One of the things I love about working at Cosimo is that I’m constantly discovering wonderful (and sometimes wonderfully weird!) old books that I’ve never even heard of before, as well as getting regular reminders of great classics that I either haven’t read since school or have never read at all (and should). But even more surprising is that the more I look through books published 50, 100, 150, even 200 years ago, the more I see that the topics that fascinate readers today are, in many instances, the same ones that booklovers were gobbling up decades and centuries ago.

Every Monday, I take a look at the current New York Times best-seller lists and point out a few Cosimo Classics that connect to today’s hottest books. Cuz all true readers know that too much of a good thing is never enough.

It’s way too early to be thinking about Christmas as far as I’m concerned, but it seems that many other readers don’t feel that way: the Times hardcover fiction list this week features two sentimental holiday selections: Christmas Letters, by Debbie Macomber, at No. 13, and at No. 15, Finding Noel, by Richard Paul Evans. Washington Irving might be best remembered for a story revolving around another holiday, but his Old Christmas, first published in 1896, deserves to be a holiday tradition alongside Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in the celebrations of the winter solstice. Warmly convivial and delightfully festive, this charming and long forgotten holiday classic was inspired in part by Dickens and other celebrations of oldtime Yule. Splendid suppers and rural churches, cheerful dances and hearty spirits imbue this short novel with the magic of the season. If you’re one of those insufferable shoppers who has her Christmas shopping done by Thanksgiving (the rest of us are secretly terribly jealous of you), consider this for an unusual stocking stuffer for the bookworm on your list.

Over on the Times hardcover nonfiction list, it’s much more serious business with two books about the selling of the American war in Iraq: Bob Woodward’s State of Denial is at No. 3, and The Greatest Story Ever Sold, by Frank Rich, is at No. 12. Philosopher Bertrand Russell was pondering how leaders coerce men to war back in 1916 in Why Men Fight, which grew out of the devastation of World War I. Russell explores ideas of war, pacifism, reason, impulse, and personal liberty and argues that when individuals live passionately, they will have no desire for war or killing. Eminently relevant to our modern world, Russell provides critiques of war and social institutions such as marriage and the state, and offers his thoughts on what we can do to rid our world of violence.

(Technorati tags: Christmas Letters, Finding Noel, Washington Irving, Old Christmas, State of Denial, Bob Woodward, Greatest Story Ever Sold, Frank Rick, Why Men Fight, Bertrand Russell)

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One of the things I love about working at Cosimo is that I’m constantly discovering wonderful (and sometimes wonderfully weird!) old books that I’ve never even heard of before, as well as getting regular reminders of great classics that I either haven’t read since school or have never read at all (and should). But even more surprising is that the more I look through books published 50, 100, 150, even 200 years ago, the more I see that the topics that fascinate readers today are, in many instances, the same ones that booklovers were gobbling up decades and centuries ago.

Every Monday, I take a look at the current New York Times best-seller lists and point out a few Cosimo Classics that connect to today’s hottest books. Cuz all true readers know that too much of a good thing is never enough.

Nora Roberts has two supernatural thrillers on the Times paperback fiction list: Morrigan’s Cross, at No. 6, and its sequel, Dance of the Gods, at No. 1. The series is about a magical war waged against a powerful demon by a team that includes a wizard, a witch, a shapeshifter, a demon hunter, and a vampire… beings that have fascinated us since the dawn of time. In his 1932 book Wild Talents, maven of the paranormal Charles Fort regales us with accounts of vampires, werewolves, talking dogs, poltergeist activity, teleportation, witchcraft, vanishing people, spontaneous human combustion, and the escapades of the “mad bats of Trinidad,” and more. Fort is at his wittiest and most provocative here, in this early work of research into the mysteries of the world.

No. 6 on the Times paperback advice list this week is The South Beach Diet, just one of a long string of popular books in recent years advocating low-carbohydrate diets for weight loss and overall health. But low-carb is hardly the modern “fad” it has been derided as. In fact, William Banting’s Letter on Corpulence was first published in 1864, with this advice:

Bread, butter, milk, sugar, beer, and potatoes, which had been the main (and, I thought, innocent) elements of my subsistence, or at all events they had for many years been adopted freely.

These, said my excellent adviser, contain starch and saccharine matter, tending to create fat, and should be avoided altogether.

Banting’s book was so popular in the late 19th century that “banting” became slang for that era’s version of low-carb dieting. The more things change…

(Technorati tags: Nora Roberts, Charles Fort, vampires, South Beach Diet, Letter on Corpulence, William Banting)

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Cosimo/Paraview author John Renesch will be hosting and speaking at next weekend’s International Spirit at Work Awards Conference in Garrison, New York. This is the only conference that offers workshops by the CEOs, executives, and internal change agents who have received the International Spirit at Work Awards, which recognizes exemplary organizations that are deeply committed to nurturing the human spirit. The conference is an opportunity to learn from the organizational leaders and pioneers who are changing the face of workplace culture.

