Non-Fiction Books

THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO SELF-PUBLISHING: Everything You Need to Know to Write, Publish, Promote and Sell Your Own Book (3rd Edition)
by Tom & Marilyn Ross. Condition: NEW 1998 Writer's Digest large soft cover, third edition, second printing. Tiny tiny edge wear. Content: "Self-publishing," say authors Tom and Marilyn Ross, "is a perfect example of the American dream." This book, then, is an aspiring self-publisher's dream. "This isn't a book of fancy theory," as the authors put it; "it's a practical handbook of state-of-the-art specifics." In 521 pages, it lays out everything you need to know to publish your own books, from start-up considerations to the possibility of selling to a big publisher: how to choose a name for your press, how to get an ISBN, what cover designs cost, how to find a reliable printer, how to price your book, where to find lighter-weight shipping envelopes, how to generate working capital. The authors' encyclopedic grasp of the ins and outs of self-publishing is matched by their natural good sense about self-promotion. Turn your signings into events, they recommend; get your books into a variety of venues; use the books as fundraisers for organizations; get online and get reviewed online. The price of this book is negligible considering the cost of proper self-publishing (between $12,000 and $25,000), and, oh, the headaches it will spare you! Questions welcome [2 copies available]
$ 7.50 + $ 3.29 media shipping.

CRAZY ENGLISH: The Ultimate Joy Ride Through Our language
by Richard Lederer. B&W comic illustrations by Dick Anderson. Condition: NEW 1990 Pocket Books paperback, first printing. Content: If you have ever been completely wowed by the power you can have over language, or its power over you, Richard Lederer is your patron saint. His oft-reprinted introduction to Crazy English, claims that English is "the most loopy and wiggy of all tongues." And then he demonstrates: "In what other language do people drive in a parkway and park in a driveway? ... Why do they call them apartments when they're all together?" And so on. Lederer's pace is frenetic. He alights on oxymorons ("pretty ugly," "computer jock"), redundancies, confusing words (are you sure you know the meaning of enormity?), phobias, contronyms, heteronyms, retroactive terms (acoustic guitar, rotary phone), and a host of other linguistic delights. Though English may be one of the crazier languages--Lederer claims that about 80 percent of our words are not spelled phonetically--they are all, he says, a little crazy. "That's because language is invented ... by boys and girls and men and women, not computers. As such, language reflects the creative and fearful asymmetry of the human race, which, of course, isn't really a race at all." Questions welcome [1 copy available]
$ 3.59 + $ 2.94 media shipping.

DICTIONARY OF EPONYMS
by Martin Manser. B&W photos illustrate. Condition: UNREAD 1990 Guild Publishing small hardcover & DJ (in mylar jacket), reprint. DJ has a couple of light impressions near spine - barely noticeable, but there. Content: Great research tool for writers. An eponym is the person after whom something is believed to be named, i.e., Farmer Giles, bogus, etc. Great fun! Questions welcome [1 copy available]
$ 7.59 + $ 3.19 media shipping.

DICTIONARY OF PROVERBS AND THEIR ORIGINS
by Linda & Roger Flavell. Condition: NEW 1997 Hippocrene Books Trade Paperback, first thus. Content: The proverbs are categorized by subject matter and each entry has the meaning of the proverb, it's likely origin, literary references, and variants. Interesting and particularly useful for teachers and public speakers. Questions welcome [1 copy available]
$ 5.59 + $ 3.19 media shipping.

THE LEFT-HANDERS HANDBOOK: 4 Books in 1: The Left-Handed Book; The Natural Superiority of the Left-Hander; The World's Greatest Left-Handers; and Left-Handed Kids
by James T. de Kay. Wicked B&W comic drawings - but no credit given. Condition: UNREAD 1997 MJF hardcover & DJ (in mylar jacket), 6th printing. Content: Reviewer: "I think right-handed people who read this will be very offended. But hey, they deserve it. Lefties are so underrepresented, they need something to cheer them up. The viciously funny cartoons are a real knee-slapper. This book is great, if you are left handed or want to know how it feels to be left handed. Which everyone should. Questions welcome. [1 copy available]
$ 6.49 + $ 3.19 media shipping.

MARIONETTES and String Puppets Collector's Reference Guide
by Daniel E. Hodges. Color photos illustrate. Condition: NEW 1998 ATB large soft cover, no printing given. Content: Hodges provides an informative, entertaining, colorful, and nostalgia-evoking look at the most popular marionettes ever produced for the consumer market. Includes a special section devoted to TV characters, animals, clowns, and storybook characters. Questions welcome. [1 copy available]
$ 3.49 + $ 3.29 media shipping.

PRAYERS TO THE MOON: Exercises in Self-Reflection
by Kay Leigh Hagan. B&W decorations. Condition: Gently pre-read, if at all, 1991 HarperSanFrancisco soft cover, first printing. Content: Reviewer: "Hagan's book is a magnificent work, with such a wonderful variety of reflective writing exercises, and ample space to explore right in the book. I met the author at a journal conference long ago, and was introduced to parts of the book before it was published. For many years, I have used the finished product in my journal classes, as a guide for men and women who are exploring self and creativity. Unfortunately, it is now out of stock at the publisher and is not readily available. But I hold tight to my last copy and continue to write again and again, using Kay's imaginative weekly exercises as my beginning." Questions welcome. [1 copy available]
$ 4.59 + $ 3.29 media shipping.

