The painting on the cover of the first US paperback edition of The Hobbit has a lion, a fruit tree, and a pair of emus. There are no lions in The Hobbit. There are no fruit trees or emus. J.R.R. Tolkien was baffled. He wrote to the publisher, “Where is this place? Why emus? And what…
I have a limited edition of Philip K Dick’s novel In Milton Lumky Territory with the legendary author’s signature on the first page. Only 50 copies were signed and bound with the signature and the special quarter leather spine. There’s a fun story about the signature. Philip Dick was prolific, pounding out stories and novels during the…
Mark Twain fled to Berlin in 1891 with his wife and three little daughters. He had earned a great deal of money from Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and his other writing and lectures, but he invested in ventures that lost most of it and the family was short of funds. So in the fall…
We’re going to dive down a rabbit hole into the world of collecting Lewis Carroll books. You know the phrase “going down a rabbit hole” comes from Alice In Wonderland, right? Book collecting has been called “a gentle madness.” Maybe you’ve known a collector – but do you really know what specific insanity drove that…