In Cosimo/Paraview book Leadership in a New Era, futurist John Renesch collects the vision and wisdom of business executives, professional consultants, successful authors, and leadership scholars in a joint call for a fundamental transformation in the way we lead, the way we see leaders, the way we allow ourselves to be led, and how we think about leadership. Contributions by such successful authors on the subject of “New Leadership” as Warren Bennis, Margaret Wheatley, James Autry, Max DePree, and Ann Morrison highlight this rich collection of essays. This book was created for the individual who recognizes that he or she could be doing more to improve or even transform their own role in their organizations, or their organization’s role in the world. Whether the reader is a middle manager, a CEO, a sales rep, or an accountant, he or she will find incredible value from the treasure chest of ideas shared by these authors.

(Technorati tags: John Renesch, business leadership)

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One of the things I love about working at Cosimo is that I’m constantly discovering wonderful (and sometimes wonderfully weird!) old books that I’ve never even heard of before, as well as getting regular reminders of great classics that I either haven’t read since school or have never read at all (and should). But even more surprising is that the more I look through books published 50, 100, 150, even 200 years ago, the more I see that the topics that fascinate readers today are, in many instances, the same ones that booklovers were gobbling up decades and centuries ago.

Every Monday, I’ll take a look at the current New York Times best-seller lists and point out a few Cosimo Classics that connect to today’s hottest books. Cuz all true readers know that too much of a good thing is never enough.

Brad Meltzer’s political thriller The Book of Fate — currently No. 4 on the Times hardcover fiction list — is about the Masonic secrets behind a murder in the highest corridors of power in Washington, D.C. If you’re enjoying Meltzer’s book, check out The Ancient Mysteries and Modern Masonry, a 1909 work by Rev. Charles H. Vail. Though the author cannot, alas, “lift the veil from the secrets of the Order,” Vail, a 32nd-degree Freemason, endeavors to lead the curious toward a more complete understanding of the ancient knowledge of the eternal truth of the universe of which the Masons are the keepers. From the great antiquity of Masonic symbols and traditions to the formation of the organization with their perpetuation as its goal, this is an intriguing glimpse inside one of the most enigmatic fraternities in existence. It is required reading for those fascinated by arcane wisdom and secret societies.

The Times hardcover nonfiction list includes two books criticizing Christianity, and in particular the harm organized and widespread religion has done to the modern world: Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation is at No. 6 on the list, and Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion is at No. 8. For more about the roots of modern Christian criticism, you’ll want to read Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche’s timeless masterpiece The Anti-christ. In this scathing critique, Nietzsche writes:

The Christian concept of a god — the god as the patron of the sick, the god as a spinner of cobwebs, the god as a spirit — is one of the most corrupt concepts that has ever been set up in the world… In him nothingness is deified, and the will to nothingness is made holy.

His works have been by turns vilified, lauded, and subjected to numerous contradictory interpretations, and yet Nietzsche remains a figure of profound import, and this insightful and entertaining book in particular is vital to any meaningful understanding of the roots of contemporary religious criticism.

(Technorati tags: Book of Fate, Brad Meltzer, Freemasons, Letter to a Christian Nation, Sam Harris, God Delusion, Richard Dawkins, Nietzsche, Anti-Christ, New York Times best seller lists)

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Google, which has been revolutionizing how surfers use the Web for years, is rocking the Net again with its new Google Book Search, which allows surfers to do full-text searches on copyrighted volumes, under certain restrictions by publishers, and on public domain material in an unrestricted manner; readers can also download and print out PDFs of works in the public domain.

Publishers are worried about losing control of their works, according to Book Business, and

have raised issue with the search’s display of portions of copyright-protected works without prior approval…

The Mountain View,Calif-based company contends the search constitutes fair use and offers publishers the opportunity to request how and if their content will be used.

According to Google, the company does “not enable downloading of any books under copyright. Unless we have the publisher’s permission to show more, we display only basic bibliographic information, and, in many cases, small snippets of text - at most, a few lines of text surrounding a search term.”

An article in yesterday’s International Herald Tribune outlines some of the worries of the major publishers, who’ve seen how Napster and the iPod have rattled the music industry and are hoping to head off similar chaos in the book biz while they still can:

There is no hit device for reading books electronically, nor is there a place to go online to browse or download an unbeatable selection of books. There is, however, a keen awareness among publishing executives that this day will come - and that they need to shape, rather than be shaped by, developments.

