Author: Half Price Books

Totally Random Lists 2019: How ‘Bout Them Apples?

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Editor’s Note: This year our Half Price Books calendar once again features books, movies and music grouped together in weird, unexpected ways. You might even call them Totally Random Lists, which is what we did because, well, we had to put something on the front cover. We like the lists so much, we’ll be sharing them on this blog throughout the year.

Symbolizing knowledge, immortality and temptation, the apple is no ordinary fruit. More likely to star in media than a second banana, apples are a juicy subject for any author or auteur. Here’s a bushel of titles to keep the doctor away.

BOOKS
The Giving Tree, Shel Silverstein
The Orchard, Theresa Weir
The Golden Apples of the Sun, Ray Bradburyapple book stack
Ten Apples Up on Top, Theo. LeSeig (Dr. Seuss)
Apple Tree Yard, Louise Doughty
The Orchardist, Amanda Coplin
The Apple That Astonished Paris: Poems, Billy Collins

apple two LPsMOVIES
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
The Apple
Meet the Applegates
Steve Jobs
The Apple Dumpling Gang

MUSIC
Adam’s Apple, Wayne Shorter
When the Pawn…, Fiona Apple
Candy Apple Grey, Hüsker Dü
The Apple Tree, Original Broadway Cast
Apples, June Tabor
Apple Venus Volume 1, XTC
Come and Get It: The Best of Apple Records, Various Artists

Still hungry? Find more picks at hpb.com/apples

Totally Random Lists 2019: Word on the Street

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Editor’s Note: This year our Half Price Books calendar once again features books, movies and music grouped together in weird, unexpected ways. You might even call them Totally Random Lists, which is what we did because, well, we had to put something on the front cover. We like the lists so much, we’ll be sharing them on this blog throughout the year.

What do a road and a story have in common? They both take you on a trip with an uncertain (but intriguing) ending. Because we all know it’s the journey, not the destination, that matters, here are some street-smart picks you won’t need a GPS to explore.

2019 rl blog feb productsBOOKS
Telegraph Avenue, Michael Chabon
If Beale Street Could Talk,  James Baldwin
The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros
84 Charing Cross Road, Helene Hanff
The Street, Ann Petry

MOVIES
Road to Perdition
21 Jump Street
Miracle on 34th Street
The Road to Morocco
Mad Max: Fury Road
Sunset Boulevard
It Happened on 5th Avenue

MUSIC
Mermaid Avenue, Billy Bragg & Wilco
Stones in the Road, Mary Chapin Carpenter
Avenue Q, Original Broadway Cast
Exile on Main Street, The Rolling Stones
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Elton John
3614 Jackson Highway, Cher

See our longer list of road-tested titles at HPB.com/street.

 

Totally Random Lists 2019: One Syllable is Enough

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Editor’s Note: This year, our Half Price Books calendar once again features books, movies and music grouped together in weird, unexpected ways. You might even call them Totally Random Lists, which is what we did because, well, we had to put something on the front cover. We like the lists so much, we’ll be sharing them on this blog throughout the year.

When an author chooses a one-word title, they’re basically saying, “this one word is all I need to capture my creation’s powerful essence!” Here are some of our favorite books, movies and albums that say it all with a single, memorable syllable—on the cover, anyway.

BOOKSOneSyllable Stack 3 BLOG
Holes, Louis Sachar
Night, Elie Wiesel
Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson
It, Stephen King
Room, Emma Donoghue
Jazz, Toni Morrison
Watt, Samuel Beckett
Dune, Frank Herbert
Crash, J.G. Ballard

MOVIESalbums 1
Babe
Jaws 
Big
Mask
Up
Brave
Elf
Speed
Pi

MUSIC
Blue, Joni Mitchell
Pearl, Janis Joplin
Damn, Kendrick Lamar
Go, Dexter Gordon
Tusk, Fleetwood Mac
Bad, Michael Jackson
So, Peter Gabriel

For a longer list of monosyllabic titles, visit HPB.com/syllable.

