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› Find signed collectible books: 'Animal Farm With Connections'
Since its publication in 1946, George Orwell's fable of a workers' revolution gone wrong has rivaled Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea as the Shortest Serious Novel It's OK to Write a Book Report About. (The latter is three pages longer and less fun to read.) Fueled by Orwell's intense disillusionment with Soviet Communism, Animal Farm is a nearly perfect piece of writing, both an engaging story and an allegory that actually works. When the downtrodden beasts of Manor Farm oust their drunken human master and take over management of the land, all are awash in collectivist zeal. Everyone willingly works overtime, productivity soars, and for one brief, glorious season, every belly is full. The animals' Seven Commandment credo is painted in big white letters on the barn. All animals are equal. No animal shall drink alcohol, wear clothes, sleep in a bed, or kill a fellow four-footed creature. Those that go upon four legs or wings are friends and the two-legged are, by definition, the enemy. Too soon, however, the pigs, who have styled themselves leaders by virtue of their intelligence, succumb to the temptations of privilege and power. "We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organisation of the farm depend on us. Day and night, we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples." While this swinish brotherhood sells out the revolution, cynically editing the Seven Commandments to excuse their violence and greed, the common animals are once again left hungry and exhausted, no better off than in the days when humans ran the farm. Satire Animal Farm may be, but it's a stony reader who remains unmoved when the stalwart workhorse, Boxer, having given his all to his comrades, is sold to the glue factory to buy booze for the pigs. Orwell's view of Communism is bleak indeed, but given the history of the Russian people since 1917, his pessimism has an air of prophecy. --Joyce Thompson [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Bromeliad Trilogy: Wings'
In a world whose seasons are defined by Christmas sales and Spring Fashions, hundreds of tiny nomes live in the corners and crannies of a human-run department store. They have made their homes beneath the floorboards for generations and no longer remember -- or even believe in -- life beyond the Store walls.
Until the day a small band of nomes arrives at the Store from the Outside. Led by a young nome named Masklin, the Outsiders carry a mysterious black box (called the Thing), and they deliver devastating news: In twenty-one days, the Store will be destroyed.
Now all the nomes must learn to work together, and they must learn to think -- and to think BIG.
Part satire, part parable, and part adventure story par excellence, master storyteller Terry Pratchetts engaging trilogy traces the nomes flight and search for safety, a search that leads them to discover their own astonishing origins and takes them beyond their wildest dreams.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cinderellis and the Glass Hill'
Ralph said, "Rain tomorrow."
Burt said, "Barley needs it. You're covered with cinders, Ellis."
Ralph thought that was funny. "That's funny." He laughed. "That's what we should call him-- Cinderellis."
Burt guffawed.
In this unusual spin on an old favorite, Cinderlla is a boy! He's Cinderellis, and he has two unfriendly brothers and no fairy godmother to help him out. Luckily, he does have magical powders, and he intends to use them to win the hand of his Princess Charming-- that is, Marigold. The only problem is-- Marigold thinks Cinderellis is a monster!
Gail Carson Levine is the author of Ella Enchanted, a spirited retelling of the "real" Cinderella fairy tale and a 1998 Newberry Honor Book. In this fourth of her Princess Tales, Levine brings new life and new fun into a little-known tale and proves that determination, imagination, and kindness can carry the day.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Cutting Edge: The Catalog for the Man, Woman, and Child Who Has Everything...but Wants More!'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Ella Enchanted'
At birth, Ella is inadvertently cursed by an imprudent fairy named Lucinda, who bestows on her the "gift" of obedience. Anything anyone tells her to do, Ella must obey. Another girl might have been cowed by this affliction, but not feisty Ella: "Instead of making me docile, Lucinda's curse made a rebel of me. Or perhaps I was that way naturally." When her beloved mother dies, leaving her in the care of a mostly absent and avaricious father, and later, a loathsome stepmother and two treacherous stepsisters, Ella's life and well-being seem in grave peril. But her intelligence and saucy nature keep her in good stead as she sets out on a quest for freedom and self-discovery, trying to track down Lucinda to undo the curse, fending off ogres, befriending elves, and falling in love with a prince along the way. Yes, there is a pumpkin coach, a glass slipper, and a happily ever after, but this is the most remarkable, delightful, and profound version of Cinderella you've ever read.
Gail Carson Levine's examination of traditional female roles in fairy tales takes some satisfying twists and deviations from the original. Ella is bound by obedience against her will, and takes matters in her own hands with ambition and verve. Her relationship with the prince is balanced and based on humor and mutual respect; in fact, it is she who ultimately rescues him. Ella Enchanted has won many well-deserved awards, including a Newbery Honor. (Ages 9 to 14) --Emilie Coulter [via]
![Tolkien, J. R. R.: Farmer Giles of Ham ; [and], The Adventures of Tom Bombadil Tolkien, J. R. R.: Farmer Giles of Ham ; [and], The Adventures of Tom Bombadil](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0048231258.01._SL160_SCLZZZZZZZ__.jpg)
› Find signed collectible books: 'Farmer Giles of Ham ; [and], The Adventures of Tom Bombadil'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Johnny And the Dead'
Post-life citizens
Breath challenged
Vertically disadvantaged
(buried, not short)
Johnny Maxwell's new friends not appreciate the term "ghosts," but they are, well, dead.
The town council wants to sell the cemetery, and its inhabitants aren't about to take that lying down! Johnny is the only one who can see them, and and the previously alive need his help to save their home and their history. Johnny didn't mean to become the voice for the lifeless, but if he doesn't speak up, who will?
