Nice is the secret ingredient to a better life. It makes us happy. It may even be what makes us civilized—when we say thank you, shake hands, send flowers, we’re doing the nice things that bring people together. ?A compulsive and chunky book for lovers of trivia, popular history, customs, and culture—and a perfect gift to say “you’re nice”—The Book of Nice is an entertaining, quirky compendium of those signs, traditions, and expressions that we so often take for granted, yet turn out to be quite fascinating. It’s about why we cover a yawn (originally to prevent evil spirits from entering our bodies, now to hide the impression that something’s boring us). About holiday traditions—it’s thanks to Guy Lombardo’s December 31 broadcast in 1929 that we now sing “Auld Lang Syne” on New Year’s Eve. About customary offerings—the wedding cake evolved out of the Roman use of wheat as a symbol of fertility (and it’s much tastier than bits of grain). And about those simple yet essential niceties—how Thomas Edison championed an obscure term, “hello” (if Alexander Graham Bell had gotten his way, we’d all be saying “ahoy”). Why not put a little nice in your day?

The essays in this collection reach beyond book history to address fundamental questions about historicism with a broad range of issues such as gender and sexuality, religion, political theory, economic history, adaptation and appropriation, and quantitative analysis and digital humanities.

Beginning with one of the crucial technological breakthroughs of Western history - the development of moveable type by Johann Gutenberg - The History of the Book in the West 1455-1700 covers the period that saw the growth and consolidation of the printed book as a significant feature of Western European culture and society. The volume collects together seventeen key articles, written by leading scholars during the past five decades, that together survey a wide range of topics, such as typography, economics, regulation, bookselling, and reading practices. Books, whether printed or in manuscript, played a major role in the religious, political, and intellectual upheavals of the period, and understanding how books were made, distributed, and encountered provides valuable new insights into the history of Western Europe in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries.

You're probably breaking the law right now-and don't even know it. Did you know... ? Naples, Italy, enforces laws for what constitutes real pizza, and "pizza police" visit restaurants to crack down on unlawful pies? ? In West Virginia it is a crime to display or possess a red or black flag? ? It is illegal to sell stuffed articles depicting female breasts within a thousand feet of any county highway in California? ? Spherical fishbowls have been banned in Rome since 2004? There are hundreds of bizarre laws that we could be breaking at any moment. What exactly are we doing that we shouldn't be doing, and what happens if we get caught? In this engaging and insightful collection, Nathan Belofsky takes us on a journey of eclectic, unexpected, and bizarre laws from around the world. Written by a practicing lawyer with an eye for his profession's most unusual quirks, The Book of Strange and Curious Legal Oddities offers a delightful look at the legal system's peculiarities through the ages. From laws that crack down on how we eat, look, and have sex, to real legal battles involving litigious chimpanzees, you'll start wondering whether you're really the law-abiding citizen you claim to be.

Kisses from Nick Flynn, Rebecca Makkai, Pico Iyer, Ilyse Kusnetz, Andre Dubus III, Christian Kiefer, Camille T. Dungy, Major Jackson, Bich Minh Nguyen, Terrance Hayes, Ada Limón, Honor Moore, Téa Obreht and Dan Sheehan, Kazim Ali, Beth Ann Fennelly, and others In this wide-ranging collection of essays, stories, graphic memoir, and cross-genre work, writers explore the deeply human act of kissing, and share their thoughts on a specific kiss—the unexpected and unforgettable, the sublime and the ambiguous, the devastating and the regenerative. Selections from beloved authors “tantalize with such grace that they linger sweetly in your mind for days” (New York Times Book Review), as they explore the messy and complicated intimacies that exist in our actual lives, as well as in the complicated landscape of the imagination. This is a book meant to be read from cover to cover, just as much as it’s meant to be dipped into—with each kiss pulling us closer to the moments in our lives that matter most.

In all six of its volumes The Broadview Anthology of British Literature presents British literature in a truly distinctive light. Fully grounded in sound literary and historical scholarship, the anthology takes a fresh approach to many canonical authors, and includes a wide selection of work by lesser-known writers. The anthology also provides wide-ranging coverage of the worldwide connections of British literature, and it pays attention throughout to issues of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. It includes comprehensive introductions to each period, providing in each case an overview of the historical and cultural as well as the literary background. It features accessible and engaging headnotes for all authors, extensive explanatory annotations throughout, and an unparalleled number of illustrations and contextual materials, offering additional perspectives both on individual texts and on larger social and cultural developments. Innovative, authoritative, and comprehensive, The Broadview Anthology of British Literature embodies a consistently fresh approach to the study of literature and literary history. The full Broadview Anthology of British Literature comprises six bound volumes, together with an extensive website component; the latter has been edited, annotated, and designed according to the same high standards as the bound book component of the anthology, and is accessible through the broadviewpress.come website by using the passcode obtained with the purchase of one or more of the bound volumes. Highlights of Volume 6: The Twentieth Century and Beyond include: Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer,” “An Outpost of Progress,” an essay on the Titanic, and a substantial range of background materials, including documents on the exploitation of central Africa that set “An Outpost of Progress” in vivid context; and a large selection of late twentieth and early twenty-first century writers such as Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Zadie Smith. For the convenience of those whose focus does not extend to the full period covered in the final volume of The Broadview Anthology of British Literature (Volume 6: The Twentieth Century and Beyond), that volume is now available either in its original one-volume format or in this alternative two-volume format, with Volume 6a (The Early Twentieth Century) extending to the end of WWII, and Volume 6b (The Late Twentieth Century and Beyond) covering from WWII into the present century.

"Of the many charges laid against contemporary literary scholars, one of the most common--and perhaps the most wounding--is that they simply don't love books. And while the most obvious response is that, no, actually the profession of literary studies does acknowledge and address personal attachments to literature, that answer risks obscuring a more fundamental question: Why should they? That question led Deidre Shauna Lynch into the historical and cultural investigation of Loving Literature. How did it come to be that professional literary scholars are expected not just to study, but to love literature, and to inculcate that love in generations of students? What Lynch discovers is that books, and the attachments we form to them, have long played a role in the formation of private life--that the love of literature, in other words, is neither incidental to, nor inextricable from, the history of literature. Yet at the same time, there is nothing self-evident or ahistorical about our love of literature: our views of books as objects of affection have clear roots in late eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century publishing, reading habits, and domestic history."--Publisher's Web site.