As I wrote on Monday, we’re boxing up books in preparation for some house renovations. You were kind enough to take 21 autographed paperback copies of At the Water’s Edge off our hands–in about three hours.

Well, we have even more books that we’d rather sell than pack.

Here’s our new deal: we’ve got 17 autographed copies of the American hardback edition of Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life. The hardback edition is out of print, but between now and next Thursday, you can buy them for the low, low price of ten dollars from my Amazon store. (Cue Crazy Eddie again!)

In Microcosm, I tilt at one of my favorite windmills: the definition of life. But rather than try to take on all of life on Earth, I chose one species–the one that we know best of all. That would be our gastrointestinal lodger, Escherichia coli, the little bug that helped build modern biology and launch the entire biotechnology industry. In my biography of this scrutinized germ, I explore the origin of life, our inner ecology, and the search for life on other planets. You ...