I am an independent bookseller

[DurbBird]

Michele and I (http://otowistation.com/staff.htm) own Otowi Station (http://otowistation.com/), an independent bookstore specializing in atomic history, the Manhattan Project (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project), and scientific and technical books.

If you need a recommendation, the name of an independent bookstore near you, books for your reading group, or an out-of-print book, let me know!

[Scrat1]

Very cool. Got any recommendations?

I'm more of a fiction guy, but I wouldn't mind some nonfiction/science recommendations either.

[DurbBird]

The books that I liked best of the 89 I read last year are

Everything Is Illuminated, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_Is_Illuminated) by Jonathan Safran Foer;
The Shadow of the Wind (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow_of_the_Wind), by Carlos Luis Zafon;
A Mercy, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercy_(novel)) by Toni Morrison;
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing; Volume II: the Kingdom on the Waves (URL="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/10/24/RV9V13L25K.DTL"), by M. T. Anderson (you should probably start with The Pox Party, the first volume; and
Fine Just the Way It Is, (http://books.simonandschuster.com/9781416571667) by E. Annie Proulx.

I've hand-sold tons of copies of Cold Comfort Farm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_Comfort_Farm), by Stella Gibbons. It's one of the funniest novels ever written.

Swing by your friendly nearby independent bookstore and pick up one of 'em!

[Art Wing]

Michele and I (http://otowistation.com/staff.htm) own Otowi Station (http://otowistation.com/), an independent bookstore specializing in atomic history, the Manhattan Project (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project), and scientific and technical books.

If you need a recommendation, the name of an independent bookstore near you, books for your reading group, or an out-of-print book, let me know!

Cool stuff DurbBird. I worked for an online bookseller as a booklister for a while during grad school. Fun stuff! They focused on scholarly non-fiction.

Any recommendations for books about the Cuban Missile Crisis? It has been on my mind lately to read up on the subject.

[DurbBird]

You might like One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War by Michael Dobbs. It came out about six months ago and got a starred review in Publishers Weekly.

Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis by Robert F. Kennedy is vivid and immediate.

[mdterpsrule]

I have a bunch of really old books, and since you deal in science books, I was hoping if you knew if one was worth anything. It's a Scientific American Reference Book from 1877. That is the only thing it says on its cover, and it has a little Star of David under it. I couldn't find anything out about it by googling. I don't really plan on selling it, just wondering if it was worth anything.

It's a really cool book. It talks about everything from rights of employees at a company, to famous inventors, to basic geometry. My favorite section is the census where they tell you the population for each county. I tried looking up the population of the county of your bookstore in 1877 but NM wasn't a state then so it doesn't have anything on it :). Any info on this book would be really cool, thanks.

[DurbBird]

Terps, the value of an old book depends a lot on the condition of the book, its scarcity, and the demand for it (sorta like baseball cards). On the used-book market, The Scientific American Reference Book of Useful Information (Munn & Co., Inc., New York, 1877) is going for about $10-25. If you'd like to sell any of your scientific or technical books, PM me, okay?

Thanks for trying to look up Los Alamos. New Mexico became a state in 1912, and Los Alamos has been a county only since 1949. Compared with you guys on the East Coast, we're just toddlers.:D