The Library Secret Service (hint: not a real organization) explains the rules for the care of library books.

How should you grow your organization? Its one of the most challenging questions an executive team faces and the wrong answer can break your firm. So where do you start? By asking the right questions, argue INSEADs Laurence Capron and coauthor Will Mitchell, of Duke Universitys Fuqua School of Business and the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. Drawing on more than two decades of research and teaching, Capron and Mitchell have found that a firms aptitude for determining the best resource pathways for its growth has a defining impact on its success. Theyve come up with a helpful framework, reflecting practices of a variety of successful global organizations, to help you determine which path is best for yours.

With her older sister planning a wedding and her younger sister preparing to launch a career on the stage, Lulu can't help but feel like the failure of the Atwater family. Lulu loves her sisters dearly and wants nothing but the best for them, but she finds herself stuck in a rut. When her mother sends her to look for some old family recipes in the attic, she stumbles across a collection of letters written by her great-great-grandmother Josephine March. Jo writes in detail about every aspect of her life: her older sister Meg's new home and family; her younger sister Amy's many admirers; the family's shared grief over losing Beth; and her own feelings towards a handsome young German. As Lulu delves deeper into the lives of the March sisters, she finds solace and guidance, but can her great-great-grandmother help Lulu find a place in a world so different from the one Jo knew?--From publisher description.

In this lively history of consumer debt in America, economic historian Louis Hyman demonstrates that today’s problems are not as new as we think. Borrow examines how the rise of consumer borrowing—virtually unknown before the twentieth century—has altered our culture and economy. Starting in the years before the Great Depression, increased access to money raised living standards but also introduced unforeseen risks. As lending grew more and more profitable, it displaced funds available for business borrowing, setting our economy on an unsustainable course. Told through the vivid stories of individuals and institutions affected by these changes, Borrow charts the collision of commerce and culture in twentieth-century America, giving an historical perspective on what is new—and what is not—in today’s economic turmoil. A Paperback Original

The books you lend are usually the ones you least want to lose. Here's a sure way to track them: the borrower is given a handsome bookmark with your name on top; you keep the stub, noting the title, date, and name of the borrower. Tidy and effective -- it works!

"Art is theft," Picasso once proclaimed, and much of the best and most "original" new art involves an act or two of unequivocal, overt theft. Paradoxically, the law relating to artistic borrowing has grown more restrictive. "The plagiarism and copyright trials of the twenty-first century are what the obscenity trials were to the twentieth century," Kenneth Goldsmith, has observed. "These are really the issues of our time." Beg, Steal and Borrow offers a comprehensive and provocative survey of a complex subject that is destined to grow in relevance and importance. It traces an artistic lineage of appropriation from Michelangelo to Jeff Koons, and examines the history of its legality from the sixteenth century to now.

How Governments Borrow reveals how annual borrowing decisions are informed by domestic politics. The book traces the annual fiscal policymaking process in Emerging Markets (EM) to show how a government's partisan policy preferences are a primary determinant of annual external borrowing decisions and thus patterns of debt accumulation. That sovereign debt composition has partisan political roots provides insights for scholars in political science, international relations, economics, sociology, and public administration that work on sovereign debt. Sovereign debt composition enhances or limits the capacity of an EM government to contribute to social and economic development. Many EMs depend on foreign currency debt. How much external debt an EM government owes, the cost of that debt, the maturity of that debt, and the conditions attached to that debt all determine the political and economic opportunities and risks associated with a government's borrowings. EMs borrow from different sources each year, leading them to build different sovereign debt structures over time. Some prioritize cheap yet conditional official credit, which constrains policy autonomy but enhances debt sustainability. Others prioritize comparatively expensive bond markets, which enhances policy autonomy but brings more expensive repayment obligations on to national balance sheets. As countries accumulate debt, the borrowing choices they make come to have important effects on fiscal space, debt sustainability, and development.