Looking to buy some medieval armour? In the mood for an orchestra of typewriters? Perhaps you’d like to sift through handcrafted cashmere scarves while chatting up Indiana Jones’ lovely co-star? Know where to find America’s oldest baseball diamond, New England’s smallest town, or Grover Cleveland’s impossibly-young (and spitting-image) grandson (think about it)? New England Notebook offers the answers to these questions and more in a blend of the region’s most singular and noteworthy nuggets of history, people, and culture. This is a collection of colorful facts, stories and anecdotes, plus a savvy selection of unusual eats, goods, services and events. Whether it’s finding a little-known museum of Titanic memorabilia, an underwater escape artist, or the smallest bar, both casual readers and dedicated lovers of all things New England will share a hearty—and humorous—sense of, “Who knew?” Written by a native New Englander and WCVB on-air reporter, New England Notebook goes beyond the merely curious, though it offers plenty of intriguing tidbits, unusual museums, fascinating characters, and many pieces of trivia and little-known facts.

Explore the fabric of America over hot coffee and penny candy. Step through the wooden doors of a New England general store and step back in time, into a Norman Rockwell painting and into the heart of America. New England’s General Stores offers a nostalgic picture of this colonial staple and, fortunately, steadfast institution of small towns from Connecticut to Maine. This is where children of each generation take their first allowance to buy their very own penny candy. Locals have swapped stories at these counters from gossip to whispers of revolution. In tough times, the general store treated customers like family, extending credit when no one else would. Stubborn as New Englanders themselves, the general store has refused to become a mere sentimental relic of an earlier age.

From sports to politics, food to finance, aviation to engineering, to bitter disputes over simple boundaries themselves, New England’s feuds have peppered the region’s life for centuries. They’ve been raw and rowdy, sometimes high minded and humorous, and in a place renowned for its deep sense of history, often long-running and legendary. There are even some that will undoubtedly outlast the region’s ancient low stone walls. Ted Reinstein, a native New Englander and local writer, offers us fascinating stories, some known, others not so much, from the history of New England in this fun, accessible book. Bringing to life many of the fights, spats, and arguments that have, in many ways, shaped the area itself, Reinstein demonstrates what it really means to be Wicked Pissed.

In the April of 1945, exactly two years before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in major league baseball, liberal Boston City Councilman Izzy Muchnick persuaded the Red Sox to try out three black players in return for a favorable vote to allow the team to play on Sundays. The Red Sox got the councilman’s much-needed vote, but the tryout was a sham; the three players would get no closer to the major leagues. It was a lost battle in a war that was ultimately won by Robinson in 1947. This book tells the story of the little-known heroes who fought segregation in baseball, from communist newspaper reporters to the Pullman car porters who saw to it that black newspapers espousing integration in professional sports reached the homes of blacks throughout the country. It also reminds us that the first black player in professional baseball was not Jackie Robinson but Moses Fleetwood Walker in 1884, and that for a time integrated teams were not that unusual. And then, as segregation throughout the country hardened, the exclusion of blacks in baseball quietly became the norm, and the battle for integration began anew.

A captivating look at the past New England Ruins is the collective body of work by photographer ROB DOBI and his homage to abandoned buildings across the Northeast. The result of twenty years of exploration and documentation, this book features a rare look at structures that no longer serve their original purpose and have been otherwise forgotten. Dobi’s work is an ongoing quest to study neglected structures and the stories people left behind. Approaching subjects of industry, education, institutions, and everything in-between, the collection of interior photographs evokes feelings of loss and nostalgia, but also rouses the imagination about the past.

Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier years. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusionment with communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the heroine relives part of her own experience. And in a blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna resolves to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook. Doris Lessing's best-known and most influential novel, The Golden Notebook retains its extraordinary power and relevance decades after its initial publication.