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› Find signed collectible books: 'Agent in Place'
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Annotated Thursday'
This edition of Chesterton's masterpiece, The Man Who Was Thursday, explicates and enriches the complete text with extensive footnotes, together with an introductory essay on the metaphysical meaning of Chesterton's profound allegory. Martin Gardner sees the novel's anarchists as symbols of our God-given free will, and the mysterious Sunday as representing Nature, with its strange mixture of good and evil when considered as distinct from God, as a mask hiding the transcendental face of the creator. The book also includes a bibliography listing the novel's many editions and stage dramatizations, as well as numerous illustrations that further illuminate the text. Gardner's annotating of Chesterton's famous novel is a delight. His notes bring Edwardian London to life, and he offers exciting new insights into the novel's meaning. - Joseph Pearce, Author, Tolkien: Man and Myth Gardner is a gift to anyone interested in genuine literary scholarship. He magnifies the fascinating pictures seen through the gorgeous window that is a Chesterton novel. - Michael Coren, Author, Gilbert: The Man Who Was G. K. Chesterton Gardner's annotations provide everything required for the study and enjoyment of Chesterton's best novel, a grand thriller. - John Peterson, Editor, Father Brown of the Church of Rome Martin Gardner's skill in combining math, science, philosophy and literature has produced more than sixty books of diverse natures, including two novels and a collection of short stories. Some of his other annotated works include The Annotated Alice and The Annotated Ancient Mariner. For 25 years he was the writer of mathematical games for Scientific American. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'At Risk'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Billion Dollar Brain'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency'
Everybody knows about the CIA--the cloak-and-dagger branch of the U.S. government. Many fewer are familiar with the National Security Agency, even though it has been more important to American espionage in recent years than its better-known counterpart. The NSA is responsible for much of the intelligence gathering done via technology such as satellites and the Internet. Its home office in Maryland "contains what is probably the largest body of secrets ever created."
Little was known about the agency's confidential culture until veteran journalist James Bamford blew the lid off in 1982 with his bestseller The Puzzle Palace. Still, much remained in the shadows. In Body of Secrets, Bamford throws much more light on his subject--and he reveals loads of shocking information. The story of the U-2 crisis in 1960 is well known, including President Eisenhower's decision to tell a fib to the public in order to protect a national-security secret. Bamford takes the story a disturbing step forward, showing how Eisenhower "went so far as to order his Cabinet officers to hide his involvement in the scandal even while under oath. At least one Cabinet member directly lied to the committee, a fact known to Eisenhower." Even more worrisome is another revelation, from the Kennedy years: "The Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up and approved plans for what may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government. In the name of anticommunism, they proposed launching a secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the American public into supporting an ill-conceived war they intended to launch against Cuba."
Body of Secrets is an incredible piece of journalism, and it paints a deeply troubling portrait of an agency about which the public knows next to nothing. Fans of The Sword and the Shield will want to read it, as will anybody who is intrigued by conspiracies and real-life spy stories. --John J. Miller [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Body of Secrets : Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency, from the Cold War Through the Dawn of a New Century'
Everybody knows about the CIA--the cloak-and-dagger branch of the U.S. government. Many fewer are familiar with the National Security Agency, even though it has been more important to American espionage in recent years than its better-known counterpart. The NSA is responsible for much of the intelligence gathering done via technology such as satellites and the Internet. Its home office in Maryland "contains what is probably the largest body of secrets ever created."
Little was known about the agency's confidential culture until veteran journalist James Bamford blew the lid off in 1982 with his bestseller The Puzzle Palace. Still, much remained in the shadows. In Body of Secrets, Bamford throws much more light on his subject--and he reveals loads of shocking information. The story of the U-2 crisis in 1960 is well known, including President Eisenhower's decision to tell a fib to the public in order to protect a national-security secret. Bamford takes the story a disturbing step forward, showing how Eisenhower "went so far as to order his Cabinet officers to hide his involvement in the scandal even while under oath. At least one Cabinet member directly lied to the committee, a fact known to Eisenhower." Even more worrisome is another revelation, from the Kennedy years: "The Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up and approved plans for what may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government. In the name of anticommunism, they proposed launching a secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the American public into supporting an ill-conceived war they intended to launch against Cuba."
