WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — "Havana Before Castro" (Gibbs Smith) is a lovely trade paperback devoted to places like the Nacional Hotel, the Tropicana, and various and sundry feather shows. This is a lush, fascinating book organized around landmarks, with hundreds of photographs and postcards of the city when it was the tropical playground for both the northern and southern hemispheres. Special attention is paid to the Mob's presence, and author Peter Moruzzi — an architecture historian by profession — also prints some tantalizing recipes for various drinks and food dishes.
It's nostalgic one-stop shopping, and highly recommended.
Norton and editor Leslie Klinger had a great success a few years ago with their three-volume "Annotated Sherlock Holmes," so they're returned to the well of perennial Victoriana with "The New Annotated Dracula." Bram Stoker's novel has always been among the most readable Victorian classics, and remains genuinely chilling.
There was a previous stab at this book more than 30 years ago by Leonard Wolf, but much documentation has come to light since then, and, unlike the previous books, Klinger had access to Stoker's complete original manuscript. There are good appendixes on the stage and film adaptations of the novel, and more than 200 illustrations. Klinger's frequent — I almost wrote "incessant" notations — add a great deal of knowledge, although I find his underlying fancy that the events and characters of "Dracula" are real and not a work of fiction tiresome.
In the Pipeline...
Rob Sheffield, who has recently moved from Rolling Stone to Blender, will write "13 Ways of Looking at a Pop Song" for Three Rivers. Sheffield wrote the very good "Love Is a Mix Tape" last year.
Mike Browning's Word of the Week. . . limicolous: living in mud.