There are many readers who love to read biographies. Luckily for them, there are a lot of choices. Literally hundreds of biographies are published every month. But for the reader who is interested in the history of specific books—“book biographies” if you will—the pickings are very slim. Luckily, there has been a mini-boomlet in book biographies recently. Perhaps this is a harbinger of a new trend in publishing. If that is the case, let us hope the future crop will be as good as these recent examples:

NPR’s Fresh Air book critic Maureen Corrigan has written a fascinating book about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. In So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures, Corrigan examines the history of the book from its creation, to near-obscurity, to its eventual climb to the top of the literary canon. She claims to have read the novel about 50 times and it shows in the close reading of the text.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is considered to be the first great work of world literature, so one would think that that there would be a book written about its history, and as it so happens, there is! David Damrosch's The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh traces the book's composition, modification, the loss of the text and its ultimate rediscovery in 1872. He divides his work into the history of it discovery and an analysis of the importance of the epic story in the development of world literature.

Although Kevin Birmingham does touch on the creation of James Joyce's Ulysses in The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses, the focus of his text is an examination of its publishing history, particularly the legal battle that was waged when attempts were made to ban (and even burn extant copies of) the book. That may lead you to think that the book will be a dry read, but it is actually a smart, superbly written cultural history wrapped on the guise of a legal thriller.

Another example of a banned book is Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, although in this instance it was banned in the Soviet Union. Peter Finn and Petra Couvee's The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book is a Cold War political thriller that recounts the CIA's efforts to help print and disseminate copies of the book to Russian citizens after it was smuggled out of the USSR to Italy and became a best seller in Europe.

In Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind: A Bestseller's Odyssey From Atlanta to Hollywood, Ellen Firsching Brown takes on perhaps the most famous popular book ever written. Besides writing about Mitchell's creation process and the history of its publication, Brown also examines the book's adaptation into a Oscar-winning film, as well as the Mitchell estate's battle to protect its copyright (which is set to expire in 2031).

Alberto Manguel is probably the closest thing we have to a "reading historian." He's written a number of books about reading, libraries and the culture of books, but only one book about one book. Actually, that isn't quite accurate, because the book in question, Homer's the Iliad and the Odyssey: A Biography, is about two books. In this historical survey of Homer's epic poems, Manguel examines the history of the texts, the various translations of the works, as well as the impact they have had throughout history. The fact that he was able to do all of that—successfully—in a book of fewer than 300 pages demonstrates how good of a writer he is.

And finally, although it is not strictly a "book biography," Nathaniel Philbrick's Why Read Moby-Dick? is one Melville groupie's love song to the brilliance and importance of—in his words—"the genetic code of America." In this concise, yet incisive book, Philbrick tells us why Moby-Dick was important in the past and why it remains so today.

Of course, in order to obtain maximal pleasure from reading any of these books, you should read (or re-read) the books they are about. Yes, that’s a lot of reading, but honestly, what else were you going to do? Watch TV?