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09/28/2026

This Week's Puzzler

On September 15, 1889, this man was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. After graduating from Philips Exeter Academy in 1908, he attended Harvard University, where he served as editor of the Harvard Lampoon for two consecutive years.

After college, he worked at a succession of writing jobs at The New York Tribune, Life magazine, and Vanity Fair, before finding his true calling as a writer and humorist. In the 1920s, he became one of the original contributors to a sophisticated new magazine called The New Yorker, where his understated comic essays helped establish the magazine’s distinctive style—and his reputation as a writer.

He was also a prominent member of the celebrated Algonquin Round Table, that legendary group of writers, critics, actors, and assorted wits who regularly gathered for lunch at New York’s Algonquin Hotel. While his companions included such great wits as Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, and George S. Kaufman, this week’s Mystery Man developed his own distinctive comic persona—that of a genial, slightly bewildered ordinary man attempting to make his way through an increasingly complicated world.

In the 1930s, he spent most of his time in Hollywood, where made nearly fifty short subject films and appeared in almost fifty feature films. In 1935, he won a Oscar for his film “How to Sleep,” now regarded as a film classic.

Who was this man?

09/24/2026

Bring in any three books today, and we'll put acetate jacket protectors on them free of charge.

09/13/2026

This week's Puzzler

On September 11, 1862, William Sidney Porter was born in Greensboro, North Carolina. At age three, his mother died of consumption (now called tuberculosis), and he was raised by his father—a family physician—and maternal grandmother. After finishing his aunt Evelina Porter’s private elementary school in 1876, he attended public high school in Greensboro, but left school without graduating to work in his uncle’s drugstore. By age nineteen, he was a licensed pharmacist.

In 1882, at age 20, concerned that a chronic cough might develop into consumption, he moved to Texas, ultimately settling in Austin. He worked at a variety of jobs and became a well-known member of the local music and theater scene. He was proficient with the guitar and mandolin and, apparently, had an exceptional singing voice as well. It was also around this time that he began to dream up plots for short stories.

In 1891, he took a job as a teller and bookkeeper at the First National Bank of Austin. In 1894, he was abruptly fired, accused by his bosses of embezzling funds. Significantly, though, no charges were filed. He quickly moved to Houston, where he landed a job at The Houston Post.

Two years later, after a federal audit of the Austin bank, formal embezzlement charges were brought against him. The day before his trial, he fled, first to New Orleans, and then to Honduras. A year later, after learning that his wife Athol was dying of consumption, he returned to Austin and surrendered to authorities. In 1898, he was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison.

While serving his sentence at Ohio Penitentiary, he worked as a night druggist in the prison hospital. Compared to the inmates who were serving hard time, he was given a comfortable room instead of a cell and provided with a typewriter to assist him in his writing efforts. While serving his prison sentence, his short stories—most written under a now-legendary pen name—began to be published in national magazines.

Released from prison after serving three years, he moved to New York City in 1902. He lived in Manhattan until his premature death—clearly hastened by his heavy drinking—at age 47 in 1910. During the last decade of his life, he wrote nearly 400 short stories, cementing his reputation as one of America’s most celebrated writers.

What was this writer's pen name?

08/16/2026

This Week's Puzzler

On August 25, 1949, this man was born in Oxford, England. Even though his father was a famous English writer, he showed little interest in literature—or any other school subjects—as he grew up. Indeed, he performed so poorly in elementary school that one of his early headmasters cleverly described him as “unusually unpromising.”

By age sixteen, he had read nothing but comic books his entire life when his stepmother, the writer Elizabeth Jane Howard, introduced him to the works of Jane Austen. It turned out to be a life-changing experience. Almost overnight, he got turned on to literature—and he went on to deepen that interest considerably as he attended Oxford University’s Exeter College. After graduating in 1971, he worked for several years at The Times Literary Supplement before taking a job at the New Statesman. A few years later, at age 27, he became the publication’s youngest literary editor.

After his first novel—The Rachel Papers in 1973—won the Somerset Maugham award, he went on to become one of his era’s most popular and prolific writers, with novels like Money (1984), London Fields (1989), and The Information (1995). In 2008, The Times of London hailed him as one of the 50 greatest post-WWII English writers.

A prolific short-story writer as well as a novelist, he published seven collections, including Einstein’s Monster (1987) and Heavy Water (1998). He also excelled in the non-fiction arena, with an acclaimed memoir—Experience, in 2000—and five separate collections of essays, including The Moronic Inferno (1986) and Visiting Mrs. Nabokov (1993).

