Jon ZobenicaThe Secret Lives of Used Books (The Revolt of Mamie Stover, by William Bradford Huie)This book hails from the Atlanta Public Library — a jewel of brutalism, the architectural style that reigned from the 1950s to the 1970s…5 min read·May 12, 2023----
Jon ZobenicaThe Secret Lives of Used Books (The White Album, by Joan Didion)Stuart B. Schimmel was a bibliophile of some renown — a longtime member of New York’s Grolier Club and a man who, in 1961, commissioned the…3 min read·May 4, 2023----
Jon ZobenicaThe Secret Lives of Used Books (Passages from the Diary of Samuel Pepys)Edward W. Johnson was born in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1894 or 1895, to a father from Norway and a mother from the Grand Duchy of Finland…4 min read·Dec 2, 2022----
Jon ZobenicaThe Secret Lives of Used Books (The Call of the Wild, by Jack London)Oakland, California’s Montera Junior High School — founded in 1959, and from which this copy of The Call of the Wild came — was almost…4 min read·Nov 28, 2022----
Jon ZobenicaThe Secret Lives of Used Books (The Heart of the Matter, by Graham Greene)The first line of Walter J. Johannsen’s obituary reads that he was “Born to Eternal Life on October 11, 2008, at the age of 78.” He did a…5 min read·Nov 16, 2022----
Jon ZobenicaThe Secret Lives of Used Books (Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by D. H. Lawrence)I’ve stumbled here either on an intriguing story, or on a series of coincidences that only make it seem that way. Several months ago, at a…4 min read·Nov 12, 2022----
Jon ZobenicaThe Secret Lives of Used Books (Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, by Allan Gurganus)Nancy Sinclair, with her hummingbird bookplate, was presumably the original owner of this first edition of Allan Gurganus’s Oldest Living…4 min read·Jan 7, 2022----
Jon ZobenicaThe Secret Lives of Used Books (Henderson the Rain King, by Saul Bellow)This copy of Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King somehow made its way from the library of Maria Assumpta College, in London, to a…5 min read·Dec 9, 2021----
Jon ZobenicaWhiskey Foxtrot One-OneMy father was training to fight a war, but his real battle was with himself20 min read·Nov 10, 2020----
Jon ZobenicaThe Secret Lives of Used Books (Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev)In the late 1980s, as the air slowly went out of the Cold War, and as Francis Fukuyama prepared to ask outright whether History had…3 min read·Oct 22, 2020----
