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.

Travel to strange and distant lands — by fictional characters and real people alike — has always been an adventure to expand the heart, soul, and mind. The queen of escapist soap opera, Danielle Steel, puts the plot to good use in her new book H.R.H., at No. 11 on the Times hardcover fiction list, about a spoiled European princess who journeys to Africa to work with the Red Cross. Evangelist and teacher Emma Hillmon Haviland wrote of her real-life experiences as a missionary in late-19th-century Zulu country in Under the Southern Cross: Or, A Woman’s Life Work for Africa… though her travels seem to have done little to widen her horizons. Privately published, this is one woman’s account of her Christian work in Africa, from her childhood on farms in Iowa and Kansas, where she had a youthful brush with death that led to her conversion to an active Christianity, to her return home after long years doing the Lord’s work. The time in between is fraught with culture shock: her difficulties in learning the Zulu language, her disdain for Zulu tradition and mythology, even a particular scorn for the food she found unpalatable. Stolid and unbending, this is a curious document of a less enlightened time, a firsthand look at the mindset of a bygone time.

Erik Larson’s Thunderstruck sits at No. 9 on the Times hardcover nonfiction list. A tale of intrigue fueled by modern science, it’s about the attempts, at the turn of the 20th century, to bridge the Atlantic with wireless communication… and how it took a sensational murder to bring the success of the endeavor to public prominence. One of the first great business and technology journalists, Herbert N. Casson, covered the development of a wired communication device in his 1910 book, The History of the Telephone. This charming and highly readable overview of the impact of the telephone in its first quarter-century discusses not only the scientific innovators and business pioneers involved in its creation, but also the social impact of the new technology. Writes Casson:

With the use of the telephone has come a new habit of mind. The slow and sluggish mood has been sloughed off. The old to-morrow habit has been superseded by “Do It To-day”; and life has become more tense, alert, vivid.

(Technorati tags: H R H, Danielle Steel, Under the Southern Cross, Emma Hillmon Haviland, Thunderstruck, Erik Larson, Herbert Casson, History of the Telephone)

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