates, mostly photographs by Hoskins himself, and 17 maps or plans. It has appeared in at least 35 editions and reprints in English and other languages. (Full article...)
Selected quote
| “ | An ordinary man can...surround himself with two thousand books..and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy. | ” |
| — Augustine Birrell | ||
Did you know ...
- ... that A Christmas Carol (pictured) sold over six thousand copies in one week?
- ... that the Book of Revelation 21:21 describes the city of New Jerusalem as having streets "made of pure gold, clear as crystal" ?
- ... that the early nineteenth century, books were hand-bound using heavy materials such as wood, leather, gold, silver and jewels?
General images
The following are images from various book-related articles on Wikipedia.
Jikji, Selected Teachings of Buddhist Sages and Seon Masters, the earliest known book printed with movable metal type, 1377. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. (from History of books)
The intricate frontispiece of the Diamond Sutra from Tang dynasty China, i.e. 868 CE, the oldest known dated printed book in the world (British Library) (from History of books)
Page spread with J. A. van de Graaf's construction of classical text area (print space) and margin proportions (from Book design)
A Sumerian clay tablet, currently housed in the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, inscribed with the text of the poem Inanna and Ebih by the priestess Enheduanna, the first author whose name is known
European output of manuscripts 500–1500 (from History of books)
Gilt front cover adorned with walrus ivory on the Horne Book, Denmark, 13th century (from Bookbinding)
Early medieval bookcase containing about ten codices depicted in the Codex Amiatinus (c. 700) (from Bookbinding)
Marbled book board from a book published in London in 1872 (from Bookbinding)
The Book of the Dead of Hunefer, c. 1275 BCE, ink and pigments on papyrus, in the British Museum (London) (from History of books)
Modern paperback spines (from Bookbinding)
The annual production of handwritten manuscripts and printed books per 1000 people in Western Europe (from History of books)
Design by Hans Holbein the Younger for a metalwork book cover (or treasure binding) (from Book design)
Detailed blind tooling of a book binding (from Bookbinding)
Hardbound book spine stitching (from Bookbinding)
Three books with different titling orientations:
ascending (left); descending (middle); upright (right) (from Bookbinding)
12-metre-high (40 ft) sculpture of a stack of books at the Berlin Walk of Ideas, commemorating the invention of modern book printing (from History of books)
An author portrait of Jean Miélot writing his compilation of the Miracles of Our Lady, one of his many popular works. (from History of books)
Scheme of common book design(from Bookbinding)- Belly band
- Flap
- Endpaper
- Book cover
- Head
- Fore edge
- Tail
- Right page, recto
- Left page, verso
- Gutter
A Chinese bamboo book, The Art of War, commissioned by the Qianlong Emperor in 18th-century China (from History of books)
Chinese Bookseller, illustration, c. 1824 (from History of books)
Rebacking saving original spine, showing one volume finished and one untouched (from Bookbinding)
9th-century Qur'an in Reza Abbasi Museum (from Bookbinding)
Illustration from the Codex Manesse, a German book from the Middle Ages (from History of books)
Cloth book cover with attached paper panel, mimicking half leather binding (from Bookbinding)
The spine of the book is an important aspect in book design, especially in the cover design. When the books are stacked up or stored in a shelf, the details on the spine is the only visible surface that contains the information about the book. In a book store, it is often the details on the spine that attract the attention first. (from Book design)
Folio from the Shah Jahan Album, c. 1620, depicting the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan (from History of books)
The scene in Botticelli's Madonna of the Book (1480) reflects the presence of books in the houses of richer people in his time. (from History of books)
Traditionally sewn book opened flat (from Bookbinding)
Page from a Jain manuscript depicting the birth of Mahavira, c. 1400 (from History of books)- Books with different spine orientations:
ascending (left); descending (middle); upright (right) (from Book design) 
Book conservators at the State Library of New South Wales, 1943 (from Bookbinding)
Bookbinder's type holder (from Bookbinding)
Photograph of a printing press in Egypt, c. 1922 (from History of books)
European output of books 500–1800 (from History of books)
A 15th-century incunable. Notice the blind-tooled cover, corner bosses, and clasps. (from History of books)
Page 49 of the Dresden Codex (from History of books)
Sammelband of three alchemical treatises, bound in Strasbourg by Samuel Emmel c. 1568, showing metal clasps and leather covering of boards (from Bookbinding)
Hardbound book with half leather binding (spine and corners) and marbled boards (from Bookbinding)
Decorative binding with figurehead of the 12th century manuscript Liber Landavensis (from Bookbinding)
Woman holding wax tablets in the form of the codex. Wall painting from Pompeii, before 79 CE. (from History of books)
European output of printed books c. 1450–1800 (from History of books)
A twentieth-century copyright imprint from McLoughlin Bros that features three rams and the copyright year, 1903 (from History of books)- Modern book spine designs (from Bookbinding)
A traditional bookbinder at work (from Bookbinding)
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Web resources
- Bookbinding and the Conservation of books, A Dictionary of Descriptive Terminology, 1982 by Matt T. Roberts and Don Etherington
- IOBA glossary of book terms
- Project Gutenberg - Free e-Books
- Words at Large: The best in books from CBC.ca
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