We’re keeping an eye on a new series from Fordham University Press called “Empire State Editions,” an imprint devoted to books about New York State, with an emphasis on New York City and the Hudson Valley.

The series will be launched in November with the second edition of Patrick Bunyan’s All Around the Town: Amazing Manhattan Facts and Curiosities. The second edition is 368 pages long with 150 black-and-white photographs, and (at 5×8) it’s a little more portable than its predecessor (which was 9×8). The book’s entries are organized by street address and offer historical accounts of well-known and not-so-well-known events, as well as amusing anecdotes about life in Manhattan from the early Dutch days to the present. It should make an excellent supplement to the recently updated AIA Guide to New York City, which by the way is available in a Kindle edition.

Apparently, Empire State Editions will also gather together a number of books already published by Fordham UP, including Brian Cudahy’s