Early in his career, he was a hip, brash, and irreverent figure who was dubbed “the Mick Jagger of English letters.” In a 2003 article, Washington Post editor Carol Burns wrote of him:

“His reputation as the bad boy of British writing shouldn’t overpower the fact that he’s simply a fantastic writer. His brash, intelligent novels are sharp with insight, and his wordplay makes reading [him] feel like playing: swinging high in a swing, hanging from monkey bars, just having fun.”

A life-long smoker, this week’s Mystery Man died at age 73 from esophageal cancer at his home in Florida in 2023.

who was this man?

08/05/2026

We're nationally famous locally!

Even if you’re paying close attention to the road as you drive down South Broadway, you might not notice one of the hidden gems of Denver’s independent business landscape. The Printed Page Bookshop lives in a charming Victorian cottage on Antique Row. A yellow and black sign on the front porch a...

08/02/2026

Today's Puzzler (a hard one):

On July 29, 1905, this man was born into a Russian-Jewish immigrant household in Worcester, Massachusetts. Three weeks before his birth, his father committed su***de after his dressmaking business went bankrupt, and his mother was so upset she had every trace of her husband removed from the family home.

An extremely bright child, he excelled in every school he ever attended, including Harvard College, from which he graduated in 1926 (an M.A. came a year later). His original goal was to become a Harvard English professor, but he abandoned his doctoral studies after a school official told him the college’s Anglo-Saxon students would not like to be taught by a Jew.

He published his first book of verse in 1930, but his poetry didn’t begin to be appreciated until decades later. Most of his early works were out of print when a new collection, Selected Poems, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1959. In 1974, nearing age seventy, he became a consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress (a precursor to the poet laureate program, which began in 1985).

Many believed the appointment would be his “Swan Song,” but he continued to write to great acclaim, winning the 1995 National Book Award—at age ninety—for Passing Through. In 2000, at age ninety-five, he was officially named poet laureate of the United States, the oldest person so honored. He died at age 100 in 2006.

Who was this man?

07/12/2026

This Week's Puzzler

On July 29, 1805, this man was born in Paris. Growing up, he was raised in an aristocratic French family that had long supported the French Crown. As supporters of Louis XVI, however, they ended up on the losing side during the French Revolution. After the hostilities ended, he spent a brief period of exile in England before returning to France during what is known as The Bourbon Restoration. Like his father before him, he planned a political career, but went about it in an unusual way.

In 1831, he sought and received official permission to travel to the United States, ostensibly to examine American prisons and penitentiaries. In reality, though, he believed that political and cultural developments in America held great promise for France’s future—and he wanted to learn as much as he could about the newly-formed country.

After a nine-month visit that took him as far west as Wisconsin and as far south as Louisiana, he returned to France and produced a small pamphlet on American prison reform. Three years later, in 1835, he published the first volume of his magnum opus: Democracy in America. That book, along with a second volume in 1840, made him famous in France as well as in America—and forever established his reputation in history.

Who was this man?

07/05/2026

This Week's Puzzler

On July 13, 1903, this man was born into a wealthy London family (his father had inherited a fortune from his Scottish ancestors and went on to achieve notoriety as “the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo”). Raised in an atmosphere of privilege and educated at England’s best schools, he developed an early passion for art and carried this passion with him until his death at age 79 in 1983.

He was a teenager at Wi******er College, one of England’s oldest and most prestigious boarding schools for boys, when he became enthralled with the world of art, an interest that was fueled by the writings of the noted English art critic John Ruskin. At age nineteen, he went on to Trinity College, Oxford, where he formally majored in modern history but devoted most of his attention to the study of art.

He was only twenty-five when he wrote his first book (The Gothic Revival) in 1928. In the 1930s and 40s, he served as Director of Britain’s National Gallery. During WWII, he became a national hero for protecting artworks from bombing raids, keeping the museum open to the public, and hosting free lunchtime and evening concerts.

He will be forever remembered, though, as the writer, producer, and host of BBC-TV’s Civilisation, one of broadcast history’s most successful and influential documentary television series (first broadcast in England 1969, and the following year in America on PBS-TV).

Who was this man?

07/04/2026

We are open July 4!

07/04/2026

Our nationally famous Doctor poster...available only at Printed Page.