Body of Secrets is an incredible piece of journalism, and it paints a deeply troubling portrait of an agency about which the public knows next to nothing. Fans of The Sword and the Shield will want to read it, as will anybody who is intrigued by conspiracies and real-life spy stories. --John J. Miller [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton: The Club of Queer Trades The Man Who Was Thursday The Ball and the Cross'
Introduction by Dr. Denis Conlon, University of Antwerp
T.S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, C.S. Lewis and W.H. Auden all recognized Chesterton as a giant literary figure. This volume contains G.K. Chesterton's earliest and greatest novels. The reader will encounter characters that defend with great vigor the diginity of the person and fundamental Christian beliefs. This volume is graced with Chesterton's own drawings and photos, as well as maps. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Day of Judgement'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Death in Vienna'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Devil's Alternative'
Russia faces famine. The soviets are forced to pin their hopes for survival on the u.s. But as the kgb and the cia watch in horror, the rescue of a ukrainian freedom fighter from the black sea unleashes savagery that endangers peace--and plunges leaders from washington to moscow into a web of overwhelming intrigue, terror, and suspense. Only two lovers can save the world from nuclear destruction. Yet every way out means certain death. And the countdown has already begun [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Friday'
Engineered from the finest genes, and trained to be a secret courier in a future world, Friday operates over a near-future Earth, where chaos reigns. Working at Boss's whimsical behest she travels from far north to deep south, finding quick, expeditious solutions as one calamity after another threatens to explode in her face.... [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Good News, Bad News'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Heart of the Matter: Stamboul Train ; A Burnt-Out Case ; The Third Man ; The Quiet American ; Loser Takes All ; The Power and the Glory'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Hidden Target'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'I'd Tell You I Love You, but Then I'd Have to Kill You'
I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Kingdom of Shadows: A Novel'
Penzler Pick, January 2001: The thrillers of Alan Furst usually take place in the dark days preceding World War II, but while the main participants in that war are of course portrayed, Britain, France, Germany, and the United States do not usually star in Furst's novels. He prefers instead to focus his stories on the citizens of those countries whose allegiances and roles in that particular theater of operations are much more contradictory and conflicted.
Kingdom of Shadows is set in Paris during 1938 and 1939. It is unclear at that time what the fate of Hungary will be if Hitler has his way, but a small group of expatriates would like to insure that events turn out in their country's favor. Nicholas Morath is an Hungarian aristocrat who fought bravely in the Great War. He is now part owner of an advertising agency in Paris, while his uncle, Count Janos Polanyi, is a minor diplomat stationed in Paris. Polanyi calls on Nicholas to take part in missions against the Hungarian Fascists: carrying letters or bringing individuals back across the border in the course of his business trips.
As Nicholas's dinner parties, business deals, and dalliances with his mistress start to take a back seat to the escalating crisis in Europe, his tasks become more complicated, dangerous, and bewildering to him. He knows far less than the reader, who understands that his actions will have far-reaching consequences even beyond the fate of Hungary. Nicholas just does what he can without the luxury of historic hindsight.
Furst has fashioned here an elegant gem that vividly portrays the city of Paris during the last peaceful days of 1938 and the menace of Hitler's ambitions in the Sudetenland and beyond. Nicholas Morath is a charismatic and sympathetic figure who will come to understand, as the war progresses, the consequences, both good and bad, of his smallest actions during that turbulent time. --Otto Penzler [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Kobra Manifesto'
When four top operatives die mysterious deaths, Quiller, the Bureau's top intelligence agent, follows the world's five deadliest men from the French Riviera, to Rome, to Cambodia, to New York, and to Brazil. Reprint. NYT. PW. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Loo Sanction'
"A masterpiece . . ." THE NEW YORK TIMES
The scene is London, where Jonathan Hemlock is blackmailed into performing another "sanction" -- a top-secret political assassination -- in a nerve-wracking web involving dirty dealings among high-ranking British government officials and a British counterespionage group. Once again Hemlock's life hangs in the balance -- but this time the game is deadlier, the penalty for failure more grotesquely lethal than ever before! [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Mamista'
Spanish Guiana - riddled with war, drugs and rival guerilla factions - is the setting for this adventure about a group of people who find themselves locked into a life or death mission. But for the Pentagon it is just a cynical game being played out around the discovery of oil in the Republic. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Man Who Was Thursday'
In an article published the day before his death, G.K. Chesterton called The Man Who Was Thursday "a very melodramatic sort of moonshine." Set in a phantasmagoric London where policemen are poets and anarchists camouflage themselves as, well, anarchists, his 1907 novel offers up one highly colored enigma after another. If that weren't enough, the author also throws in an elephant chase and a hot-air-balloon pursuit in which the pursuers suffer from "the persistent refusal of the balloon to follow the roads, and the still more persistent refusal of the cabmen to follow the balloon."
But Chesterton is also concerned with more serious questions of honor and truth (and less serious ones, perhaps, of duels and dualism). Our hero is Gabriel Syme, a policeman who cannot reveal that his fellow poet Lucian Gregory is an anarchist. In Chesterton's agile, antic hands, Syme is the virtual embodiment of paradox:
He came of a family of cranks, in which all the oldest people had all the newest notions. One of his uncles always walked about without a hat, and another had made an unsuccessful attempt to walk about with a hat and nothing else. His father cultivated art and self-realization; his mother went in for simplicity and hygiene. Hence the child, during his tenderer years, was wholly unacquainted with any drink between the extremes of absinthe and cocoa, of both of which he had a healthy dislike.... Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing left--sanity.Elected undercover into the Central European Council of anarchists, Syme must avoid discovery and save the world from any bombings in the offing. As Thursday (each anarchist takes the name of a weekday--the only quotidian thing about this fantasia) does his best to undo his new colleagues, the masks multiply. The question then becomes: Do they reveal or conceal? And who, not to mention what, can be believed? As The Man Who Was Thursday proceeds, it becomes a hilarious numbers game with a more serious undertone--what happens if most members of the council actually turn out to be on the side of right? Chesterton's tour de force is a thriller that is best read slowly, so as to savor his highly anarchic take on anarchy. --Kerry Fried [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Man Who Was Thursday, a Nightmare'
Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Pomona Press are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Mandarin Cypher'

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Matlock Paper'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Modesty Blaise'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mrs. Pollifax, Innocent Tourist'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Orient Express'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Peking Target'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Prodigal Spy'
Joseph Kanon's debut thriller, Los Alamos, captivated readers and critics alike and was awarded the 1998 Edgar Award for Best First Novel. The Prodigal Spy, set in the aftermath of the Manhattan Project, offers a glimpse at cold war espionage and a very personal story about the effects of McCarthyism and the paranoia that it spawned. Once again, Kanon effortlessly weaves together history and fiction in prose that is thick with period details. The real achievement of the book, though, is the author's strong sense of his narrative center, Nick Kotlar.
