22 Pandemic Books to Read Before the H7N9 Virus Kills Us All

It’s been a while since the news was overrun with stories on the H7N9 bird flu – but not so long ago the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Chinese government were convincing folks not to panic…yet. But if you spent as many hours translating microblogs from Mandarin as some amateur epidemiologists do, you’d be … Read more

The End of the Treasure Hunt?

“If I hadn’t been a novelist I would have been a rare book dealer. You’re always on a treasure hunt.” – Graham Greene Rare book dealers must lament the passing of an era. That is their job. There was a time, before the internet, when the mostly likely place to find a pristine first edition … Read more

What EBooks Mean to Book Collectors

 by Carrie Bailey The short answer, in my opinion, is nothing, but I want explore how I may be proven wrong. Imagine you lived in 1938 and heard Orson Wells’s radio broadcast of H. G. Well’s War of the Worlds. It’s a great moment in history if you aren’t familiar with the story. A young … Read more

14 Inventions NOT Available at Aunt Em’s House

  By Carrie Bailey Context changes things. In 1907, the concept of a clockwork man was innovative, a device before its time. In fact, Frank L. Baum created his character Tik Tok before the word “robot” was first used to describe “a machine resembling a human being and able to replicate certain human movements and … Read more

Book Collecting on a Budget

by Carrie Bailey Old smelly musty historically significant books are my passion. The problem is that I can’t always afford the ones I want. The value of rare books is driven by the desire of people to own them. Don’t misunderstand – I have great aspirations as a book collector. Yet, when it comes to … Read more