The Steampunk Bible by Jeff Vandermeer. I was at work looking through a list of upcoming nonfiction Steampunk titles, without any thought of being able to buy them for any of my library collections. Then I wondered where The Steampunk Bible would actually fall. And – score! 809.387, in the Dewey 800s (literature), one of the areas for which I do the purchasing. Even more exciting, it appeared on our weekly front-page of the Web site carousel of new purchases. That generated enough demand that I had to buy a second copy, a moment of geeky librarian happiness.

The Steampunk Bible is a book filled with contrasting pages of large and beautiful pictures opposite pages of dense text. It is a history of Steampunk movement from its early origins in the literature of Charles Verne and H.G. Wells, through to the first works to use the term Steampunk in the 1980s and today’s mushrooming Steampunk movement. In addition to literature, including graphic novels, film, art, music and costume all receive chapters with profiles of people and works. If you want to feel like an expert even without living Steampunk yourself, you can read through it all. And if you just want to see lots of beautiful and inspiring Steampunk imagery, you can just flip through and absorb the pictures. Since every chapter has lists of more things to explore, this could easily be the beginning of a new obsession.

Cross-posted to http://library-mama.dreamwidth.org and http://sapphireone.livejournal.com .