A little bit of funny found on the interwebs

Contra Costa Library turns 100!

For information on various 100th year celebrations happening all over the CCC Library system check out http://guides.ccclib.org/100thbirthday.

via madmagazine.com/blog

Happy Valentine's Day from Edgar Allan Poe

46th California International Antiquarian Book Fair

The 46th California International Antiquarian Book Fair is soon approaching. This great event is being held at the  Concourse Exhibition Center (635 8th Street in San Francisco) from 3 p.m. - 8 p.m. on Friday, February 15; 11 a.m. - 7 p.m. on Saturday, February 16; and 11 a.m. - 5 p.m. on Sunday, February 17.

Your humble blogger was given a media pass to attend this three day event. This will be my first ever book fair so I'm not exactly sure what to expect. The closest experience I've had was reading The Man Who Loved Books Too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett and attending the  the San Diego Comic Con about ten years ago.

              I was recently given a list of 13 of the rarest books that will be at the convention. The two that I am dying to see are a first edition of The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith ($125,000) and an incredible set of first editions of all 85 Federalist Papers by John Jay, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton ($382,000). 

For those that aren't History/Economics teachers you may find the autographed, hand written original manuscript from chapter 20 of a A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain ($79,000), original John Lenin sketches ($134,000), or a rare copy of Birds of America by John James Audubon ($32,000) more interesting. 



At those prices, of course, I'll just be looking. But we these items as the headliners, this should be a fun weekend of window shopping.
 

Three-day admission tickets are available online at www.cabookfair.com or at the door on Friday for $25.  Tickets purchased online or at the door for Saturday and Sunday are $15 each and allow return admission for the remainder to the fair. For more information about tickets or exhibiting, visit www.cabookfair.com.

For more information about tickets or exhibiting and access to pre-sale discount tickets, please visit the website at www.cabookfair.com or the ABAA website at www.abaa.org; or call (415) 962-2500, (800) 454-6401.

 

February Book of the Month: The Whiskey Rebels by David Liss

via goodreads.com

David Liss’s bestselling historical thrillers, including A Conspiracy of Paper and The Coffee Trader, have been called remarkable and rousing: the perfect combination of scrupulous research and breathless excitement. Now Liss delivers his best novel yet in an entirely new setting–America in the years after the Revolution, an unstable nation where desperate schemers vie for wealth, power, and a chance to shape a country’s destiny.

Ethan Saunders, once among General Washington’s most valued spies, now lives in disgrace, haunting the taverns of Philadelphia. An accusation of treason has long since cost him his reputation and his beloved fiancée, Cynthia Pearson, but at his most desperate moment he is recruited for an unlikely task–finding Cynthia’s missing husband. To help her, Saunders must serve his old enemy, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, who is engaged in a bitter power struggle with political rival Thomas Jefferson over the fragile young nation’s first real financial institution: the Bank of the United States.

Meanwhile, Joan Maycott is a young woman married to another Revolutionary War veteran. With the new states unable to support their ex-soldiers, the Maycotts make a desperate gamble: trade the chance of future payment for the hope of a better life on the western Pennsylvania frontier. There, amid hardship and deprivation, they find unlikely friendship and a chance for prosperity with a new method of distilling whiskey. But on an isolated frontier, whiskey is more than a drink; it is currency and power, and the Maycotts’ success attracts the brutal attention of men in Hamilton’s orbit, men who threaten to destroy all Joan holds dear.

As their causes intertwine, Joan and Saunders–both patriots in their own way–find themselves on opposing sides of a daring scheme that will forever change their lives and their new country. The Whiskey Rebels is a superb rendering of a perilous age and a nation nearly torn apart–and David Liss’s most powerful novel yet.