Paul Collins

Acclaimed historian Paul Collins' remarkable true account of a stunning turn-of-the-19th century murder and the trial that ensued--a showdown in which iconic political rivals Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr joined forces to make sure justice was done.--

The True Story of how Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr Teamed Up to Take on America's First Sensational Murder Mystery

Duel with the Devil

“No writer better articulates ourinterest in the confluence of hope, eccentricity, and the timelessness of the bold and strange than Paul Collins.”—Dave Eggers On Long Island, a farmer finds a duck pond turned red with blood. On the Lower East Side, two boys playing at a pier discover a floating human torso wrapped tightly in oilcloth. Blueberry pickers near Harlem stumble upon neatly severed limbs in an overgrown ditch. Clues to a horrifying crime are turning up all over New York, but the police are baffled: There are no witnesses, no motives, no suspects. The grisly finds that began on the afternoon of June 26, 1897, plunged detectives headlong into the era’s most baffling murder mystery. Seized upon by battling media moguls Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, the case became a publicity circus. Reenactments of the murder were staged in Times Square, armed reporters lurked in the streets of Hell’s Kitchen in pursuit of suspects, and an unlikely trio—a hard-luck cop, a cub reporter, and an eccentric professor—all raced to solve the crime. What emerged was a sensational love triangle and an even more sensational trial: an unprecedented capital case hinging on circumstantial evidence around a victim whom the police couldn’t identify with certainty, and who the defense claimed wasn’t even dead. The Murder of the Century is a rollicking tale—a rich evocation of America during the Gilded Age and a colorful re-creation of the tabloid wars that have dominated media to this day.

The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars

The Murder of the Century

"Sixpence House is the bookworm's answer to A Year in Provence." -Boston Globe Paul Collins and his family abandoned the hills of San Francisco to move to the Welsh countryside-to move, in fact, to the village of Hay-on-Wye, the "Town of Books" that boasts fifteen hundred inhabitants-and forty bookstores. Taking readers into a secluded sanctuary for book lovers, and guiding us through the creation of the author's own first book, Sixpence House becomes a heartfelt and often hilarious meditation on what books mean to us. A #1 BookSense Pick "A delightful book."-Los Angeles Times "Collins' gift is that you don't care where you end up. The journey is enough."-Readerville "The real, engaging heart of the tale is Collins' love of books and other people who love them...Collins muses on antiquarian books the way the rest of us remember lost loves."-San Francisco Chronicle "Funny, informative, somewhat chaotic and full of interesting references...there are numerous meanders into peripheral subjects, seen through the astute eyes of an Anglophile American."-Washington Post

Sixpence House

Describes the personal and professional life of the master of the horror genre behind “The Raven,” including a discussion of his rocky relationship with his wealthy adoptive father and his time spent working as an editor and reviewer. 15,000 first printing.

The Fever Called Living

Edgar Allan Poe

When Paul Collins's son Morgan was two years old, he could read, spell, and perform multiplication tables in his head...but not answer to his own name. A casual conversation-or any social interaction that the rest of us take for granted-will, for Morgan, always be a cryptogram that must be painstakingly decoded. He lives in a world of his own: an autistic world. In Not Even Wrong, Paul Collins melds a memoir of his son's autism with a journey into this realm of permanent outsiders. Examining forgotten geniuses and obscure medical archives, Collins's travels take him from an English churchyard to the Seattle labs of Microsoft, and from a Wisconsin prison cell block to the streets of Vienna. It is a story that reaches from a lonely clearing in the Black Forest into the London palace of King George I, from Defoe and Swift to the discovery of evolution; from the modern dawn of the computer revolution to, in the end, the author's own household. Not Even Wrong is a haunting journey into the borderlands of neurology - a meditation on what "normal" is, and how human genius comes to us in strange and wondrous forms.

Adventures in Autism

Not Even Wrong

Paul Collins and his family abandoned the hills of San Francisco to move to the Welsh countryside-to move, in fact, to the little cobblestone village of Hay-on-Wye, the 'Town of Books' that boasts fifteen hundred inhabitants-and forty bookstores. Antiquarian bookstores, no less.

Lost in a Town of Books

A delectable true-crime story of scandal and murder at America's most celebrated university.

