Jon's Writing in Idaho Magazine

I had the good fortune to be able to write a feature in the June issue of Idaho Magazine about Richard "Two Gun" Hart. Hart was a lawman, busting up bootleggers in the wilds of Idaho during Prohibition. Funny thing, though. His brother was one of the most notorious men alive during Prohibition - Al Capone.

Go to your favorite independent bookstore and look for the magazine if you'd like. Happy reading!

Hitler's Mein Kampf - The Global Art Project

Take Mein Kampf. Give it to artists. Then see what they come up with.

Your Summer Reading List

It's that annual time of year when people go to the beach eager to read (books in their satchel near the sun tan lotion), and decide to snooze instead.

But what did people read in the the summers in the '80s? The '60s? The '30s? The Washington Post has the answer.

What Good Are Authors' Estates?

That is the question Virginia Quarterly Review asks, what with all the hullabaloo over estates lately (Nabakov, Steinbeck, etc).

From the piece...

All writers strive towards immortality, but if you are among this aspirational group, it’s prudent to bet on falling short. That is: you will die, and if your works are any good, and thereby profitable to concerned parties, a melodramatic and legalistic morass may appear sooner than any volumes of collected works. Yet many writers fail to make adequate preparations regarding their literary estates, and the two most common mistakes seem to be: 1) no will (or a legally dubious one); and 2) leaving inept, rapacious family members in charge.

Let’s look at a few infamous cases. Stieg Larsson, author of the Millennium trilogy of crime novels, which have been spectacularly popular, posthumously, died at age 50. (One friend claims that his last words were, “I’m 50 for Christ’s sake!”) He had no will and never married his long-time domestic partner, Eva Gabrielsson, who’s now in an ongoing legal dispute with Larsson’s father and brother, the author’s heirs under Swedish law. Franz Kafka famously asked his friend Max Brod to burn all of his work. Fortunate for literary posterity, Brod didn’t burn a thing, but his own papers, which include some Kafka manuscripts of potentially immense value, were left in a moldering Tel Aviv apartment. The saga surrounding them is ongoing (some papers were possibly stolen quite recently), and Haaretz has done a fine job of covering this mess.

Jon's Writing in Sublime Magazine

I had the good fortune to write a piece in Sublime Magazine recently. Based in London, Sublime, so says their website, "is a bi-monthly international lifestyle magazine with ethical values and intelligent content. Sublime is authentic, honest and fresh. It explores community and celebrates diversity and individuality. It captures the spirit of our time. Sublime is urban, entertaining, informative and thought provoking. And above all, Sublime is an independent voice."

Look for the most recent issue at one of your higher-end independent bookstores! Within the "Together" issue I discuss the future of public transportation.

The 18 Best Batman Panels Ever

There's been quite a few panels to choose from, to be honest. Batman #700 was just published. Comic Book Alliance does their best, though.

Walker Evans, Decade by Decade

One of my favorite photographers is discussed, with a brief slide show, at Vanity Fair.

The Geekiest Kid Book Ever?

Presenting the large hadron collider pop up book.

Friday's Poem

William Ernest Henley's "Invictus":

Machine Gun Sonnets

The Millions has an essay about the First World War and the poetry surrounding it.

From the piece...

But politics and agenda aside, what is rather interesting is the range and scope of First World War poetry, for war poetry has never been a mode of discourse possessing a long shelf life. It is not the thing that complements a sunny afternoon, and while there is a decent tradition in American letters of the war novel, A Farewell to Arms, The Naked and the Dead, The Thin Red Line and The Things They Carried all immediately come to mind, these works often arrive long after the final salvo, tend to be imbued with the cult of the author’s persona and to be written from the safety and distance of time, free from the possibility that a sniper bullet might arrest the author mid couplet; whereas the poems of the Great War, for the most part, exist devoid of ego and communicate a collective rather than personal mindset. As Patrick MacGill writes in the final quatrain of “Before the Charge:”

The dead leaves float in the sighing air,
The darkness moves like a curtain drawn,
A veil which the morning sun will tear
From the face of death.—We charge at dawn

Together, reads the unwritten and inferable coda; and together we die.

Abracadabra...

Funky old books on Houdini and the art of magic!

Happy National Bathroom Reading Month!

You didn't even know there was such a thing, did you?

Jon's Writing on Venuszine

I reviewed Nada Surf's latest album - one chock full of cover songs. You can check it out, here.

