Back Creek Books

09/29/2025

Great weekend in New Orleans. Wedding and wildlife.

09/28/2025

Bourbon Street.

09/28/2025

09/26/2025

NOLA weekend.

09/07/2025

Made a quick run up to Rochester for the book fair. Always great to see our fellow booksellers and the interesting things they bring to shows. Came home with a nice little group of things which are stacked on our desk but headed for the shop ASAP. Stop by to check out these new arrivals, as many won't ever make it to our website.

09/05/2025

Inscribed and signed copy of Rockwell Kent's autobiography. Published just two years after his landmark Supreme Court victory restoring his passport following his defiant clash with McCarthy-era censorship. His memoir blends personal narrative of art and adventure with political conviction, offering a rare window into the conscience of a blacklisted artist.
Available at the shop and on our website (link in profile).
$375.

08/29/2025

Swipe to glimpse some of the varied items on our most recent E-List (link in profile). Briefly, they are:
1. Complete 10 issue run of the newspaper published during the National Sailors' Fair in 1864. Edited by Julya Ward Howe, it includes first appearances of material by Emerson, Thoreau, and other major 19th century American literary figures.
2. Biting exposé of the U.S. funeral industry by one of the Mitford sisters that is a real-life counterpart to Evelyn Waugh's satirical novel, "The Loved One."
3. Elegant cocktail guide published in Chicago a few years after the repeal of Prohibition.
4. Frederick Douglass's only published work of fiction, in a rare abolitionist anthology from 1853.
5. Rich insider memoir of the daily lives of ten presidents and their families, by the White House electrician-turned-Chief Usher.
6. First edition of Donna Tartt's dark academia classic, "The Secret History."
7. Memoir by Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman, revealing a brilliant mind that thrived on mischief, skepticism, and the thrill of discovery.
8. Uncommon first edition of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's early feminist treatise "The Man-Made World," un which she dissects the cultural consequences of male-centered thought across art, ethics, politics, and industry.
Hit the link tree in our profile and go to our current E-List for full descriptions, more photos, and secure ordering of these and many more!

08/28/2025

"Birds were coming down out of the half darkness upcountry and shearing away off the edge of the mesa and to the north lightning stood along the rimlands like burning mandrake."
First printing of Cormac McCarthy's breakout book, "All the Pretty Horses," 1992. The was the work that finally reached a popular audience and ended his undeserved obscurity. Won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1992.
Just one of the awesome new items featured in our E-List 64, which just dropped on our website (link in profile). Check it out!

08/17/2025

Warren Commission exhibit 773, which is the clipped order form and mailing envelope with which Lee Harvey Oswald ordered the rifle he used to shoot President John F. Kennedy in 1963.
The Mannlicher-Carcano appeared in the full page ad from Klein's Sporting Goods of Chicago, priced at $19.95 complete with 4x scope. Oswald filled in the order form at the bottom of the ad using his alias (A. Hidell) and sent it off to Klein's with postal money order for $21.45 (shipping was $1.50).
Swipe to see our copy of this ephemeral hinge of history, in the same monthly issue of the magazine that Oswald ordered from.

07/29/2025

Went to Tennessee for the book fair. Did Nash, took a hike.

07/23/2025

On the Eastern Sho'.

07/06/2025

Visited historic Annapolis today. Great town. Highly recommended.