"When man is tired of London," wrote Samuel Johnson in 1750, "he is tired of life." I bought this wonderful history of the London gin craze for the U.S. market as one of the first books we published at Justin, Charles & Co. We worked with Patrick Dillon to add material to make all the eighteenth-century British language, currency, and weights-and-measures (how much is a dram, anyway?) explicable to an American audience, and gave it a more American cover and title. This is still a favorite of mine.