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The holidays are upon us and this is your last chance to buy meaningful gifts for the loved ones in your life. There are many great gifts for readers, but for the rare book enthusiast in your life, making the right choice can be tricky. Here are some first edition novels, volumes, and autobiographies that…
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John Locke, born August 29, 1632, was one of the greatest liberal minds of the Enlightenment. He fathered Classical Liberalism, a school of thought that departed from the idea of society as a family and took on the view of society as a mere mesh of its individuals, all of whom were innately cold, manipulative,…
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1. The Declaration of Independence The original Declaration of Independence, signed by Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams, is easily one of the rarest, most sought after documents of all time. There were only 200 copies of it printed on July 4th, 1776, and only about 26 copies survive to this day. Fun Fact:…
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Clive Staples Lewis, better known as C. S. Lewis, was one of the most distinguished writers and intellectual giants of the twentieth century. He spent the first half of his career holding numerous academic positions at Oxford University until he was unanimously elected the Chair of Renaissance and Medieval Literature at Cambridge University, where he…
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[fusion_text]Benoit B. Mandelbrot was a mathematician who would completely change the way biologists view nature, the way financial advisors see patterns in markets, and eventually, the way computer animators design lively scenes in Pixar movies. But before his famous discovery of the Mandelbrot set in 1979, outlined in Fractals: Form, Chance, and Dimension, the mathematician…
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David Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York in February of 1962 to parents Sally Foster and James Wallace. He spent his early childhood and adolescent years in Illinois and was regionally ranked as a junior tennis player in his teens. Wallace’s parents were both professors and when it came time to go to…
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Bernard Malamud’s story began like many self-made persons in America during his era, as a child born to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Malamud came of age during the start of the Great Depression and attended Erasmus Hall High School, a popular public high school at the time while Brooklyn’s population…
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Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, also known as V.S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in the early 1930s. Naipaul’s father had emigrated from India with his grandparents in the 1880s, who sought work as indentured servants in Trinidad’s sugar plantations. Three years before Naipaul’s birth, his father began contributing to the Trinidad Guardian as an English-language…
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Kurt Vonnegut was an author who found humorous and imaginative ways to write about disconcerting realities that face us every day, from the plagues of war to the looming presence of technology. In his first novel, Player Piano, Vonnegut brings the two themes together in the setting ten years after a third world war, a…
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“Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.” Those words were famously written by one of the most influential writers in the 20th century, James Joyce. The quote comes from Joyce’s work Ulysses, an epic novel that was originally published in parts throughout continuous issues of magazine The…
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