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The Owner of The Mysterious Bookshop Built His Dream House

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a good 60,000 books must be in want of a very big house. At some point in the mid-1980s, Otto Penzler, the indefatigable founder and proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop, the Manhattan store specializing in fictitious tales of crime and espionage and whodunits of a high order, could no longer ignore the evidence: His personal collection of first editions had outgrown his office, and cartons containing the overflow were stashed in a pal’s garage. They needed a room of their own. Read more

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Mark Twain’s Connecticut Estate Lists for $4.2 Million

Twain, whose given name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, built “Stormfield” in 1908 in the style of a Tuscan villa and named it after his short story “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven,” according to the listing with Laura Freed Ancona of William Pitt and Julia B. Fee Sotheby’s International Realty, who brought the home in Redding to the market on Saturday. Read more