Sounds interesting. I've been doing a little bit of reading lately too. I recently got a copy of "The Honeywell Pentax Book" (6th edition, 1973) for my birthday - it's by Herb Keppler, who I think is pretty well-known in the photography circles, and from what I've read so far, is very good. Certainly the reviews are terrific and most of the content in it can apply to any camera. It is funny to read about the advantages of the screw-mount over the bayonet mount that some other companies were using; of course, Pentax switched to a bayonet mount a couple years later.

It's a relatively small old book but actually has a lot of pages, just on thin paper. It's a few hundred pages.
I also was at Borders a few days ago and happened to see one called "The New Manual of Photography" in the bargain pile for $5, it looked to have some decent stuff on composition and lighting and so on, so I grabbed that. It rang up at $4, even better.

So far it's pretty good. Written in 2003, it mentions digital but mostly talks about film, which is fine since I'm not concerned about the tech side of things. I did notice later that the vast majority of pics in it were taken on Pentaxes.
My other fairly-recent photo book addition is one from 1874 or so. It's called Shepp's Photographs of the World, and is photos of landmarks around the world. The age of the book and the photographs intrigued me (and I always like travel shots, too.) I did find out later that you can
download the book for free but it's not quite the same as having the actual real book in front of you.