There is a new device, however, with the potential to become that hit: Sony has just launched the Sony Reader, a beautiful — if limited — toy that could evolve into the iPod for books. The price will have to be lower — the Reader retails for $350 — as will the cost of the downloadable books, which are barely cheaper than their hard-copy versions. More on my wishlist for the Reader: a nonproprietary format — it can already read PDF files, which is good, but I’m not gonna spend $350 for something that can’t read all e-books.

We’re on the edge of an exciting time for publishing — scary, perhaps, for the big corporations, which are about to lose their near-exclusive channel for distributing books, and crazy, definitely, for readers, as competing efforts to digitize the world’s library butt heads. We’ll see mishmashes of incompatible formats and duplicated effort before it all settles down into something genuinely useful. Google is already embroiled in lawsuits and legal spats with publishers and rival e-corps, according to the Los Angeles Times:

Google Inc. will subpoena information from Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. to help fight copyright lawsuits over its book-scanning project.

Google, the world’s most-used search engine, is seeking information on rival projects by the companies, including book lists, costs, estimated sales, dealings with publishers and possible benefit or harm to copyright owners, according to papers filed in U.S. District Court in New York.

In the end, it can only be readers who will benefit, as we get access to more and more diverse material than we ever have before (I discussed how absolutely thrilling this is for readers in a post this past spring at my blog Geek Philosophy). Google Book Search’s official blog, Inside Google Book Search, offers a hint about how wide-ranging reader interest is, and how it has not been fully served by the severe limitations of traditional publishing: it took a look at the zeitgeist of what readers are searching for, bookwise, online… and it’s not, surprisingly, all John Grisham and Harry Potter:

[H]ere’s our list of most-viewed English language books supplied by our publisher partners for the week of September 17th through 23rd:

• Diversity and Evolutionary Biology of Tropical Flowers
• Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of Synonyms
• Measuring and Controlling Interest Rate and Credit Risk
• Ultimate Healing: The Power of Compassion
• The Holy Qur’an
• Peterson’s Study Abroad 2006
• Hegemony Or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance
• Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage
• Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense
• Build Your Own All-Terrain Robot

Wow. Who knew there were so many topics we didn’t know we needed to read all about?

(Technorati tags: Google Book Search)

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Yasuhiko Genku Kimura, author of the Cosimo-on-Demand title The Book of Balance, will appear on Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute radio today, Thursday, October 5, on the show “In the Spirit” with host Gary Goldberg. The interview, part of a continuing series with Kimura, will air live in the Troy, New York, area at 91.5 FM, and globally over the Internet at WRPI.org (click on the Real Audio tab at the top of the page). “In the Spirit” airs at 2pm Eastern, 11am Pacific.

Loren Coleman, author of the Paraview Pocket (a Cosimo partner) book The Copycat Effect, will appear on two NPR programs this weekend: “On the Media” on Friday, October 5, and “Weekend Edition” “Weekend America” on Saturday or Sunday, October 7 or 8. Check your local listings for times and frequencies, or listen online — live or archived — at NPR’s Web site.

(Technorati tags: Yasuhiko Genku Kimura, Loren Coleman)

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Montague Ullman, M.D., author of the Cosimo-on-Demand book Appreciating Dreams, is presenting a paper at the fifth annual online Psiber Dreaming Conference, in progress now and running through October 8. Events and papers to be presented include:

• • The Physics of Psi Dreaming, featuring papers by Dr. Montague Ullman and Dr. Mark Schroll
• • Spanish language thread with featured paper by Drs. Stanley Krippner and Rosa Anwandter
• • Dream Telepathy and Precognitive Dreaming Contests
• • and an all new Virtual Dream Ball

At Cosimo we’re terribly interested in the borderland between psychology and the paranormal, and so there are a few books about dreams in our backlist. In addition to Appreciating Dreams — which is about exploring our nighttime visions in a trusting small-group setting — we also offer Families and the Interpretation of Dreams, by Edward Bruce Bynum, an intriguing discussion of how family dynamics express themselves in our dreams.

Our untapped psychic abilities were of tremendous interest to the parapyschologists and New Thought philosophers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, too. In the two-volumes-in-one A Handbook of Dreams and Fortune-Telling, from Cosimo Classics, early pop astrologer Zadkiel presents a dictionary-style guide, dating from the mid 19th century, to interpreting your nocturnal hallucinations. And the 1897 work The Book of Dreams and Ghosts, by legendary folklorist Andrew Lang, explores how the dead supposedly manifest themselves through our dreams.

All together, these four books represent a fascinating look at how our understanding of our ability to dream — and our wisdom in interpreting our dreams — has evolved from one based in the supernatural to one rooted in science.

(Technorati tags: dreams, interpreting dreams)

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Not that politicians have ever enjoyed a reputation for honesty, but two stunning scandals currently rocking Washington are so profoundly disturbing because they involve lies about matters that few would dispute are not to be lied about.

