The Glass Factory

(Hardcover)

For readers of Hillbilly Elegy and Strangers in Their Own Land WINNER OF THE OHIOANA BOOK AWARDS AND FINALIST FOR THE 87TH CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARDS |NAMED A BEST/MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2017 BY: New York Post • Newsweek • The Week • Bustle • Books by the Banks Book Festival • Bookauthority.com The Wall Street Journal: "A devastating portrait...For anyone wondering why swing-state America voted against the establishment in 2016, Mr. Alexander supplies plenty of answers." Laura Miller, Slate: "This book hunts bigger game.Reads like an odd?and oddly satisfying?fusion of George Packer’s The Unwinding and one of Michael Lewis’ real-life financial thrillers." The New Yorker : "Does a remarkable job." Beth Macy, author of Factory Man: "This book should be required reading for people trying to understand Trumpism, inequality, and the sad state of a needlessly wrecked rural America. I wish I had written it." In 1947, Forbes magazine declared Lancaster, Ohio the epitome of the all-American town. Today it is damaged, discouraged, and fighting for its future. In Glass House, journalist Brian Alexander uses the story of one town to show how seeds sown 35 years ago have sprouted to give us Trumpism, inequality, and an eroding national cohesion. The Anchor Hocking Glass Company, once the world’s largest maker of glass tableware, was the base on which Lancaster’s society was built. As Glass House unfolds, bankruptcy looms. With access to the company and its leaders, and Lancaster’s citizens, Alexander shows how financial engineering took hold in the 1980s, accelerated in the 21st Century, and wrecked the company. We follow CEO Sam Solomon, an African-American leading the nearly all-white town’s biggest private employer, as he tries to rescue the company from the New York private equity firm that hired him. Meanwhile, Alexander goes behind the scenes, entwined with the lives of residents as they wrestle with heroin, politics, high-interest lenders, low wage jobs, technology, and the new demands of American life: people like Brian Gossett, the fourth generation to work at Anchor Hocking; Joe Piccolo, first-time director of the annual music festival who discovers the town relies on him, and it, for salvation; Jason Roach, who police believed may have been Lancaster’s biggest drug dealer; and Eric Brown, a local football hero-turned-cop who comes to realize that he can never arrest Lancaster’s real problems.

"When Filomena discovers that a fetid glass factory in a run-down area of Long Island is spewing poisons into the local water supply, she quickly smells a rat. She's sure that her nemesis, a cutthroat industrial polluter with an airtight financial empire, is somehow behind the contamination."--Jacket.

Poetry. Environmental Studies. Chemically speaking, glass is neither a liquid nor a solid; it has properties of both states of being. It is precisely these kinds of ambiguities of experience, internal and external, that McCabe's crisp yet sonically adroit poems seek to reveal. In a world in which all matter is destined for ruin, we find a speaker who again and again not only holds the elusive present in her fierce attention but also praises the very processes that, while ushering new fruit from the trees, erase all that has been, including the familiar self, which is at every moment already "turning, turning" into something other.

The only comprehensive reference book regarding internationally produced glassware for the home, "20th Century Factory Glass" is required reading for glass collectors and enthusiasts alike. Featuring every great designer, from Louis Comfort Tiffany to Alvar Aalto, as well as companies from Baccarat to Steuben, this volume provides clues to identifying marks, codes, and labels.

From the bestselling author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The BFG! Last seen flying through the sky in a giant elevator in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Charlie Bucket's back for another adventure. When the giant elevator picks up speed, Charlie, Willy Wonka, and the gang are sent hurtling through space and time. Visiting the world’' first space hotel, battling the dreaded Vermicious Knids, and saving the world are only a few stops along this remarkable, intergalactic joyride.

Amid the drama of the suffragette movement in Edwardian London, the disappearance of a famous trapeze artist in the middle of her act leads a young Fleet Street reporter to an underworld of circus performers, fetishists, and society columnists. London, 1912. The suffragette movement is reaching a fever pitch, and Inspector Frederick Primrose is hunting a murderer on his beat. Across town, Fleet Street reporter Frances “Frankie” George is chasing an interview with trapeze artist Ebony Diamond. Frankie finds herself fascinated by the tightly-laced acrobat and follows her to a Bond Street corset shop that seems to be hiding secrets of its own. When Ebony Diamond mysteriously disappears in the middle of a performance, Frankie and Primrose are both drawn into the shadowy world of a secret society with ties to both London's criminal underworld and its glittering socialites. How did Ebony vanish, who was she afraid of, and what goes on behind the doors of the mysterious Hourglass Factory? From newsrooms to the drawing rooms of high society, the investigation leads Frankie and Primrose to a murderous villain with a plot more deadly than anyone could have imagined.

It’s 1985 in a small factory town near Pittsburgh. Eight-year-old Karen’s parents are lifelong workers at the Anchor Glass plant, where one Saturday, an employee goes on a shooting spree, killing four supervisors, then himself. This event splits the young girl’s life open, and like her mother, she begins to seek comfort in obsessive rituals and superstitions. This beautifully evocative memoir chronicles the next fourteen years, as Karen moves through girlhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. It illuminates small-town factory life; explores a complicated mother-daughter bond; thoughtfully unfolds a smart, but insecure girl’s coming of age; achingly recounts her attempts to use sex to fit in; and ultimately uncovers the buried secret from her childhood—a medical file with an unbearable report. The Girl Factory deftly travels the intersections of memory and origin. Karen’s body remembers details her mind has tried to control. As the young woman mines her interior landscape for answers, certain questions persist. Where does memory live—in the body or the mind? And can you rewrite the story of your past?

Originally published in 2007 and out of print since 2012, this volume was the first complete history of L. E. Smith, made possible by unprecedented access to factory records, catalogs, photographs, and the company "morgue" - thousands of sample pieces from 100 years of production. It is now available from the Glass Flakes Press, scanned from the original work with minor updates and corrections. In addition to the extensive history, it includes sections identifying all production and many experimental colors, including carnival glass, milk glass, and other opaque colors. Approximately one third of the book is devoted to the major patterns, including Mount Pleasant, Heritage (including many reproductions from the McKee -Tec patterns), Dominion, Simplicity (Smith's answer to Viking's Epic), Moon and Star, Hobnail, Daisy and Button, and many more. The remainder of the book covers specialized products: ruby-stained souvenir ware, candy containers, bedroom and bathroom glassware, animals and covered animals dishes, candlesticks, and punch bowls. A general index, pattern number index, and visual index are included.

America's first and most notorious serial killer and his diabolical killing spree during the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, now updated with a new afterword discussing Holmes' exhumation on American Ripper. H. H. Holmes: The True History of the White City Devil is the first truly comprehensive book examining the life and career of a murderer who has become one of America’s great supervillains. It reveals not only the true story but how the legend evolved, taking advantage of hundreds of primary sources that have never been examined before, including legal documents, letters, articles, and records that have been buried in archives for more than a century. Though Holmes has become just as famous now as he was in 1895, a deep analysis of contemporary materials makes very clear how much of the story as we know came from reporters who were nowhere near the action, a dangerously unqualified new police chief, and, not least, lies invented by Holmes himself. Selzer has unearthed tons of stunning new data about Holmes, weaving together turn-of-the-century America, the killer’s background, and the wild cast of characters who circulated in and about the famous “castle” building. This book will be the first truly accurate account of what really happened in Holmes’s castle of horror, and now includes an afterword detailing the author's participation in Holmes' exhumation on the TV series, American Ripper. Exhaustively researched and painstakingly brought to life, H. H. Holmes will be an invaluable companion to the upcoming Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio movie about Holmes’s murder spree based on Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City.