If you're anything like me, you enjoy reading books related to books. In-depth or "trivia," anything to do with literature, authors, and words is entertaining, perhaps inspiring.Today's post highlights two worthy collections. 

Literary Miscellany: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Literature, by Alex Palmer, is laid out in easy-to-read, colorfully illustrated pages, with dip-into tidbits interspersed throughout.  It's filled with fascinating little-known facts.

For example:

• Mark Twain helped Ulysses S. Grant get a much better royalty deal on his memoir by referring him to the publisher who did Huckleberry Finn.

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge stated in 1808 that if novel reading became a habit, it would mean "the entire destruction of the powers of the mind."

• "It's like taking a cow and boiling it down to a bouillon cube," said John Le Carre about adapting some of his spy novels into films.

• Louisa May Alcott led an early charge to have The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn banned for its crude language.

1,001 Words and Phrases You Never Knew You Didn't Know: Hopperdozer, Hoecake, Ear Trumpet, Dort, and Ohter Nearly Forgotten Terms and Expressions by W. R. Runyan is aimed at the linguistic oddity fancier, history buff or historical fiction reader. It's a treasure trove of odd old words. Author Runyan grew up in Oklahoma in the horse-powered era, and his choice of words is Americana at its most amusing and arcane.