The book publishing arm of New York Review of Books (NYRB) has caught my attention.  Since discovering its existence I've told a handful of people that it might be the best publisher in the world.   And it might be.  No one has offered me any alternatives.  Usually, a person will ask me, "What's your favorite book?"  I'll respond, "Anything published by the New York Review of Books.  They're probably the greatest publisher in existence."   And that usually is the end of discussion.  Maybe the person will say, "Hmmm,"  or "Oh really," but the conversation usually drifts to something else.  Of course, I may be wrong.  There's a chance NYRB is a shitty publisher.  I've yet to read every book published by them.  I won't know until I read them all.  My goal is to read them all.  There's a pretty good chance I won't.  I've decided I want to accomplish this by the year 2021.  That gives me quite a bit of time.  I will be forty or something.  This website probably won't still exist.

Of the ones I've read each one has made me want to eat it.  My apologies, saying you want to eat a book because you like it is getting old.  Too many people claim books are so good they want to devore them, but no books actually get eaten.  I'm just as much a hypocrite as anyone else.  I've probably said, "This book is so good it makes me hungry," thirty or forty times in my life.  I think it might be time to literally eat a book.  I once offered to eat Michael Ian Black's book, but he never sent it to me.  Maybe I will eat the next Phillip Roth release. 

I stumbled upon NYRB by chance late in 2008.  I was browsing the shelves at the library and came across Jonathan Williams' Stoner.  The binding of the book caught my attention.  NYRB has a unique binding design you can pick out of any shelf.  After pulling it out, I read the first page and was hooked.  The fateful first sentence from Stoner wasn't anything special, "William Stoner entered the University of Missouri in the year 1910, at the age of nineteen," but for whatever reason I kept reading.  When I finished reading it and returned it to the library I was a little sad the experience was over, but I figured that was all there was.  Then, about a month later, I was browsing the shelves again and another NYRB binding caught my attention.  This time it was Darcy O'Brien's A Way of Life, Like Any Other.  Again, I was drawn in.  When I was finished I began searching for the distinguishable NYRB binding when I went to the library.  Since then I've read three other NYRBs. 

The covers of NYRBs are great as well.  To give you a better idea I'll show you a few:

Maybe my greatest find or surprise in relation to NYRB though was when I went to a local book store, Book Soup, and found they had a whole shelf devoted to NYRB (as seen below).