Children’s Book Week Special: Lane Smith’s John, Paul, George and Ben, New York Times Best Seller and Best Illustrated Book of 2006

Weekly Book Special: May 11th-May 17th

This week is Children’s Book Week, a nationwide celebration of reading. To commemorate, this week’s special is:

John, Paul, George and Ben
By Lane Smith (Hardcover, 38 pages, 2006, $17.00)

“Witty text and full-color illustrations bring new life to a few old chestnuts, depicting the Fab Four of the American Revolution — John Hancock, Paul Revere, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin — through the founding myths we know them by,” writes The New York Times.

“Early American typefaces, parchment grounds, and vestiges of 18th-century life evoke a sense of the time,” writes Library Journal. “A true-and-false section in the back separates fact from fiction. While children will love the off-the-wall humor, there is plenty for adult readers to enjoy.”

Author Lane Smith, who also wrote “The Stinky Cheese Man,” won more than 20 awards for this New York Times bestseller, including The Times’ Best Illustrated Book of 2006. Reinforced library binding makes the book able to be read many times. Exercise your freedom to pick this one up!

Purchase this book for $17.00:

Weekly Book Special: Forget not Mee and My Garden . . . : Selected Letters, 1725-1768, of Peter Collinson, F.R.S. (American Philosophical Society)

March 15th-21st Weekly Half-Price Book Special

Warm weather and buds on the trees means only one thing: spring is right around the corner! Coinciding with the season, this week’s special is:

Forget Not Mee and My Garden:
Selected Letters, 1725-1768, of Peter Collinson, F.R.S.
by Alan W. Armstrong (Hardcover, 300 pages, 2002, $60.00)

English-style gardens around the world, from suburban yards to large parks, owe their foundations to businessman Peter Collinson.

Flowers and plants in these gardens are descended from the hundreds of seeds that Collinson imported from celebrated American botanist John Bartram in the 1700s.

This limited-edition book published by the American Philosophical Society, in shrinkwrap, features Collinson’s nearly 200 letters to the colonial world’s top scientists, including Batram, Carl Linnaeus and Benjamin Franklin, and features more than 100 full-color illustrations.

My favorite spread is of the Chestnut, Dogwood and Fringe Trees (click to enlarge):

“All letters in this volume are Collinson’s; they’re fully footnoted, and all correspondents are well-introduced,” writes Book News. “The color plates of correspondents, flora, and fauna make this a beautiful, as well as informative, read.”

“[The] deft match of text and image and [the] superb but unobtrusive editing,” writes historian Eugenia Herbert, “leave no doubt the Quaker merchant’s seminal role in the grand Enlightenment project of mapping the natural world.”

Purchase this book for $60:

Louisiana Purchase and Lewis and Clark Publications

Today is the 106th anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase.

On March 10, 1804 there was a formal ceremony in St. Louis to transfer ownership of the territory from Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte of France to the United States. This territory included most of the Westward Expansion of the U.S., with the present-day Midwest, Great Plains and Western states, plus New Mexico and Louisiana.

We offer you a wide selection of publications on the Lewis and Clark Expedition from 1804-1806. Below are two of our highlights:

1814 Printed Map of Lewis and Clark’s Track Across the Western Portion of North America. From the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean:
From the Original Drawing of William Clark

The principal objective of Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery 1804-06 was the mapping of the West to the Pacific Ocean. Clark’s final cartographic achievement was his 1814 engraved map. One of the great maps of all times, it is perhaps the single most influential one of the American West, for it was upon this map that our modern understanding of the topography of that vast areas would evolve.

The first publication of the Lewis and Clark journals was Nicholas Biddle’s 1814 two-volume chronological narrative containing the map. In 1998 there was another “run” of the map produced by means of offset lithography, printed by our affiliate the American Philosophical Society. Size: 2-1/2′ long x 14″. Tan. One thousand regular copies were printed, with Black plus 1 PMS ink for duotone. Also includes a 10-page booklet on the history of the expedition and the map.

Purchase this map for $75.00:

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Jefferson’s Botanists: Lewis and Clark Discover the Plants of the West
by Richard McCourt and Earle Spamer
(Academy of Natural Sciences, Paperback, 25 pages, $20)

This beautiful concise book discusses how Meriwether Lewis collected plant specimens on the journey of exploration that he and William Clark led across the American West to the Pacific Ocean & back, sent by President Thomas Jefferson. It includes facsimile excerpts from their original journals.

The task of plant collecting was Lewis’s military duty, but he seems to have had a real flair for collecting and describing the specimens. It is clear that he spent long hours observing the specimens, perhaps with a magnifying glass, cross-checking the anatomy of the plant before him with an illustrated edition of Linnaeus’s botany book.

The hundreds of Lewis and Clark specimens that survive today, known as the Lewis and Clark Herbarium, are stored in protective folders in special storage cabinets, in a climate controlled room at our affiliate, the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Visiting scholars can readily retrieve and study the plants. Illus. (Paperback, 25 pages.)

Purchase this book for $20:

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Weekly Special: Ben Franklin’s Art of Eating Cookbook with Colonial Recipes

Weekly Book Special: January 11th-17th

Benjamin Franklin on The Art of Eating:
Together with the Rules of Health and Long Life and the Rules to Find out a Fit Measure of Meat and Drink, with Several Recipes
by Benjamin Franklin and Gilbert Chinard, introduction by Roy Goodman
(Paperback, 72 pages, 2006, $10.00)

This week we commemorate the birth of Benjamin Franklin on January 17th. Franklin, who would be turning 303 years old this coming weekend, was one of the United States’ Founding Fathers: a scientist, politician, printer, diplomat and inventor. He also had an insatiable curiosity for cooking.

“Let the gentleman who seems ignorant of the matter do us the honour of a visit in America, and I will engage to breakfast him every day in the month with a fresh variety,” Franklin told an anonymous letter writer who criticized American food.

Chefs will find a splendid collection of colonial-era recipes and food tidbits discovered in Franklin’s private journals. Written in English and French with illustrations, the book sheds new light on the man who founded electricity and had a sweet tooth.

Our affiliate the American Philosophical Society, a scholarly organization that Franklin founded in 1743, originally published the book in 1958. In 2006, the Society reprinted it in a special edition to celebrate the 300th anniversary of Franklin’s birth.

My favorite recipe is for the delicious punch Orange Shrub:

This book also contains an essay on “Benjamin Franklin On the Art of Eating” by Gilbert Chinard; a collection of Franklin’s “Rules [for Eating] and Recipes” and an introduction by Roy Goodman, assistant librarian and curator of printed materials at the American Philosophical Society.

Student bloggers at Colorado State University have more of Franklin’s excerpts.

Purchase this book for $10: