Welcome to Bristol & Lynden Press.
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We publish books focused on the history and popular culture of Chicago and the Midwest.
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Our Featured Titles
HEYDAYS: Great Stories in Chicago Sports
Chicago nonfiction/history
by Christopher Tabbert
A celebration of the greatest sports town in the world.
Heydays revisits the greatest teams, people, and events in Chicago sports history--from the crosstown World Series of 1906 to the world-champion Cubs of 2016, and everything in between. Heydays covers unforgettable teams including the 1908 Cubs, 1919 White Sox, 1934 Blackhawks, 1940 Bears, 1963 Loyola Ramblers, 1969 Cubs, 1985 Bears, 1996 Bulls, 2005 White Sox, 2010 Blackhawks, and many more. It also relives the exploits of Ernie Banks, George Halas, Gabby Hartnett, Bobby Hull, Michael Jordan, Paul Konerko, Sid Luckman, Stan Mikita, Walter Payton, and Jonathan Toews, among others. Heydays is required reading for the Chicago sports fan.
GHOSTS OF BIRCH LAKE
Literary fiction
by Christopher Tabbert
"A lake, like a forest, is timeless, mysterious, and, depending on your point of view, either magical or frightening."
In Ghosts of Birch Lake, four narrators provide oral histories covering a quarter century from the late 1930s to the early 1960s. They tell their stories as they orbit around the enigmatic central character, who seems to lead a charmed life. Along the way, the primary settings--bustling Chicago and a rustic resort in Wisconsin's north woods--virtually become characters in their own right. Finally, the narrators' separate stories merge together over the course of one fateful spring and summer. As events and their consequences grow ever more difficult to control, the novel twists and turns toward its devastating conclusion.
THE LIVES OF LINCOLN
Biography
by writers from Lincoln's own time
"We all declare for liberty, but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing." -- Abraham Lincoln
The Lives of Lincoln is a collective biography by writers from his own time. The defining events of Lincoln's life and career, along with fascinating descriptions of his personality and behavior, are presented chronologically in forty-five selections, each by a different author. Their accounts illuminate both the public and private man. Authors include Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ulysses S. Grant, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mary Henry, James Russell Lowell, Elizabeth Keckley, Nicolay & Hay, William Seward, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ida Tarbell, Walt Whitman, and (through a brief autobiographical sketch) Lincoln himself.
THE CHICAGO RACE RIOTS: July, 1919
Nonfiction/history
by Carl Sandburg
"The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line." -- W. E. B. Du Bois
Carl Sandburg was not yet an internationally famous poet and author when he wrote a series of articles about contemporary race relations for the Chicago Daily News in 1919. The Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to industrial centers like Chicago was well underway, and Sandburg was one of the first journalists to perceptively explore the complex and potentially incendiary social, economic, and political forces that were at work. When Chicago erupted in interracial violence, Sandburg was viewed as a prophet. His articles for the Daily News were published in book form for posterity, and they are presented anew in this volume, a century after their first appearance.
YOU KNOW ME AL
Baseball fiction/humor
by Ring Lardner
A new centennial edition of the classic novel.
First published in 1916, You Know Me Al has captivated readers for
a century and counting. It is perhaps the greatest baseball book ever written, but (of course) it's about more than baseball. It's about human nature.
The protagonist is Jack Keefe, a very green young pitcher trying
to make good with the Chicago White Sox. The story is told through a series of semiliterate and unwittingly hilarious letters written by Keefe to his friend Al back home. These letters describe the halting progress of Keefe's baseball career and love life, inevitably revealing more about him than he realizes. In the letters, Keefe often justifies his actions by falling back on the phrase "You know me Al."
The contemporary critic H.L. Mencken called You Know Me Al
"a contribution of genuine and permanent value to the national literature."