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…

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