Melville House Books

Dan O'Connor

Dan O'Connor is the Managing Editor of Melville House.

• Happy Birthday Jules Verne!

  On this day 185 years ago Jules Verne was born in Nantes, France. One of the most imaginative writers of the nineteenth century, he wrote about air, space, and underwater… Read more »

• Of Dope and Dupes

  It was meant to be a joke, but all hell broke loose… Read more »

• Massive book donation planned for Hurricane Sandy victims

  “Schools and libraries in the tri-state region suffering significant damage from Hurricane Sandy are eligible” to receive books… Read more »

• Dollar books under seige

  Like any naturalized New Yorker I like to crow about the stuff I’ve picked up for next to nothing, to say nothing of the things I’ve found in the street… Read more »

• Reinventing the wheel — DIY bookscanners

  A couple of years ago we spotted a do-it-yourself book scanner at Wired.com, the handiwork of Daniel Reetz, then a graduate student in visual neuroscience. Reetz cited “outrageous textbook prices” as the… Read more »

• Amazon paying up in Arizona

  Last year the Arizona state Department of Revenue demanded $53 million in unpaid sales taxes… Read more »

• I just heard about that—yesterday

  What’s the word for that experience of suddenly seeing — a word, a name — everywhere — that you never knew before yesterday? Never mind. I looked it up. It’s… Read more »

• They read it for the articles …

  Since 1970, the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS) has produced Braille editions of Playboy magazine. Service was briefly interrupted in December, 1985, after thirteen-term, Ohio congressman Chalmers Wylie… Read more »

• Tracking down lost, imaginary books

  Laughter in the Dark was the first of Vladimir Nabokov’s novels to be published in the United States, in 1938, by the then venerable Bobbs-Merrill of Indianapolis. The beautiful jacket… Read more »

• Books and/or taxes

  In Chile, a group calling itself Libros Sin IVA (Books Without VAT — “value added tax”) is petitioning the government to get rid of the 19% tax on books —… Read more »