For your edification, here's their video for "Weightless":

Fictional Stars, Real Problems

The Wall Street Journal takes a look at med students who study fictional characters for their neuroses.

From the piece...

The Harry Potter books are rife with teen angst, themes of disenchantment, the struggle for identity, even aggression and castration fantasies, as Dr. Rosegrant wrote in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association last year.

Harry's battle with Voldemort can be seen as an internal conflict between aspects of his own psyche, Dr. Rosegrant notes. Phallic symbols (snakes, wands) are prominent throughout the books, a common subconscious dynamic in young male adolescents. Hermione at one point complains about male wizards competing to see whose wand is most powerful.

As the books evolve, Harry's biggest challenge becomes confronting adult weakness. He goes through the painful process of de-idealizing his parents, discovering that his father could be arrogant and cruel and that even his protector, Dumbledore, had a shameful past.

The struggle to control newly experienced sexual impulses is also a major theme—both in fiction and real adolescence—Dr. Gabbard notes. From "Romeo and Juliet" to "Titanic" to "Twilight" to a host of slasher films, there is a recurrent message: "if you have sex, you will die."

The Art of the Dust Jacket

On the Powell's Books blog, there's a post about the aesthetic wonder that is the dust jacket.

From the piece...

But a dust jacket serves another purpose: aesthetics. The jacket of a book is meant to entice, much like a candy wrapper seduces you into buying the bar of chocolate it contains. In the case of dust jackets, aesthetics is tied as much to commerce (advertising) as to art. In their original incarnation, dust jackets were the wrapper you threw away in order to access the contents more easily. After all, that was why you purchased the book, to enjoy its contents. What did the wrapper matter? But to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, we live in an age of surfaces, where appearance is everything and that which is scarce is granted great value, worthy of being coveted. Where once we threw the wrapper away, the wrapper is now sometimes more highly prized than that which it covered. Art and commerce intertwine.

Writers on Writing

Edan Lepucki, for The Millions, writes about writers writing and writing.

From the piece...

A couple of weeks ago, I figured something out about the structure of my very-new novel that left me feeling exhilarated and ready to move forward. I’d been working and working on a certain section until–exhale–something changed. It felt like when I get a Thai massage, and the masseuse, upon discovering a particularly tough archipelago of knots, goes to town, grinding her fist (or–wait– is that an elbow…or…her teeth?) as I try to hold back tears. This time, though, I was the masseuse, and I was massaging the hell out of my novel. I couldn’t see its knots, I could only feel them, sliding and resisting beneath my fingertips. I didn’t stop, though–I would smooth them out, I would get to the bottom of this. When I was done, my novel did feel better. Also, it needed an aspirin.

I’ve always sought out writing metaphors and similes because they articulate the strangeness, joy, and frustrations of such an abstract activity, one that requires you to dream and to focus at the same time. It’s the not-exactly quality of figurative language, the pairing of two alien contexts to create a new familiar, that seems appropriate for a process that is at times so maddening. What is writing? It seems to exist in a liminal universe, where words slowly turn into worlds.

I have some favorites. There are many gems in The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard, which begins, “When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a woodcarver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe.” Lorrie Moore has said that a short story is “like a mad, lovely visitor with whom you spend a rather exciting weekend.” (Not sure I agree–but, lord, do I wish I did.) In an interview, Ron Carlson said, “Today, my writing day felt like pushing a big rock that was flat on every side, and heavy. Oosh. All I can say is: here’s my shoulder once again.” And was it Ann Beattie who compared writing a novel to walking into the ocean to die? (Now, that’s one I can relate to.)

Jon's Writing in Venuszine

I recently reviewed Ratatat's new album, LP4, for Venuszine. You can read the piece, here. And to see their video of their song, "Falcon Jab," look no further...

The Golden Age of Science Writing

It's RIGHT NOW, according to the Times Online.

From the piece...

One of the benefits of this burgeoning of popular science has been that the public has a ringside seat in another simultaneous golden age, in cosmology. Many of the expensively commissioned books on the subject failed to make the grade, after publishers apparently neglected to check that their prospective authors could write. But we have been kept consistently informed about the latest thinking about the Universe, notably in several fine books by the Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees.

Evolution and genetics did most to fuel the boom and a handful of scientists have become our favourite biology teachers, including the witty Steve Jones, the forthright Matt Ridley and the late essayist Stephen Jay Gould. Most impressive of all of them, perhaps, is Jared Diamond, whose Guns, Germs and Steel illuminates the factors that make certain societies apparently much more successful than others.