Behind the Book The Minimalist Home by Joshua Becker

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Editor’s Note: Popular minimalist blogger and author Joshua Becker provides methodical instruction on how to turn your home from a storage unit into a place of peace, contentment and purposeful living. His new book, The Minimalist Home, helps you to declutter your home and learn how to address the underlying issues that contribute to over-accumulation in the first place. We are delighted he provided us with more insight below! Minimalist Home Book Jacket

Why did you write The Minimalist Home?
I’ve been writing my blog (Becoming Minimalist), teaching minimalism, and speaking about the joys of owning less at conferences around the world for a decade now. And I’ve seen repeatedly, more times than I can recall, that there is an almost magical effect when people right-size the quantity of their possessions—in the process, the people themselves are changed in positive ways. Owning less creates opportunity to live more. I wrote The Minimalist Home to give people a practical guide to help them experience that. At its best, minimalism is about transforming your home so you can transform your life. Continue reading →

Behind the Book- Watching You by Lisa Jewell

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Editor’s Note: Having started her first novel for a bet in 1996, Lisa Jewell has grown into one of the UK’s most beloved and popular fiction authors. Jewell’s writing is addictive, her characters fleshed out and her storylines original. We were thrilled she agreed to write this piece about the inspiration behind her latest novel, Watching You. Read on to discover how this book came to be! Lisa Jewell- Watching You cover

The first glimmer of the genesis of Watching You was a feeling that there seemed to be an awful lot of news stories about very suburban people in very suburban love triangles committing murder. Either the mistress would kill the wife, or the husband would kill the wife, or the wife would kill the mistress or some other combination of the three.

So, if I was to write about suburban love triangles then I needed a suburb, and that was when the book really started to take form in my head; there is a suburb of Bristol in the UK called Clifton which is famous for its high set rows of brightly painted houses. It used to be a rough area, but has become increasingly gentrified over recent years and is now so “chi chi” that it has its own branch of the Ivy (an upscale restaurant chain in the UK). Continue reading →

A Bestseller Flashback- 2018 in Books

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Editor’s Note: Throughout the year, our buyers curate a selection of new, bestselling books to offer in our stores at 20% off the cover price. Here’s a closer look at some of 2018’s standouts!

melmoth
Melmoth (Sarah Perry)
Melmoth is a full-on gothic horror novel from the author of The Essex Serpent. The story crosses many different time periods and focuses on people who are in the midst of difficult situations. It is primarily centered on Helen Franklin, an English translator working in Prague, who disregards an obscure local monster legend before a friend’s disappearance reveals that Helen is being watched. This particular book asks the question, “What’s the difference between someone who orders a horrific act be done and the person who turns a blind eye towards it?” It’s a very chilling, and at times horrific, book that stays with you. Continue reading →

Behind the Book- Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield

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Editor’s Note: Diane Setterfield is a magical storyteller. The way she weaves her stories makes readers demand more, more, more! We are delighted to be able to present an in-depth review of the inspiration behind her latest novel, Once Upon a River.

once upon a river cover

Once upon a time, a long time ago, I wrote a novel called The Thirteenth Tale.  People took this book to their hearts in an extraordinary way and I spent over a year travelling to meet readers all over the world. It was a very special time, and when the last trip was done I came home buzzing: so many readers and bookshops, so many cities, countries, continents. What I needed now was to get my feet back on the ground, recalibrate myself for normal life lived at a normal pace. I needed to slow down. I needed a holiday. Continue reading →

Behind the Book- Queen of Air & Darkness by Cassandra Clare

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Editor’s Note: From the master of young adult fiction comes the final novel in the #1 New York Times and USA Today bestselling The Dark Artifices trilogy, Queen of Air and Darkness. This magnificent conclusion to a spellbinding series involves dark secrets and forbidden love, which threaten the very survival of the Shadowhunters. We had the opportunity to catch up with Cassandra Clare and ask her some questions about the series and Shadowhunters.

QueenofAirandDarknessbyCassandraClareCoverHiRes

What first inspired you to write about Shadowhunters?
The idea came to me one afternoon in the East Village. A good friend of mine was taking me to see the tattoo shop where she used to work. She wanted to show me that her footprints were on the ceiling in black paint — in fact the footprints of everyone who’d worked there were on the ceiling, crisscrossing each other and making patterns. To me it looked like some fabulous supernatural battle had been fought there by beings who’d left their footprints behind. I started thinking about a magical battle in a New York tattoo shop and the idea of a secret society of demon hunters whose magic was based on an elaborate system of tattooed runes just sprang into my mind. When I sat down to sketch out the book, I wanted to write something that would combine elements of traditional high fantasy — an epic battle between good and evil, terrible monsters, brave heroes, enchanted swords — and recast it through a modern, urban lens. So you have the Shadowhunters, who are these very classic warriors following their millennia-old traditions, but in these urban, modern spaces: skyscrapers, warehouses, abandoned hotels, rock concerts, thrift stores. In fairy tales, it was the dark and mysterious forest outside the town that held the magic and danger. I wanted to create a world where the city has become the forest — where these urban spaces hold their own enchantments, danger, mysteries and strange beauty. It’s just that only Shadowhunters and Downworlders can see them as they really are. Continue reading →

