Book Spoken Here

In honor of the EURO 2008 soccer tournament being contested this month – and the timely arrival of a large new collection of books – June at the Brattle will feature a host of New Arrivals in the subjects of Linguistics and Foreign Languages. So while native speakers of various Romance, Germanic, Turkic, and Slavic languages arrive in Switzerland/Austria for the matches, stop in to browse an array of foreign language guides, readers, dictionaries (general as well as technical), and literature now available and continuing to appear around the shop. The more studious among us will be pleased with the myriad studies of all things linguistic, with MIT leading the parade of scholarly presses. Among the titles featured in the West Street window display is an entertainingly exhaustive (that’s all I’ll say) study of English usage and an example of the innovative work that earned Noam Chomsky tenure in the first place.

So stop by this week to say "Ciao" - although if you want to offer congratulations to the new European Champions I’d suggest practicing a few phrases of Dutch, as the Brattle Staff consensus (of one) agrees they are the side to beat.

Oranje boven!

A Lot of Books

There's no better time than the home stretch of summer's slow approach - bringing with it, one hopes, some consistently accommodating weather - to check in on the bibliophile's open-air retreat amid Downtown Crossing's retail sprawl: the Brattle's sale lot. We know, of course, that it's not a background of sunny (or warm, or calm, or even dry) weather that matters in the lot. It's the books. And right now there is a dizzying mix of books on all imaginable subjects priced at $5, $3, and $1. The newest arrivals include recently published Business, Management, and Economics titles (published by Wiley, Harvard Business School, and the Productivity Press of Portland, OR, to name a few) and a diverse group of unusual antiquarian books covering subjects like Travel, Exploration, and History. Here's an example:
I will tell you that it's a quaint piece of 1850s Southern Americana marked with a yellow $5 sticker, but that's all the help you get. As regulars know and first-time browsers are bound to discover, the fun is in the search.
And remember, groups of new arrivals in the outside lot invariably mean new arrivals of "better" titles on the same subjects inside the shop.
Happy Hunting!