Some of the biggest successes in science publishing have come from left field. No one could have expected a hit book from an account of how a shy mathematician solved a deceptively simple-looking mathematical puzzle, yet that is what Simon Singh achieved in Fermat’s Last Theorem. Likewise, Dava Sobel achieved sales that publishers normally only dream about with Longitude, about as unlikely a subject for a popular tale as you could imagine — precision clock-making in the 18th century. Publishers spent a decade seeking to replicate its success, but in vain. Still more impressive among the mega-sellers was A Short History of Nearly Everything, in which Bill Bryson brought his charm to a Cook’s tour of science. I doubt whether any science specialist has yet engaged a mass audience so effectively.

Books on Vinyl

Screw you, iPad. Underwood, a publishing house imprint, is releasing stories on vinyl.

From the piece in the Telegraph...

Nathan Dunne is either a very brave or a very stupid young man. At a time when a) the MP3 has supplanted the CD as the most popular format on which to listen to recorded sounds; b) literature as a physical artefact is coming under attack from the rise of iPads, Kindles and other digital reading devices; and c) the short story is as tricky to sell to publishing houses as it has ever been, Dunne has set up a new imprint called Underwood, whose remit is to produce 33rpm vinyl records featuring writers reading 20-minute short stories aloud. “Candidly, it’s an experiment,” he admits.

The first release from Underwood, which takes its name from a Fionn Regan song that alludes to another largely obsolete piece of technology, the typewriter (“I’m changing the ribbon in this old Underwood”), is a lavish affair. Designed by American comic-book artist Jordan Crane, whose stylised bucolic cover picks up on themes on the disc’s two stories – Clare Wigfall’s Along Birdcage Walk and Toby Litt’s The Hare – it’s presented in a four-panel gatefold sleeve so beautiful that it’s easy to regard the artefact as visual art as much as a record.

Summer Reading or Movie Watching

Buzz Sugar takes note of 15 books you have to read this summer before they become movies, like Water for Elephants and On the Road. Or, you can just watch the movie, I suppose, and save yourself hours.

On the flip side, Variety takes note that literary fiction is taking a hit in Hollywood.

From the piece...

As the adult-skewing drama becomes an endangered species at the studios, is there any hope for that venerable subcategory, the literary-book-to-screen adaptation?

Such books -- with their focus on characterization and ideas rather than plot -- have proven awards fodder for decades, in both book and film form. The pics also helped give studios and audiences a balanced diet by offering quiet and thoughtful fare that was uplifting, enlightening -- and entertaining. Pics such as "Greed" and "All Quiet on the Western Front" drew from literary sources in the early days of film. In the last few years, there has been a wide range of such prestige projects, including Dennis Lehane's "Mystic River," Laura Hillenbrand's "Seabiscuit," Michael Cunningham's "The Hours," Ian McEwan's "Atonement," Cormac McCarthy's "No Country for Old Men" and just about any manuscript Scott Rudin gets his hands on.

But what was once a steady stream of bigscreen book adaptations has become a trickle. As one exec wryly notes, "Clint Eastwood is single-handedly holding up the adult drama at the studio level."

Jon's Writing on Lost Magazine

For Lost Magazine, I wrote about something that's haunted me some since I first learned about it in the news a few years back - the story of the Kim family who got lost in the Oregon wilderness on Bear Camp Road. The husband didn't make it out alive.

Guide to Stunt Writing

Creative Nonfiction offers a brief primer in the art of writing a book based on a stunt, such as going back to the high school prom or living the laws of the Bible for a year.

From the piece...

Step 4: Perfect Your Disguise or Establish Ground Rules, or Both

Depending on the stunt you choose, preparation can be a pretty elaborate process. Before she could go out in public as “Ned”—to bowling night in a men’s league, to strip clubs, on sales calls, even into a monastery—Norah Vincent (“Self-Made Man”) had to get new glasses and a flat top, figure out how to fake facial stubble (electric hair clipper trimmings, attached with stoppelpaste), bind her breasts (too-small sports bra) and lift weights to change her shape and find the right stuffing for a jock strap. Once she had the physical disguise down, she learned to speak like a man: in a deeper register, using fewer words, speaking more slowly and with greater authority. To pass as a black man in the South in 1959, John Howard Griffin (“Black Like Me”) first consulted with a dermatologist who prescribed a medication followed by prolonged exposure to ultraviolet radiation, a treatment Griffin undertook in secret at the house of a friend, and that gave him “a dark undercoating of pigment which I could touch up perfectly with stain.” Then, after shaving his head, Griffin headed out on his own into the streets of New Orleans. Interestingly, he didn’t change his name or identity, except as others changed it for him, reacting to his appearance. Nellie Bly experienced a similar phenomenon; although she prepared to pass herself off as insane by making some funny faces in the mirror and acting oddly enough to be committed (staying awake all night, talking to herself, rocking back and forth), once inside the asylum, she “talked and acted just as I do in ordinary life. Yet strange to say, the more sanely I talked and acted the crazier I was thought to be…”

