blogis librorum. A blog about books. Rare books.

At Books Tell You Why, we love hearing the stories of book collectors from all walks of life. For years now, one of our favorite celebrations of collectors has been the ABAA’s National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest (NCBCC). The contest chooses three finalists, all college students, who have composed an exemplary paper exhibiting their own collection. The collection can be composed of books of any kind, as long as they can be united under a sharp thematic focus. All three winners are invited to receive their scholarship and award at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., in a ceremony open to the public. The event is a celebration for bibliophiles of all ages, and is a pleasant reminder that behind every collection, there are countless stories to be told.

For a historic, revered publication concerned with the social and artistic footprint of arts and letters from across the globe, the mathematics behind The New York Times Book Review are fascinating.

Take the number 119, for example, which is how old the review turns this year. Publishing its first issue on Oct. 10, 1896, the literary supplement to The New York Times is the last free-standing, regularly published entity of literary criticism associated with a daily news publication. 

Considered alongside its fellow awards, the Nobel Peace Prize can seem a little vague. While the Nobel Prize in Literature, for example, has often been the subject of controversy, it, like the awards for physics and chemistry, is fairly straightforward. As with those aimed at breakthroughs in the sciences, the award for literature is ostensibly awarded to those achieving the most impressive new heights in the field.

The Nobel Peace Prize, on the other hand, while not referring to a discreet discipline in and of itself, has long been considered a bit nebulous in its intent. Despite that, the Peace Prize has been the highest honor the world bestows upon its most luminary minds — from Dr. Martin Luther King and the Dalai Lama to Malala Yousafzai and Jimmy Carter — for more than a century.

Awarded each year since 1901 (except in 1914, 1918, 1935, 1940, 1941, 1942, and 1943), the Nobel Prize in Literature is an obvious litmus test for exceptional writers. While there have, of course, been a fair share of “snubs” in the past 100+ years, many of the greatest authors in recent history bear the title "Nobel laureate." As a result, collecting Nobel Prize winners makes good sense: there’s a list to follow; a new author is chosen each year from all around the globe, allowing for an eclectic reach (many congratulations to the 2015 winner from Belarus, Svetlana Alexievich!); and your collection will be filled with the best of the best. We thought we’d offer some advice for fledgling collectors and seasoned collectors alike as you go about putting together your noble Nobel collection.

James Whitcomb Riley entered the world carrying that rather weighty moniker along with him in 1849 in Greenfield, Indiana. He was a middle child of six born to Reuben and Elizabeth Riley, and was named after the then governor of the state. Despite the eighteen letters that his parents bestowed upon him at birth, James spent his young life trying to make a name for himself. After a failed attempt at law school, Riley worked as a house painter, Bible salesman, and sign painter. He later signed on with a traveling show where he entertained crowds with music and verse before selling them tonics. He once made the erroneous claim that he himself had been cured of blindness by using one of those same tonics. Traveling the Indiana countryside and selling his snake oil as the “Painter Poet” solidified his reputation as a Hoosier and a huckster.

If you find yourself in Oslo and are thinking about looking for antiquarian books, we can point you in the right directions. Norway isn’t home to the largest remaining selection of antiquarian bookstores in Scandinavia (shops in Denmark and Sweden seem to have fared better than others), but there are still quite a few in which visitors can spend many hours scanning shelves and boxes.

This year, Eloise turns 60, though to her adoring fans, she’s still not a day more than 6. And in today’s fast-paced social media filled world where youth seems as fleeting as a Snapchat, she is perhaps more relevant than ever.

Eloise, the titular character in a wildly successful series of children books, first appeared to readers in 1955 in Eloise: A Book for Precocious Grown-Ups. The book chronicles the antics of an eccentric 6-year-old Manhattanite who lives a lavish life atop the Plaza Hotel. With two pets in tow — a pug named Weenie and a turtle called Skiperdee — Eloise spends her days living out the innermost parts of her wild imagination to the constant consternation of her nanny. 

There’s an ongoing campaign in Spain to locate mass graves of victims who were executed during the early days of the Spanish Civil War and through the decades of the fascist Francisco Franco’s dictatorship in the country. With 15,000 euro, archaeologists have identified regions in which bodies may have been buried. One of those bodies is likely the remains of the playwright and poet Federico García Lorca.

Thomas Clayton Wolfe’s writing is slightly obscure, and bad luck is at least somewhat to blame. While many writers drift in and out of the canon, only a few find themselves supplanted by more popular authors with the same name. Indeed, the Tom Wolfe who penned Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) may have, by dint of sheer SEO, made the resurgence of North Carolina native and early 20th century modernist maestro Thomas Wolfe a little slow in coming. But is it finally the original Thomas Wolfe's time?

J. R. R. Tolkien was raised in South Africa, fought in World War I, lived most of his life in England, and taught for a long time at Oxford University. So it may surprise you to know that a great portion of his original manuscripts and papers can be found at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It seems an unlikely location for such precious documents – how on Earth did they find their way to Wisconsin?