Books published by Bibliotech Press

Harold MacGrath (1871-1932) was a bestselling American novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter. As a young man, he worked as a reporter and columnist on the Syracuse Herald newspaper until the late 1890s when he published his first novel, a romance titled Arms and the Woman (1899). According to the New York Times, his next book, The Puppet Crown (1901) was the No. 7 bestselling book in the United States in 1901. From that point on, MacGrath never looked back, writing novels for the mass market about love, adventure, mystery, spies, and the like at an average rate of more than one a year. ... A review of "The Pagan Madonna"... I found the story a very enjoyable drama with the characters deftly handled. It is an end of the war story as a young woman and a captain are returning to America from Russia and they get caught up in a grand theft and kidnapped aboard a yacht of an art collector, which is where things are to get really interesting. (Dave from Calgary)

The Gift is a short book by the French sociologist Marcel Mauss that is the foundation of social theories of reciprocity and gift exchange.Mauss's original piece was entitled Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l'échange dans les sociétés archaïques ("An essay on the gift: the form and reason of exchange in archaic societies") and was originally published in L'Année Sociologique in 1925. The essay was later republished in French in 1950 and translated into English in 1954 by Ian Cunnison, in 1990 by W. D. Halls, and in 2016 by Jane I. Guyer. Mauss's essay focuses on the way that the exchange of objects between groups builds relationships between humans.It analyzes the economic practices of various so-called archaic societies and finds that they have a common central practice centered on reciprocal exchange. In them, he finds evidence contrary to the presumptions of modern Western societies about the history and nature of exchange. He shows that early exchange systems center around the obligations to give, to receive, and, most importantly, to reciprocate. They occur between groups, not only individuals, and they are a crucial part of "total phenomena" that work to build not just wealth and alliances but social solidarity because "the gift" pervades all aspects of the society. He uses a comparative method, drawing upon published secondary scholarship on peoples from around the world, but especially the Pacific Northwest (especially potlatch).After examining the reciprocal gift-giving practices of each, he finds in them common features, despite some variation. From the disparate evidence, he builds a case for a foundation to human society based on collective (vs. individual) exchange practices. In so doing, he refutes the English tradition of liberal thought, such as utilitarianism, as distortions of human exchange practices. He concludes by speculating that social welfare programs may be recovering some aspects of the morality of the gift within modern market economies. (wikipedia.org)