Books you should own...(Periodicals coming soon)

Many of the titles below are linked to Amazon.com, which generally has the lowest prices and best availability on these titles, many of which may be difficult to find in most bookstores.

The "Ouotebooks"

(As you can see, the Captain is quite a fan of quotebooks.  Good quotebooks, if you know how to use them, can be worth more in your extemp files than a year's worth of The Economist. (They also cost a lot less and never go out of date)  And when writing oratories, they save time and often help produce a better product.

The Quotable Lawyer is pound-for-pound the most valuable book of topic-indexed quotations you can ever have in your files.  The Captain has used it extensively in writing Oratories and in nearly every Extemp he ever gave.  The Captain, in fact, once wrote an entire debate case in a pinch using only this book, and won.  

The Word Lover's Book of Unfamiliar Quotations is also an excellent source for great speech quotations on almost any topic.  Like any good speaking quote book should be, it is the opposite of Bartlett's.  And it is so well organized that you can usually find what you're looking for in about 30 seconds.

The 2,548 Best Things Anybody Ever Said is a rather off-beat quotebook that is second to none in providing excellent oratory material.  However, its unusual organization, designed for effect rather than efficiency, makes it difficult to find things quickly enough to make it a good extemp resource.

The Quotable Mark Twain is an extremely well-organized collection of the finest quotes of America's greatest wit, most you will surprisingly not have heard before.  This book is thus an excellent source for the extemp files and oratory, as Mark Twain provides some of the finest American wit on a variety of subjects

The other work that always occupied a place in Nitro's extemp files was The New Dictionary of Thoughts, by Tryon Edwards.  It is now out of print, but if you can find a copy, it's well worth it.  (This book can quite often be found in school and public libraries)

The Fact Books

The CIA World Factbook 2000 contains more or less everything you ever wanted to know about every nation and international organization in the world.  Published by the Central Intelligence Agency, it is an outstanding general info and statistics resource for extemp. (and it's really fun citing things; "according to the CIA...")

Statistical Abstract of the United States is the US census bureau's yearly compilation of statistics from many federal agencies on every aspect of the United States, from Government spending to how much electricity the average American uses.  This is without question the first and last source of statistics for US extemp and debate.