If you like checking out staff recommendations at your local bookstore, you'll enjoy these blogs from independent booksellers.

Powell's Books

Book Passage

The Inkwell Bookstore

Wordsmiths Books

The Inside Flap

Joshua Kendall, who we interview this week about his book The Man Who Made Lists, is captivated by the divine madness that drives lexicographers. He's following up his current biography of Peter Roget with a study of the similarly obsessive Noah Webster. We asked him for further reading on the fiery minds behind the masterpieces of word reference.  Continue reading...

Without Peter Mark Roget, there would be no Visual Thesaurus — or any modern thesaurus for that matter. We now take it for granted, but it took a special type of mind to come up with a system for organizing and classifying words and their meanings, in a way that also organizes human knowledge itself. Roget, a nineteenth-century polymath who wrote treatises on everything from physiology to slide rules, certainly had the mind for it. But he also had a deeply troubled personal life, surrounded by mental illness and heartbreaking tragedy. Joshua Kendall has written a fitting tribute to this fascinating figure in his new biography, The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget's Thesaurus. We got to talk to Josh about the making of the book, and learned how his previous writing about psychology turned out to be an excellent preparation for exploring Roget's intricate mental world. Here is part one of our interview.  Continue reading...

In honor of this year's National Spelling Bee, here are some books relating to the culture of competitive spelling.

American Bee

How to Spell Like a Champ

The Spelling List And Word Study Resource Book

Webster's Third New International Dictionary (aka the Bee Bible)

...and The Big Book of Spelling Tests, by our own Orin Hargraves.

I always hated Shakespeare.

They made me read him. First it was Julius Caesar. Then Romeo & Juliet, which was only cool because we wasted a week watching the movie. Next came Henry IV, Part One. I said, "You've got to be kidding," and scraped by on class discussions. The Bard and I were not friendly.

So how did I end up writing The Master of Verona, a novel based on his works?  Continue reading...

When it comes to the printed (or electronic) word, design can be just as important as content. Here are some books to get you thinking about the "look" of language.

Thinking with Type

A Short History of the Printed Word

The Elements of Typographic Style

The End of Print