I was very fortunate that my university had a ton of old Lisp books, and after browsing through a bunch of them I found some really good ones and learned from those. Unfortunately, I don't remember the titles (though a book on CLOS stands out in my memory as being an excellent introduction to the awesome power of OO programming in Lisp), but if you have a university with a good comp sci library you may want to check it out.<p>Parenthetically, I don't know if it's true but I'd heard that there have been more books published on Lisp than all books on other programming languages combined.<p>I'd also recommend that anyone who starts out with Common Lisp give a modern Scheme (like Chicken, Racket, or Guile) a try. I found Scheme to be much more to my taste and once I learned it I viewed CL as quite backwards in many ways, so Scheme is what I use today if I can at all help it.<p>Finally, newbies should check out Emacs and eLisp. eLisp is more primitive than either CL or Scheme, but it's still great when combined with Emacs, which you can customize and improve to your heart's content. In addition, there's a mountain of eLisp code to build on for you Emacs improvement projects. I came to eLisp after learning both CL and Scheme, so it was pretty easy to pick up, and that's what I'd recommend others do too, just so you first learn what Lisp is truly capable of.