(Of course, it’s possible to build a solid stunt without making such significant physical investments: A.J. Jacobs merely had to shell out $1,400—which, presumably, he could even write off his taxes—for a leatherette set of the Britannica, and find shelf space for the books. Totally manageable, even in Manhattan.)

The E-Book Will Replace the Printed Book in 5 Years

So says Sony.

From the piece on Tech Digest...

The Japanese tech-giant suggested the paperback will be a thing of the past within five years after analysing the rise of digital film and music.

Steve Haber, president of Sony's digital reading division, told the Telegraph: "Within five years there will be more digital content sold than physical content."

"I originally thought it would take ten years for the market to reach this point, but I've revised my expectations."

While Simon Juden, chief executive of the Publishers Association, told Fresh Business Thinking: "Digital sales in the past year have increased markedly, by around 20%, and look set to grow in future.

"Currently sales of e-books still take up a small percentage of the entire book market, at around 4-5% of combined physical and digital sales."

Author and academic Alice White however believes that Sony and Juden are missing something intrinsic about the book that the e-book can't replicate...

Superhero Panhandlers

It's a sad day. Superhero panhandling has been outlawed in Hollywood, Comic Alliance reports.

Don't Let the Pigeon Start a Blog

Mo Willems is my favorite children's book author. Recently, he posted a series of fan letters from kids who have thought up all sorts of good ideas for sequels to Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus. Enjoy.

Jon's Novel on Word Riot

Care to read a crappy novel I wrote a few years back? Word Riot is letting you read it today, and today only. Read it quick or download it for future readings. Enjoy (as much as you can a crappy novel)!

Question: What Was the 1st Blockbuster Crime Novel?

Answer: The Mystery of a Hansom Cab.

Booktryst discusses the work, here.

From the piece...

The author was a law clerk who wanted to be a playwright. When he failed miserably at it, he decided to write a novel instead. But he had no idea what to write so,

"I enquired of a leading Melbourne bookseller what style of book he sold most of. He replied that the detective stories of Gaboriau had a large sale; and as, at this time, I had never even heard of this author, I bought all his works — eleven or thereabouts — and read them carefully. The style of these stories attracted me, and I determined to write a book of the same class; containing a mystery, a murder, and a description of low life in Melbourne.

"Having completed the book, I tried to get it published, but everyone to whom I offered it refused even to look at the manuscript on the grounds that no Colonial could write anything worth reading."

Undeterred, he finally had it privately printed.

Ask the Paris Review

I'm in a bad spot in my reading habits. I've been watching a lot of reality television, and I've cracked open half a dozen books, and abandoned them all. What would be good to get my reading mojo back?

That's the question. The Paris Review's answer is here.

The Best Bookstores in the World

Here they are. They're pretty spectacular.

The Death and Life of the Book Review

The Nation has an in depth look at the state of book reviewing, what with newspapers going out of business, e-book sales on the rise and that thing called the internet becoming pretty popular.

From the piece...

Wading through the year-end newspaper and magazine digests of politics and culture usually makes for dreary reading, and last year was no exception. Some writers struggled to wring a drop of good news from the decade. Others strode to the bar and leveled indictments. Either way it was a bad patch, an impossible task. Glossing ten years of history in snippets of 300 or 500 words, the writers performed an exercise bound to turn any observation about a low, dishonest decade into the perfect expression of it.

Seeking some solace I picked up a book, and in a matter of minutes I read the following passage:

Now that anyone is free to print whatever they wish, they often disregard that which is best and instead write, merely for the sake of entertainment, what would best be forgotten, or, better still be erased from all books.

