Over the years, Agate has published a variety of books in partnership with the Chicago Tribune. From true crime collections to decade-by-decade looks at the city’s sports teams, these titles are full of facts, photography, and stories that readers of all stripes will love!
Vintage Chicago
The @vintagetribune Instagram, a photography account run by the photo editors of the Chicago Tribune, has been sharing the newspaper’s vast archives since 2014. The photos in this collection aren’t the front-page, history-making photographs we’re used to seeing from photojournalists. These are images that would have been posted had Instagram existed in, say, 1932. Vintage Chicago is an inspired portrait of one of the world’s great cities, told through the lenses of countless feet-on-the-street photographers.
The Best of Royko
For more than 30 years, Mike Royko was a part of the daily fabric of Chicagoans’ lives, penning often humorous and always honest columns first for the Chicago Daily News, then the Sun-Times, and finally the Tribune. Culled from thousands of his Tribune columns and edited by his son David Royko, The Best of Royko offers up his best material from the last stage in his career, which was cut short by his premature death in 1997.
Chicago Flashback
Since 2011, the Chicago Tribune has been pulling from its vast archive of photos and stories for its weekly Chicago Flashback feature, which deals with the significant people and events that have shaped the city’s history and culture from the paper’s founding in 1847 to today. Now the editors of the Tribune have carefully collected the best, most interesting features into a single coffee-table volume—Chicago Flashback. Each story is accompanied by at least one black-and-white image from the paper’s fabled photo vault located deep below Michigan Avenue’s famed Tribune Tower.
10 Things You Might Not Know About Nearly Everything
For years, the Chicago Tribune’s popular weekly column 10 Things You Might Not Know has been entertaining readers while informing them on a diverse range of fascinating subjects. 10 Things You Might Not Know About Nearly Everything is a carefully curated collection of these columns, presented in a fun, easy-to-read format. This book provides well-researched, obscure facts on a variety of topics such as arts, culture, money, food, politics, war, science, technology, language, and more.
The Chicago Tribune Book of the Chicago White Sox
For more than a century, the Tribune has documented every Sox season through original reporting, photography, and box scores. For the first time, this mountain of Sox history has been mined and curated by the paper’s sports department into a single one-of-a-kind volume: The Chicago Tribune Book of the Chicago White Sox. Each era in Sox history includes its own timeline, profiles of key players and coaches, and feature stories that highlight it all, from the heavy hitters to the no-hitters to the one-hit wonders.
A Century of Progress
A Century of Progress is a collection of rare—and in many cases, previously unseen—photographs that document the Century of Progress International Exposition, the world’s fair held in Chicago from 1933 to 1934. Conceived during the Roaring Twenties and born during the Great Depression, this sprawling event celebrated the city’s centennial with industrial and scientific displays, lascivious entertainment, and a touch of unadulterated bad taste. The fair left an indelible mark on American culture, and A Century of Progress captures that feeling through its historic photographs.
Capone
Capone is a visual retelling of the rise and eventual fall of Chicago’s most notorious gangster: Alphonse “Scarface” Capone. Comprised of many previously unreleased photographs from the Chicago Tribune’s vast archives, Capone reveals the Roaring Twenties and the early days of organized crime. Taken from 1926 to 1952, these photos focus on Capone and his network of family, friends, and enemies. All the photos—high-quality scans of original glass-plate negatives—are historically significant for both those interested in Capone and photography buffs in general.
Life Skills
How do you give a good wedding toast? How do you fix a clogged drain? How do you end a relationship? Collected from the popular Life Skills column in the Chicago Tribune, this book is filled with often humorous instructions on performing tasks that many of us have never gotten around to figuring out. Some are truly useful explanations of technical topics, while others are good for a laugh or cover the more ambiguous areas of relationships, careers, and social interaction. With chapters on home economics, the office, recreation, and social issues, Life Skills is a unique guide to the many skills it takes a lifetime to learn and perfect.