The HOPL books & papers are great, too. Most (if not all) should be available on citeseer / google scholar. I have the HOPL II book and trivially found all the papers from HOPL III online.
I particularly like the history papers for Lisp, Lua, Erlang, and Forth, but, personal biases.
Another good one: Sammet's _Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals_. (The superior design of Lisp and APL gets asymptotically more embarrassing in retrospect.)
I get the impression Peter Landin was ahead of his time. I love this paper. It's worth a read by anyone interested in compilers or functional programming.
I particularly like the history papers for Lisp, Lua, Erlang, and Forth, but, personal biases.
Another good one: Sammet's _Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals_. (The superior design of Lisp and APL gets asymptotically more embarrassing in retrospect.)