The sense of impoverishment before an overabundance of information; of helplessness before the need to spot relevant material in a slurry of ephemera; of vertigo provoked by the realization that "the present" is becoming overwhelmingly, annoyingly accessible—many of us, I'd wager, have had these reactions after reading those year-end digests or spending just a modicum of time online. Now anyone is free to print whatever they wish. This could be someone kvetching about blogs, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube or Twitter, and in not 500 words or 300 but nine. Except it wasn't. The jeremiad was the handiwork of Niccolò Perotti, a learned Italian classicist, writing to his friend Francesco Guarnerio in 1471, less than twenty years after the invention of the printing press.

This anecdote does not suggest that past is prologue but rather underscores the importance of thinking historically, of taking a long view when trying to understand changes in deeply engrained patterns in literary culture.

What the Dickens?

"It was da best of times, and not being funny or nuffing, but it was da worst of times, to be honest." Yes, that's one of the most famous first lines in all of literature - Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. What? You don't think that's right? It doesn't quite sound the same as you remember it? Author Martin Baum has been translating and shortening Dickens works for today's youth. Word.

Understanding the Financial Crisis

Having difficulty getting your head around the mess? The Huffington Post takes note of a new book published by Soft Skull Press that uses comics to sort of it all out.

The Picture Book That Killed the Rainforest

Well, there's a new depressing study out, Salon reports. According to the study released by the Rainforest Action Network (RAN), a hefty percentage of children's books sold in the United States are made out of paper that includes "fiber linked to the clearing and conversion of Indonesia's rainforests." Nice.

Literature's Greatest Sister Acts

The Guardian highlights siblings in literature.

From the piece...

She gave several examples: Christina Schwarz's 2000 novel Drowning Ruth, which I haven't read but sounds intriguing (please tell me if it's one I ought to pick up), Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Louisa M Alcott's Little Women. According to Apter, Beth the peacemaker's refrain of "Birds in their little nests agree" bears no relation to the real world whatever – she cited research on eagles which shows that of the two chicks normally produced by a mother, the elder will generally terrorise the younger until it dies of its wounds or starves to death. However, she was most interesting on the subject of Emma, the Jane Austen novel I thought had least to do with sisters, but which, she points out, contains the line "How is a young woman who is handsome, clever and rich, going to fill her need for a sister?" in its opening pages. The book, when you analyse it, is all about Emma's search for a sister-figure to replace her real sister and her governess, both lost to her through marriage. Harriet appears at first to be an ideal sister – meek, compliant – but when she looks about to steal Knightley from Emma's affections, the relationship turns sour, and infinitely more sibling-like than before.

The Plight of the Gay Bookstores

They're closing at an alarming rate. The latest? Canada's oldest gay bookstore, Glad Day in Toronto, may have to shutter. Lamba Literary has more.

Heartless: The Story of the Tin Man

Heartless: The Story of the Tin Man from Brandon McCormick on Vimeo.

A Dying Breed - The Typewriter Repair Man

If there's not an occupation that is dwindling precipitously with every new fangled computer gizmo that's released, it's the typewriter repair man. Wired meets with a few of them.

Friday's Poem

Matthew Macfadyen reads William Shakespeare's Sonnet #29:

The Folger Shakespeare Library

A book nerd's dream - to be amongst the words of Shakespeare. Tom Post, Managing Editor of Forbes, visits the vaults of the Folger Shakespeare Library, the world's largest repository of Shakespeare's works.

From the piece...

It’s nobody’s favorite Shakespeare play. When the curtain finally drops on five acts of murder, rape, mutilation and revenge in Titus Andronicus, probably the first of his tragedies, you may feel mathematically satisfied (that’s the nature of retribution), but hardly moved.

But seeing a 1594 quarto of the play—one of the earliest printed works of Shakespeare—you can’t help but feel blown away.

Absent the miraculous discovery of a manuscript in Shakespeare’s hand, this is about as close as anybody will ever get to the young playwright. (Quartos are small, individual editions of his works; Shakespeare’s name didn’t start to appear on title pages until 1598.) The unique copy of Titus was unearthed in 1904, found in the trunk of a Swedish postal clerk, bound in a couple of 18th century lottery tickets. It didn’t stay on the market long: Henry Clay Folger (1857-1930), the Standard Oil Co. executive, pounced, paying the unholy sum of £2,000 (roughly $215,000 in today’s dollars). Folger collected rare editions of Shakespeare the way Lindsay Lohan piles up DWI violations. But he also left his fabulous accumulation, now roughly 26,000 volumes, to the American public. Today, it resides behind a thick steel door, down in the bowels of the Folger Shakespeare Library, in Washington, D.C. A few go on display.

