Lengthy lineages

A handful of local bookstores and bookbinders are among the dozens of century-old shops and establishments chronicled in a new pocket-size guide.

"The Historic Shops and Restaurants of Boston," by Phyllis Méras ( Little Bookroom), addresses both colorful beginnings -- from a silversmith-turned-flute - maker to a factory that made hardtack for the Union Army -- and enduring longevity.

Founded in 1825, the Brattle Book Shop, in Boston, is believed to be the oldest continuously operated antiquarian bookstore in the nation. Founded in 1856, Schoenhof's Foreign Books, in Cambridge, has the largest selection of foreign - language books in North America.

Local bookbinders have a place in this handsome guide, too. Acme Bookbinding, in Charlestown, bound "Uncle Tom's Cabin," by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Harcourt Bindery, in Boston, produced a limited-edition volume of " The Diary of Anne Frank" that was illustrated with 12 original watercolors and also made a leather slipcase to protect Charles Dickens's sleeping cap.

Beacon Press this month has published a lyrical, acutely observed memoir, "Without a Map," by Meredith Hall. Hall became pregnant out of wedlock in 1965 as a teenager growing up in Hampton, N.H. Her school, community, and parents shunned her. After being forced to give her baby up for adoption, a devastated Hall wandered overseas, selling her clothes to buy food and sleeping in sheds. Once, a Syrian shepherd, appalled at her emaciation, fed her ewe's milk.

Gradually she turned her life around. At 44, Hall graduated from Bowdoin College. She began writing as a way of understanding what she had experienced. Hall calls her memoir "a reckoning over my shoulder into my past and a reckoning of my being in the world." She now teaches writing at the University of New Hampshire.

Howard Zinn, a retired Boston University history professor, is reaching out to young minds. His "A People's History of the United States" has sold well since it was published, in 1980 . Now Seven Stories Press has adapted it for 10- to 14-year-olds as the two-volume "A Young People's History of the United States."

Illustrations and photographs have been added and the text trimmed, but the book still includes the voices of folks who are not usually quoted in history books, like David Walker, the son of a slave, who in 1829 urged blacks to fight for their freedom: "[Whites] have no more right to hold us in slavery than we have to hold them."

Zinn will speak at 6 p.m. Thursday at Coolidge Corner Theatre, 290 Harvard St., Brookline. Tickets, available at Brookline Booksmith, are $2.

"The Yiddish Policem en's Union," by Michael Chabon (HarperCollins)

"Dream When You're Feeling Blue," by Elizabeth Berg (Random House)

"Silent Partner: A Memoir of My Marriage," by Dina Matos McGreevey (Hyperion)

Megan Sullivan of Harvard Book Store recommends "Generation Loss," by Elizabeth Hand (Small Beer ): "This smart, dark, literary thriller will keep you up at night. A photographer who has been drinking, doing drugs, and alienating everyone around her since the '70s goes to Maine to interview a legendary photographer and gets caught up in the case of a missing girl."

Jan Gardner can be reached at JanLGardner@yahoo.com.