All Things Printed & Recorded: Ephemera, Etc.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: This year in our HPB calendar, we’re celebrating all things printed and recorded—and played, solved, watched, etc. In other words, all the cool stuff we buy and sell in our stores. For December, we’re looking at one of our smaller but most interesting product categories: ephemera—miscellaneous printed materials that have become collectible over time. Common examples found in HPB stores include sheet music, postcards and posters.

TIMELIMEsheet music singers
1457  The Mainz Psalter is the first printed book to include music, though the notation is added in by hand. 
1840  The world’s first picture postcard is sent when British writer Theodore Hook mails a self-made card to himself.
1891  Toulouse-Lautrec’s artful poster designs spark a poster craze in Paris.
1917-1918  During World War I, the US government prints 2,500 different posters to aid in the war effort, including the famous “I Want You” recruiting poster featuring Uncle Sam.

DID YOU KNOW?

  • Cheret posterBefore the advent of recording, sheet music dominated the music industry. The late 1800s saw the zenith of “parlor music,” with people gathering around the piano to play and sing the popular songs of the day.
  • “Large letter” postcards, usually printed on linen-textured paper, were popular during the mid-20th century. The style was developed by Chicago-based Curt Teich and Company.
  • In the 1880s, French painter and lithographer Jules Chéret ushered in modern advertising with a new printing process that allowed for brighter colors and more economical mass production of large posters.
  • Psychedelic posters of the 1960s, like the ones produced by The Family Dog, were influenced by Art Nouveau and Surrealism.

Want to dive deeper? Check out these great products!

book A History of Postcards: A Pictorial Record From the Turn of the Century to the Present Day, Martin Willoughby
book Postcards: Ephemeral Histories of Modernity, David Prochaska & Jordana Mendelson
book Toulouse Lautrec and La Vie Moderne: Paris 1880–1910, Phillip Dennis Cate, et al.
book Toulouse Lautrec: A Life, Julia Frey
slate_film-512 Discovery of Art: Toulouse Lautrec
book World War I Posters: 100th Anniversary Collectors Edition, Edward J. White
book World War II Posters In Color, Philip Martin McCaulay
book Jules Cheret: Artist of the Belle Epoque and Pioneer of Poster Art, Michael Buhrs, et al
book Posters of Jules Cheret: 46 Full Color Plates and Illustrated Catalogue Risonne, Lucy Broido
book High Art: A History of the Psychedelic Poster, Ted Owen, Denise Dickson & Walter Patrick Medeiros
book Off the Wall: Psychedelic Rock Posters From San Francisco, Amelie Gastaut & Jean-Pierre Criqui
slate_film-512 24 X 36: A Movie About Movie Posters
music-note-2 American Classics: Parlor Music Revisited, Daniel Kobialka

Behind the Book: The Clockmaker’s Daughter by Kate Morton

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Editor’s Note: Kate Morton is the New York Times bestselling author of The Lake House. Her newest book The Clockmaker’s Daughter is the rich, spellbinding new novel that tells the story of a love affair and a mysterious murder that cast their shadows across generations, set in England from the 1860s until the present day. Special thanks to Sara Rattaro for this insight into what went in to the writing of Kate Morton’s The Clockmaker’s Daughter.

mortonbookcover.png

 How did you manage to intertwine different narrative plans with such ease and without any flaws? How do you write and develop your novels?
I wrote The Clockmaker’s Daughter differently from my other novels. In the past, I have written each chapter in the same order that it appears in the published book; this time, however, I wanted the structure of the novel to support the thematic exploration of time. It was important to me from the start to show the way different layers of time had transpired within a single place. I knew up front that the novel would contain a number of short vignettes – snapshots into the lives of various residents of Birchwood Manor, the house at the novel’s heart – linked together by an over-arching first-person narrative. I wrote the historical vignettes first so that when it came time to write Birdie Bell’s story, I – like she – was privy to the experiences of all of the other characters across time. Because I wrote the past interludes simultaneously, I was better able to glimpse the silvery threads that tied them together.

Continue reading →