The novel begins in 1950 in the Kotlar home in Washington, D.C., as young Nick tries to make sense of the masses of reporters who have gathered outside his house. Though his parents struggle to shield him from the truth, he inadvertently sees a newsreel that reveals his father's predicament: State Department undersecretary Walter Kotlar is under the intense scrutiny of Congressman Kenneth Welles of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Kanon perfectly captures the sensibilities of a child with a parent in peril; disbelieving Nick becomes a fledgling spy, trying to erase any clues in his home that might support Welles and his committee. But one night, after an explosive conversation with Nick's mother, his father disappears. That same night, the woman who had accused Walter Kotlar of spying commits suicide--or was she murdered? In 1953, Mr. Kotlar gives a press conference from Moscow announcing his defection. The book then moves to London in 1969, where Nick meets a young woman who tells him that not only is his father still alive but he has been keeping tabs on his son for the 19 years since he fled to the Soviet Union. This revelation draws Nick into a meeting with the seriously ill elder Kotlar and propels Nick into some intelligence gathering of his own--to uncover the man who caused Walter Kotlar's defection and who killed his father's accuser. With The Prodigal Spy, Kannon has once again breathed new life into spy fiction. --Patrick O'Kelley [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Quiller Bamboo'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Quiller Meridian'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Ride a Pale Horse'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Saving The Queen: A Blackford Oakes Novel'
This book is a replica of the original from the collections of The New York Public Library; it was produced from digital images created by The New York Public Library and its partners as part of their preservation efforts. To enhance your reading pleasure, the aging and scanning artifacts have been removed using patented page cleaning technology. We hope you enjoy the result. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Scorpio Illusion'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Scorpion Signal'
Quiller, the Bureau's top intelligence agent, travels from a clinic in Berlin to the heart of Lubyanka Prison to track down the British agent who has vanished from Moscow. Reprint. NYT. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'See You Later Alligator'
President Kennedy has selected CIA super-secret agent Blackford Oakes to meet with Che Guevara inside Castros Cuba. But the Communists have a double-cross in mind, with terrifying consequences. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'See You Later, Alligator'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'SS-GB: Nazi-Occupied Britain, 1941'
In 1941 murder is still murder, but detection is a little different in Hitler's Britain. This novel portrays what might have happened if Germany had won World War II. The author has written about 25 books since his best-selling first novel, "The Ipcress File". [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'SS/GB'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Striker Portfolio'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Triple: A Novel'
Net Dickstein, uno de los mejores agentes secretos israelies, tiene una mision crucial: hacer desaparecer el barco que transporta el uranio que Egipto necesita para poseer la bomba atomica. Ciertamente una mision casi imposible, ya que egipcios y palestinos no estan dispuestos a contemplar pasivamente como se esfuma su gran baza para inclinar a su favor el conflicto de Oriente Medio. Una novela electrizante a partir de un suceso real. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Vesuvius Club: A Bit of Fluff'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'When Eight Bells Toll'
From the acclaimed master of action and suspense. The all time classicMillions of pounds in gold bullion are being pirated in the Irish Sea. Investigations by the British Secret Service, and a sixth sense, have bought Philip Calvert to a bleak, lonely bay in the Western Highlands. But the sleepy atmosphere of Torbay is deceptive. The place is the focal point of many mysterious disappearances. Even the unimaginative Highland Police Sergeant seems to be acting a part. But why?This story is Alistair MacLean at his enthralling best. It has all the edge-of-the-seat suspense, and dry humour that millions of readers have devoured for years. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Xanadu Talisman'
› Find signed collectible books: 'El Hombre Que Fue Jueves / the Man Who Was Thursday'
En el hombre que fue jueves se han reunido dos grandes escritores, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, uno de los novelistas ingleses mas originales, y el mexicano Alfonso Reyes, quien hizo la traduccion y el prologo de esta divertidisima historia de aventuras, enredo, intriga y suspenso. A lo largo de mas 200 paginas, perseguidor y perseguido cobran una significacion inesperada, hasta convertirse en principios eternos del universo. [via]
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