In Johnny Maxwell's second adventure, Carnegie Medalist Terry Pratchett explores the bonds between the living and the dead and proves that it's never too late to have the time of your life -- even if it is your afterlife!
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Lost'
At the flat in Weatherall Walk there was no milk in the fridge, no ice in the tiny freezer unit.... The better furniture was hung over with drop cloths, the leather-bound books evacuated from their shelves.... Unconnected wiring threaded from walls, and a smell of lazy drains, something rotting, unfurled from the sewer all the way up to this flat. Winnie wrenched open a window. But no sign of John?
Winifred Rudge, a bemused writer struggling to get beyond the runaway success of her mass-market astrology book, travels to London to jump-start her new novel about a woman who is being haunted by the ghost of Jack the Ripper. Upon her arrival, she finds that her stepcousin and old friend John Comestor has disappeared, and a ghostly presence seems to have taken over his apartment in the nineteenth-century rowhouse once owned by Winnie's great-great-grandfather. Is it the spirit of this ancestor, who, family legend claims, was Charles Dickens's childhood inspiration for Ebenezer Scrooge? Could it be the ghostly remains of Jack the Ripper? Or a phantasm derived from a more arcane and insidious origin?
Winnie begins to investigate, but John's erstwhile girlfriend, Allegra, is aggressively unhelpful, and his downstairs neighbor, the cat-obsessed Mrs. Maddingly, is growing stranger by the day. Gripped by inspiration and desperation alike, Winnie finds herself the unwilling audience for a drama of specters and shades, some from her family's peculiar history and some from her own unvanquished past.
In the spirit of A. S. Byatt's "Possession, with dark overtones echoing from "A Christmas Carol, Lostpresents a rich fictional world that will enrapture Gregory Maguire's eager audience. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Magicians of Caprona'
Tonino is the only person in the famous Montana household who wasn't born with an instinct for creating spells, but he has other gifts.His ability to communicate with cats just might help defend the city of Caprona against a mysterious enchanter -- but only if Tonino can learn to cooperate with a girl from the hated Petrocchi family of spell-makers.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mirror Mirror'
A brilliant achievement.
Boston Herald
Entertaining&profound&.A novel for adults that unearths our buried fascination with the primal fears and truths fairy tales contain.
Christian Science Monitor
Gregory Maguire, the acclaimed author who re-imagined a darker, more dangerous Land of Oz in his New York Times bestselling series The Wicked Years, offers a brilliant reinvention of the timeless Snow White fairy tale: Mirror Mirror. Setting his story amid the cultural, political and artistic whirlwind of Renaissance Italyand casting the notorious Lucrezia Borgia as the Evil QueenMaguire and Mirror Mirror will enthrall a wide array of book lovers ranging from adult fans of Harry Potter to readers of the sophisticated stories of Angela Carter.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Monica's Untold Story: An Amorality Tale'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'More Sniglets: Any Word That Doesn't Appear in the Dictionary, but Should'
Collier Books paperback. Comedy illustrated. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Only You Can Save Mankind'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Place of Dead Roads'
A good old-fashion shoot-out in the American West of the frontier days serves as the springboard for this hyperkinetic adventure in which gunslingers, led by Kim Carson, fight for galactic freedom." The Place of Dead Roads is the second novel in the trilogy with "Cities of the Red Night and" The Western Lands.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Princess Sonora and the Long Sleep'
A spiteful fairy. A beautiful princess. An outstretched finger. A spindle. A hundred-year snooze. A charming prince. A kiss. Allthe familiar ingredients.
But wait! Where did that extra prince come from? And those fairy gifts that were never there before? And what does a flock ofbalding sheep have to do with anything?
Gail Carson Levine has waved her magic wand over the old standby of "Sleeping Beauty" and presto! It reappears, transformed,sparkling and hilarious. Chuckles and giggles are guaranteed.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Silmarillion'
Although The Silmarillion takes place in the same imaginary world as J.J.R Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and was originally published four years after the author's death and over two decades after the former book, it is set much earlier, in the First Age of the World. The tales and the book which reads as a fusion between a story collection and historical chronicle, are a matter of legend even to the characters of The Lord of the Rings:
In the beginning Eru, the One, who in the Elvish tongue is named Ilúvatar, made the Ainur of his thought; and they made a great Music before himTolkien wrote the heart of this material very early in his career, and continued to work on it throughout his life. It fell to his son, Christopher Tolkien, to edit it into book form, and such proved the unquenchable public appetite that he subsequently oversaw 12 volumes of The History of Middle-Earth. This edition features 20 highly evocative colour plates by Ted Nasmith, themselves worth the price of admission, while reinforcing the sense of a historical work are genealogical tables, an extensive index, appendix and colour map. Far removed from the genial style of The Hobbit, this is Tolkien at his most formal, his prose austere, poetically beautiful, his storytelling capturing the epic scale, high drama and melancholy wonder of myth. These stories of elves and heroes and old gods are quite literally the foundation of the entire modern fantasy-publishing revival, and are therefore essential reading. --Gary S. Dalkin [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Smith of Wootton Major'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sniglets'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Star Bores'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Tom Thumb: And, The Tragedy of Tragedies'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Torrents of Spring'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Tristram Shandy'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Candide'
Brought up in the household of a powerful Baron, Candide is an open-minded young man, whose tutor, Pangloss, has instilled in him the belief that 'all is for the best'. But when his love for the Baron's rosy-cheeked daughter is discovered, Candide is cast out to make his own way in the world. And so he and his various companions begin a breathless tour of Europe, South America and Asia, as an outrageous series of disasters befall them - earthquakes, syphilis, a brush with the Inquisition, murder - sorely testing the young hero's optimism. [via]
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