Over on the sidebar at right readers will find a link to Amazon.com, more specific links to three dozen or so recently published books recommended by Rittenhouse, and, as added more recently, a link to the Rittenhouse “Wish List” at Amazon.

I don’t yet know who to thank, but within the last few days a Rittenhouse reader ordered and arranged to send to me Puritan Boston & Quaker Philadelphia, by E. Digby Baltzell, easily the item on the wish list I most desired, and a book I mentioned in passing here last week.

I hope I can thank personally the generous reader who sent this gift, not only because this is just really a darn nice thing to do and all that, but because this particular book is essential to one of my current research projects, as are most on the wish list, but also one I hope will eventually help lead to a book of my own, or more likely, or at least, a magazine article, about a certain period of Philadelphia history.

So thanks. Many thanks. Whoever you are, know and feel good that you haven’t lined my pockets, you’ve contributed to and supported the kind of work that gets an unjustifiably unemployed (They said it, I didn’t!) and all-around pretty-damned-unhappy-lately writer out of bed in the morning.