New York: Ticknor & Fields, (1991). Hardcover first edition - The author's second book, a memoir which is also a journey through family history, feminist insight, and southern mythology. Shirley Jean Abbott grew up in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in the 1940s and 50s, the beloved daughter of Alfred Bemont Abbott, affectionately known as "Hat whose business was taking bets on horse racing. But he also loved to read, and he passed that love on to his daughter. xxi, 290 pp. ISBN: 0-899195180.

New York: Norton, (2003). First edition - Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist recounts his 1950s and '60s childhood in the Midwestern steel town of Lorian, Ohio. The only boy of four children, he grew up in a blue-collar family with a father who "hated his lot in life with every particle of his moody, dissatisfied soul." To escape from home life, he buried himself in books - and describes many of them here. Photographs. Includes Dirda's book list. 330 pp.

New York: Simon & Schuster, (2015). SIGNED first edition - The author's first novel, the story of a "a compulsively honest, bibliophile heroine" who lands a job at a hip startup that promises to revolutionize reading. SIGNED on the title page. 372 pp.

Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. dj. SIGNED hardcover first edition - From discussions of reading such diverse books as Huck Finn and Don Quixote, Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle and Ian McEwan's The Child in Time, this is an exploration of what books and reading - and rereading them - can mean to us. SIGNED on the title page. 234 pp. ISBN: 0-61808293X.