We purge, you save! Get an autographed hardcover copy of Microcosm

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 can find out more about the book on at carlzimmer.com, or check out this review from Anthony Doerr in the Boston Globe, in which he calls it “quietly revolutionary.”

Thanks for saving us from the purgatory of boxing books. If our stash runs out before you get a chance to buy a copy, bear in mind that the paperback and Kindle editions are still in print, and I have plenty of other autographed books for sale.

Update 3 pm: Wow! We sold them all in 85 minutes. Keep an eye out for more sales like this in days to come.