Calling all Geeks to a Night of Nerdery at the Doylestown Bookshop!

Come celebrate true geekery with us as we host Jeff Ryan and Stephen Segal, who will be talking about their new books, Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America and Geek Wisdom: The Sacred Teachings of Nerd Culture.

After the book discussion and signing, The County Theater will be helping to prolong this night of nerd-dom. At 8 o'clock there will be a special screening of The Princess Bride. Literally one of the best movies ever.

"You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles."

Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America
Nintendo has continually set the standard for video-game innovation in America, starting in 1981 with a plucky hero who jumped over barrels to save a girl from an ape. The saga of Mario, the portly plumber who became the most successful franchise in the history of gaming, has plot twists worthy of a video game. Jeff Ryan shares the story of how this quintessentially Japanese company found success in the American market. Lawsuits, Hollywood, die- hard fans, and face-offs with Sony and Microsoft are all part of the drama.

The unexpected approach that allowed Nintendo to reinvent itself as the gaming system for the non-gamer, especially now with the Wii Even those who can't tell a Koopa from a Goomba will find this a fascinating story of striving, comeuppance, and redemption.

Jeff Ryan, a lifelong gamer, has been featured on Salon.com and All Things Considered. He reviewed over five hundred video games and covered four console launches as the games editor for Katrillion, a popular dotcom-era news and entertainment Web site. He lives in Bloomfield, New Jersey.

Geek Wisdom: The Sacred Teachings of Nerd Culture
Computer nerds are our titans of industry; comic-book superheroes are our Hollywood idols; the Internet is our night on the town. Clearly, geeks know something about life in the 21st century that other folks don’t—something we all can learn from. Geek Wisdom takes as gospel some 200 of the most powerful and oft-cited quotes from movies (“Where we’re going, we don’t need roads”), television (“Now we know—and knowing is half the battle”), literature (“All that is gold does not glitter”), games, science, the Internet, and more.

Now these beloved pearls of modern-day culture have been painstakingly interpreted by a diverse team of hardcore nerds with their imaginations turned up to 11. Yes, this collection of mini-essays is by, for, and about geeks—but it’s just so surprisingly profound, the rest of us would have to be dorks not to read it. So say we all.

Stephen H. Segal is the Hugo Award winning senior contributing editor to Weird Tales, the world’s oldest fantasy/sci-fi/horror magazine, and an editor at Quirk Books. His geek portfolio includes work for Tor Books, Viz Media, and WQED Pittsburgh, and Carnegie Mellon. A native of Atlantic City, he lives in Philadelphia.