SISTER BERNADETTE'S BARKING DOG: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences
by Kitty Burns Florey. B&W illustrations. Condition: NEW 2007 2007 Harvest soft cover, first printing. Content: In its heyday, sentence diagramming was wildly popular in grammar schools across the country. Kitty Burns Florey learned the method in sixth grade from Sister Bernadette: "It was a bit like art, a bit like mathematics. It was a picture of language. I was hooked." Now, in this offbeat history, Florey explores the sentence-diagramming phenomenon, including its humble roots at the Brooklyn Polytechnic, its "balloon diagram" predecessor, and what diagrams of famous writers’ sentences reveal about them. Along the way Florey offers up her own commonsense approach to learning and using good grammar. Charming, fun, and instructive, Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog will be treasured by all kinds of readers, from grumpy grammarians and crossword-puzzle aficionados to students of literature and lovers of language. Any one involved in politics or the legal field absolutely needs this book! [1 copy available]
$ 5.00 + $ 3.19 media shipping.

THE SUPERIOR PERSON'S BOOK OF WORDS
by Peter Bowler. B&W comic illustrations by Dennis Corrigan. Condition: NEW 1998 David Bodine hardcover & DJ (in mylar jacket), 16th printing. Content: Are you an Anglophile? (Stout fellow!) Just stand at this springboard and leave the fields of popinjay jabber and tongue-stumped battology behind forever! Step up for big dividends in the giddy heights of superior speech. Are you a rasorial searcher after words? Are nouns your bread? Adjectives your butter? Verbs your little salad? Adverbs your house dressing? Well, then, this is the book to shiver you futtocks! Put an end to fopdoodly speech; amaze your friends, baffle your enemies, write interoffice memos to end all discussion! Peter Bowler will teach you the practical riches of saying it well with good words, neglected words, precise words for vocabular exultation. A Superior Person is not defined by income, class, or sex. A Superior Person uses Superior Speech. And, if Aristotle's definition of art as something both entertaining and edifying is still toasted with glee, then there's art a-chock-a-block in Mr. Bowler's dictionary - a funny, useful, and elevating little book. Nothing short of a brief dictionary for those who aspire to linguistic snobbery. Questions welcome. [1 copy available]
$ 3.59 + $ 3.09 media shipping.

UNDERSTANDING MEDIA: The Extensions of Man
by Marshall McLuhan. Condition: Unread c. 1970s Signet paperback, 10th printing. Pale shelfwear hinge crease with something odd: 2 colors of paper being used for the text. Light tanning to page edges. Interior clean and tight. Content: "An early copy of Marshall McLuhan's classic expose (1964) on the state of the then emerging phenomenon of mass media. Terms and phrases such as "the global village" and "the medium is the message" are now part of the lexicon, and McLuhan's theories continue to challenge our sensibilities and our assumptions about how and what we communicate. There has been a notable resurgence of interest in McLuhan's work in the last few years, fueled by the recent and continuing conjunctions between the cable companies and the regional phone companies, the appearance of magazines such as WiRed, and the development of new media models and information ecologies, many of which were spawned from MIT's Media Lab. In effect, media now begs to be redefined." One of the most influential books ever published. [1 copy available]
$ 6.59 + $ 2.89 media shipping.

VINTAGE JUKEBOXES: The Collector's Guide to the Much-Loved Musical Icons of the 1940s and 1950s
by Christopher Pearce. Color and B&W photos illustrate. Condition: NEW 2002 Quantum large soft cover, no printing given. Content: A fascinating look at the design creativity and technical innovation of the Jukebox. Questions welcome. [3 copies available]
$ 5.49 + $ 3.19 media shipping.

WITHIN THE VEIL: Black Journalists, White Media
by Pamela Newkirk. B&W photo section. Condition: NEW 2000 NY University Press hardcover & DJ (in mylar jacket), first printing. Content: On the surface, the increase of African American reporters in the media may signal that they have made significant gains in that arena. But as Professor Pamela Newkirk of New York University outlines in her valuable book Within the Veil, race is still an issue that blacks have to deal with. Riffing on W.E.B. Du Bois' use of "the veil" in his classic book The Souls of Black Folk, Newkirk writes: "Behind the obvious, albeit small, numerical gains, a wide and deep racial and cultural chasm still divides blacks and whites in the newsroom. Despite their heightened visibility, African-American journalists and their minority counterparts, woefully underrepresented in the industry and in news management, are far from integrated into newsroom culture." Charting the development of the black press with the publication of Freedman's Journal in 1827, Newkirk chronicles the endless struggle of blacks to challenge the racist stereotypes that permeate American thought. She details the ordeals of several blacks in the '60s who desegregated TV networks, the most well known example being the late Max Robinson, brother of civil rights leader Randall Robinson. There's also the case of the disgraced Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke, who had to give back her Pulitzer Prize for writing a false story, while white writers guilty of the same crime are given jobs elsewhere. Newkirk also highlights the pressures black reporters feel from their racial group to tell the truth about Afro-American life, which at times goes against what their white counterparts believe. Newkirk also examines Black Entertainment Television and Net Noir, an Internet company, and writes, "African-Americans must use the power of praise and punishment to call attention to the ways in which they are portrayed." [1 copy available]
$ 18.59 + $ 3.19 media shipping. Priority shipping available.

ZEN IN THE ART OF WRITING
by Ray Bradbury. Condition: UNREAD, but not perfect, 1992 Bantam paperback, 7th printing. Name inside front cover and tiny edge wear. Content: Famous science fiction author Bradbury here collects ten essays and eight poems from his past writings that illustrate his views on what a writer should do and be. Included are his reflections on the experience of writing, particularly the writing of such well-known works as Fahrenheit 451 and Dandelion Wine. Much autobiographical information is provided in this collection as well. As in his 500 short stories, novels, plays, and poems, Bradbury's warmth and cordiality will charm readers. Questions welcome. [1 copy available]
$ 4.39 + $ 2.94 media shipping.