Literary Almanac

THE LITERARY ALMANAC covers the years 1900 only to 1996 so we can only hope that a revised edition is in the works. There is a wealth of information included: for each year the awards have been given, the Nobel Prize-- I was surprised to learn that the prize has not been given every year-- the Pulitzer, the Pen/Faulkner Award, the National Book Awards, the National Book Critics Circle Awards, the Booker Prize, the Newbery Medal, the Caldecott Medal, as well as the NEW YORK TIMES top two best sellers in both fiction and nonfiction and paperback, both trade and mass market. (A NYT best seller is defined as one in which the hardcover sales reach 100,000 and its paperback sales top 1,000,000.) There are births, deaths, a list of American poet laureates, banned books, nom de plumes and Anthony Burgess's 99 best books published since 1939. (I have read only 17 of them so I'm not sure what that makes me.) Additionally there is a lot of photographs of writers, of book covers, quotations from book reviews and this from Ogden Nash: