Inside Jacket

The Huffington Post has a photo tour of some of the most beautiful libraries at colleges and universities around the US. Compared to the bunker that was my university library these seem quite palatial.

Princeton Library

October’s most expensive sale on AbeBooks, the famous Arion Press edition of Moby Dick with artwork by Barry Moser, illustrates how fine presses are adored by high-end book collectors.

With a price-tag of $28,900, this beautiful book was AbeBooks? second most expensive sale of 2010 – just a handful of dollars less than the archives of Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci that sold in September. Andrew Hoyem founded Arion in 1974 and he is ranked one of the world?s leading printers. See the full list.

For some a zombie apocolypse is the most terrifying way to imagine the world ending. A world full of human undead would be a living nightmare but a house full of zombie books is one of our wildest dreams.

Every year thousands of books go out-of-print and yet many of them deserve wider exposure. AbeBooks has chosen 25 books we would raise from the dead and reprint if we were a mad scientist. Our reasoning is that demand remains strong for this selection of literature as we see buyers scouring the world’s used and rare booksellers.

Read our list of books we would bring back from the dead

Galleycat has posted a list of books that the late Marilyn Monroe has on her bookshelf, the list is actually a lot more literary than I would have pegged the bombshell for:

- The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
- The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett
- Paris Blues by Harold Flender
- Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
- Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
- A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
- Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck
- The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
- On the Road by Jack Kerouac
- The Fall by Albert Camus
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
- Once There Was a War by John Steinbeck

Just for fun I limited these searches to books that were published before Monroe’s death in 1962, so if you click though you can get an idea of what her shelf might have actually looked like.

Topping the list is a collection of personal files from Oriana Fallaci, the late Italian journalist famed for her intense interviews with politicians and celebrities alike.

The collection included letters, research materials and more, and sold for $28,994. That makes it one of the most expensive sales on AbeBooks in recent years, and the second landmark sale we’ve enjoyed in as many months. In August our top sale, a copy of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon, went for $27,500. Surely these are signs that the rare book market is buoyant.

See the whole list