The 1849 Murder That Scandalized Harvard

Blood and Ivy

The historical record crowns success. Those enshrined in its annals are men and women whose ideas, accomplishments, or personalities have dominated, endured, and most important of all, found champions. John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists, and Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets are classic celebrations of the greatest, the brightest, the eternally constellated. Paul Collins' Banvard's Folly is a different kind of book. Here are thirteen unforgettable portraits of forgotten people: men and women who might have claimed their share of renown but who, whether from ill timing, skullduggery, monomania, the tinge of madness, or plain bad luck-or perhaps some combination of them all-leapt straight from life into thankless obscurity. Among their number are scientists, artists, writers, entrepreneurs, and adventurers, from across the centuries and around the world. They hold in common the silenced aftermath of failure, the name that rings no bells. Collins brings them back to glorious life. John Banvard was an artist whose colossal panoramic canvasses (one behemoth depiction of the entire eastern shore of the Mississippi River was simply known as "The Three Mile Painting") made him the richest and most famous artist of his day. . . before he decided to go head to head with P. T. Barnum. René Blondot was a distinguished French physicist whose celebrated discovery of a new form of radiation, called the N-Ray, went terribly awry. At the tender age of seventeen, William Henry Ireland signed "William Shakespeare" to a book and launched a short but meteoric career as a forger of undiscovered works by the Bard -- until he pushed his luck too far. John Symmes, a hero of the War of 1812, nearly succeeded in convincing Congress to fund an expedition to the North Pole, where he intended to prove his theory that the earth was hollow and ripe for exploitation; his quixotic quest counted Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe among its greatest admirers. Collins' love for what he calls the "forgotten ephemera of genius" give his portraits of these figures and the other nine men and women in Banvard's Folly sympathetic depth and poignant relevance. Their effect is not to make us sneer or revel in schadenfreude; here are no cautionary tales. Rather, here are brief introductions-acts of excavation and reclamation-to people whom history may have forgotten, but whom now we cannot.

Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn't Change the World

Banvard's Folly

Al paese dei libri

"Sixpence House is an engaging meditation on what books mean to us, and how their meaning can resonate long after they have been abandoned by their public."--BOOK JACKET.

Lost in A Town Of Books

Allira Hart's 'gift' has saved her from certain death. But now she has to fix the Rainbow Gate to gain entry to the World of Grrym where her grandfather, Fergus, But that's the easy part. On her arrival, she must somehow muster all nine goblin kingdoms to fight a common enemy: Morgassa the Fierce and her devious legion of blood troll mercenaries, ogres, dark goblins, spirit spiders and wizards. Allira is starting to think that facing these formidable foes isn't such a good idea.

Lords of Quibbitt

Danny Willis

Explores the world of Grrym, the outer realm, home of the goblins. It is a world of natural beauty, where the most terrifying breeds of dragons, ogres, trolls and other beasts are free to roam, causing turmoil and trouble wherever they go.

Allira's Gift

the emperial age, 1550-500 BC

From Egypt to Babylon

The Hiveborn completes the highly acclaimed series 'The Earthborn Wars'

The Hiveborn

Welkin Quinn has always dreamed of setting foot on Earth. As an elite Skyborn teenager aboard a transport ship destined for Tau Ceti, all he knows of his home planet is what he has learned from the Elders as well as from a wealth of records and artifacts archived in the ship's memory. The creatures known as the Earthborn-brutish survivors of the devastation that laid waste to Earth-are an uncivilized and technologically primitive race in many ways indistinguishable from savages. Yet even though Welkin was born on The Colony, Earth is still. . . home. When The Colony is forced to abort its mission to colonize and Tau Ceti and crash lands on Earth, he will finally have a chance to experience Earth-and the Earthborn-firsthand. Assigned to a reconnaissance team to explore The Colony's perimeter, however, Welkin is ambushed by a murderous gang of feral Earthborn known as Jabbers. Welkin is rescued by Sarah, an Earthborn hardly older than himself and a leader of group of young survivors who are trying to unite other displaced families in a war against the Jabbers. No question Skyborn Welkin needs the help of these Earthborn to survive. The real question is, Why on earth would they need him?