First, there’s Bob Woodward’s new book State of Denial, which the British Guardian says:

lifts the lid on an administration in crisis, claiming that Bush and his top officials have deliberately covered up the seriousness of the violence in the war-torn country [of Iraq].

And then there’s the outrage surrounding not only the behavior of Congressman Mark Foley, who is either a sexual predator of children or damn close to being one, and that of the Republican House leadership, which to all appearances has covered up and protected Foley — and hence potentially endangering teenage House pages — for months, perhaps years. In this case, it’s both the sex and the lying… and the hypocrisy of the party that holds itself up as the defenders of morality while shielding one of its offending own.

More than 250 years ago, Scottish philosopher David Hume was thinking about what constitutes morality and what makes humans moral (or not). In his 1751 book An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals — available from Coismo Classics — Hume writes:

Sympathy, we shall allow, is much fainter than our concern for ourselves, and sympathy with persons remote from us much fainter than that with persons near and contiguous; but for this very reason it is necessary for us, in our calm judgments and discourse concerning the characters of men, to neglect all these differences and render our sentiments more public and social.

Basically, self-preseveration is an undeniable human instinct, but decent, moral people manage to overcome our own inclination to cover our asses when the situation calls for it. Read more of Hume… and perhaps send a copy to your congressman, too.

(Technorati tags: State of Denial, Bob Woodward, Mark Foley, Republican sex scandal, lies, lying, David Hume, philosophy)

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The publishing and bookselling industries are currently in upheaval as new technologies (like print-on-demand) and new paradigms (like Amazon) are radically changing the way books are produced and moved into readers’ hands. And the revolution has just claimed another casualty: New York City’s beloved independent bookstore Coliseum Books.

From Publishers Weekly:

The 32-year-old Coliseum Books in New York City has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and plans are in place to close the store.

“I don’t see us surviving Chapter 11,” said general manager Richard Urciuoli, who has worked at the store for 25 years. “This location never paid off with the amount of space we have and the book sales we needed to generate.”

Between 1974 and 2002, the store was located slightly north of busy Times Square on Broadway and 57th Street. When a jump in rent forced them to close, the store relocated to a 10,000 sq.-ft. space on 42nd Street, near the New York Public Library.

Even in spite of its famous literary neighbor, which we might assume would bring in plenty of foot traffic interested in books, a destination bookstore could not survive in one of the most literary cities on the planet. Sorry as I am to see one of my own personal favorite bookstores disappear, I think there is a lesson to be found in this news for the future of the book arena, and its one that anyone who reads will recognize:

Readers want more options. We don’t want to be limited to the mere thousands of books that even the widest-ranging bookstore, limited by the simple logistics of shelf space, can carry. We want it all, and we’re going to those places that will give it to us, and shunning those that cannot, no matter how beloved they once were.

(Technorati tags: Coliseum Books)

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While no one could have predicted the precise details of today’s tragic school shooting in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Paraview Pocket (a partner of Cosimo) author Loren Coleman did in fact predict a cluster of school shootings in general… and more specifically, shootings by older gunman targeting females.

In a posting at Coleman’s blog, The Copycat Effect — an extension of his book of the same name — the author identified nine distinct school-shooting incidents between the end of August and the end of September across North America (with one in Western Europe), and zeroed in on a similarity among many of them:

Please note that the lone male “outsider shooter” is a common denominator here, as well as most of the victims being females or authority figures (teachers, administrators).

The posting — which was updated early this morning, hours before a gunman entered a one-room Amish schoolhouse and singled out girls as his victims — continues:

In general, of course, we seem to now be in an unfortunate high copycat effect pattern, and it could be a deadly time for students in North America, as well as internationally, for several weeks, no matter what the day or date. (I wrote the first draft of this September 27, and had to revise it, too quickly, on September 29, after the Wisconsin incident. The landscape of school shootings is changing rapidly this fall.)…

Expect more school shootings, unfortunately. Be alert, be prepared, be careful.

As I write this, the talking-heads on CNN are noting the similarities between last week’s hostage event in Platte Canyon High School in Colorado in which one teenaged girl was killed, and today’s shootings in Lancaster, with both gunmen long past schoolage and deliberately targeting girls. They’re wondering if the first inspired the second. Coleman’s thesis, carefully and comprehensively laid out in The Copycat Effect, implicates the media itself as the vector that transmits a deadly psychological virus that does indeed feed on itself — it’s not the mere reporting of events that is the problem but the sensationalism with which they are reported. Dr. Steven Stack, sociologist with the Center for Suicide Research, calls The Copycat Effect “urgent reading”… an urgency that has, alas, been proven in the most horrific way today.

(Technorati tags: Amish school shooting, Loren Coleman)

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