The Earthborn

The sensational story of the last two centuries of the papacy, its most influential pontiffs, troubling doctrines, and rise in global authority In 1799, the papacy was at rock bottom: The Papal States had been swept away and Rome seized by the revolutionary French armies. With cardinals scattered across Europe and the next papal election uncertain, even if Catholicism survived, it seemed the papacy was finished. In this gripping narrative of religious and political history, Paul Collins tells the improbable success story of the last 220 years of the papacy, from the unexalted death of Pope Pius VI in 1799 to the celebrity of Pope Francis today. In a strange contradiction, as the papacy has lost its physical power--its armies and states--and remained stubbornly opposed to the currents of social and scientific consensus, it has only increased its influence and political authority in the world.

How the Pope Became the Most Influential Man in the World

Absolute Power

“Stimulating, encyclopedic, and often downright funny, this is a book worth remembering.” —Stephen O'Shea, Globe and Mail (Toronto, Canada) “A lively, full-to-bursting history of the turbulent tenth century in Europe…. Collins presents chaotic upheaval across Europe in an organized and riveting fashion.” —Kirkus (starred review) The tenth century dawned in violence and disorder. Charlemagne's empire was in ruins, most of Spain had been claimed by Moorish invaders, and even the papacy in Rome was embroiled in petty, provincial conflicts. The stability once provided by Imperial Rome had dissolved, leaving a perilous landscape behind. Yet the story of the tenth century is the story of our culture's birth. This was the moment that civilization emerged from the Dark Ages into the light of day. The Birth of the West tells the story of a transformation from chaos to order, exploring the alien landscape of Europe in transition. It thoroughly renovates older conceptions of feudalism and what medieval life was actually like. The result is a wholly-new vision of how civilization sprang from the unlikeliest of origins, and proof that our tenth-century ancestors are not as remote as we might think. “The Birth of the West is a re-making of what we think we know about the end of the Dark Ages. It is also the gate to the utterly unexpected cosmos of European forebears.… The characters who people The Birth of the West are as familiar as relatives—as indeed they are—groping their way to a cohesive Western culture. The Birth of the West is thus the tale of our birth, and Collins tells it with a narrative grace and elegance which will make readers cherish it.” —Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler's Ark

Rome, Germany, France, and the Creation of Europe in the Tenth Century

The Birth of the West

A history of the Bard's competitively pursued First Folio traces the author's travels from the site of a Sotheby auction to regions in Asia, throughout which he investigated the roles played by those who have sought and owned the Folios.

How Shakespeare's First Folio Conquered the World

The Book of William

Ma che idea, lasciare la California per un brumoso paesino della campagna gallese! Se non fosse che il paesino è Hay-on-Wye, la «Mecca dei bibliofili», dove c’è una libreria antiquaria ogni quaranta abitanti, e dove si celebra ogni anno uno dei più noti Festival della Letteratura – e se non fosse che il pellegrino è Paul Collins, instancabile e ardimentoso cacciatore di libri perduti e strampalati. Ingaggiato nel 2000 da Richard Booth, il libraio che nel 1977 si proclamò Re del Principato Autonomo di Hay, Collins si è potuto dedicare per sei mesi alla sua attività preferita: frugare tra cataste di libri effimeri «che fin dall’inizio non erano destinati a durare», e tramandarci le loro storie. Ed ecco le ponderose raccolte di riviste obsolete («La rivista delle meraviglie. Composta interamente di materiale classificabile come MIRACOLOSO! BIZZARRO! STRANO! STRAVAGANTE! SOPRANNATURALE! ECCENTRICO! ASSURDO! OSCURO! e INDESCRIVIBILE!»), le memorie apocrife ("Sono stata la cameriera di Hitler") o anonime ("Confessioni della moglie di uno scrittore"), gli autori che scrivono dall’aldilà, e le prime edizioni «grigie e pesanti come tombini». Mentre cerca casa, fantasticando di stabilirsi definitivamente in un grande «pub sconsacrato» del Seicento, il Sixpence House, Collins riesce anche a far domanda per un seggio alla Camera dei Lord (quella «specie di governo fondato sulla copula. Una spermocrazia, se preferite»). Oltre che una incantevole tranche de vie, "Al paese dei libri" è una sorprendente meditazione sul valore dei libri nel tempo – e sulla volubile incuranza del passato, «l’unico Paese dove è ancora permesso dileggiare gli indigeni».

Paul Collins

About

Books

Join the club