Whey Poetry Rocked Russian Stadiums

They used to be literary lions, Russian poets. Now, though as talented as ever, they're barely read at all. The New York Times looks at the state of poetry in Russia.

From the piece...

The death on Tuesday of Andrei Voznesensky, a stirring poet of the post-Stalin “thaw era” in the 1950s and early 1960s, caused many to recall a time when that reach was enormous. Voznesensky’s generation of poets, which included Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Bella Akhmadulina, declaimed their work in sports stadiums to overflow crowds. A moment presented itself — the relative artistic freedom of the early Khrushchev era — and these poets pounced on the microphone. As Mr. Voznesensky put it, with a punk lip curl: “The times spat at me. I spit back at the times.”

The poets of the thaw era were liberating figures, and have frequently been likened to the West’s most word-drunk rockers and singer-songwriters: Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen. They were political, sexy, a bit louche and sometimes ridiculous. They squabbled. Mr. Yevtushenko seemed to be alluding to poets too, when he asked, “Why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves?”

The attention paid to Mr. Voznesensky’s death is a reminder not just of that ecstatic thaw era, but of how important Russia’s poetry has been over three centuries, from Aleksandr Pushkin to Anna Akhmatova, to the country’s sense of itself. It is a vast and elusive country, one that poetry — that pointed words — helped to unite.

Shakespeare and Company Ready to Launch

Oh, how I love Paris. The legendary bookstore Shakespeare & Company is starting up a new literary magazine and prize.

From the story in Publishers Weekly...

The magazine, Paris Magazine, is what store owner Sylvia Whitman calls a “reincarnation” of a literary magazine with the same name that her father founded in 1967. The elder Whitman published three issues at sporadic intervals before discontinuing it in the ‘80s. “This will be the fourth one, but many, many years later,” the younger Whitman explained. It has not yet been determined how often this incarnation of Paris Magazine will be published.

Paris Magazine, edited by former Granta managing editor Fatema Ahmed, will include fiction, nonfiction, and illustrations. The current issue, with a 5,000-copy print run, contains a new translation of a poem by Apollinaire by Beat Generation writer Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a short story by N’Diaye, and another short story by Jesse Ball.

Collecting First Editions is Madness

So says Christopher Howse in the Telegraph.

From the piece...

Most books only ever achieve a first edition. Yet the Shakespeare first folio effect still works with popular authors such as J K Rowling. In 1997, only 500 copies of the first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone were printed. A copy can fetch £30,000 – but only if it is in very good condition, as almost all aren't.

That is another symptom of book madness: valuable copies are the ones nobody has read. It is like taking your shoes off when it rains. Nothing spoils a book like reading it. In the British Library, readers tell a librarian if pages of the book are uncut – joined at the right-hand edge – so they may be parted without damage. Private collectors keep books uncut. It's the ne plus ultra of bibliomania: a book that cannot be read.

As for dustjackets, don't speak to me. A Beckett or D H Lawrence fetches many times more in a dustjacket. These are scarce because human beings used to discard them, as they do shoe-boxes on buying shoes. I can't help despising dustjacket magpies when even the presence of the price, which used to be clipped off at sale, boosts book values.

But no ordinary person makes a fortune out of first editions. Auction houses sell them by the wheelbarrow. Indeed if you want a hardback of a novel by Conrad or Masefield, you might as well go to an auction of "modern firsts".

As with financial market, it's all to do with sentiment.

It's Not You, It's Me

For the Millions, Sonya Chung asks herself, "Why do I not finish some books and finish others? Why are there books I try to get into but just can't? What's all this say about me?"

From the piece...

One of my favorite Millions Quizzes was “The Glaring Gap,” a post in which regular contributors confessed which Great Books / Great Authors they’ve never read. One contributor shared that she consciously chose not to read a certain category of male writers, and the comments came a-flying: oh, but you “should” read those! Should should should. Even the word “confess” implies sheepishness, shame and guilt. I know, I know, I should read (and love) Proust! And Dickens! And Virginia Woolf! And (these days) Bolaño!

My commitment to finishing books in the past was probably related to the above – fear of ensuing guilt and shame. Failure, too, I suppose. And perhaps at this point in my reading life, I’ve finished (and more than that, really ingested into my mind and emotions) enough books so that I feel a little freer in exercising the right to choose how to invest my reading time and energy; to veer from the Canonical Path – if such a thing actually exists anymore – and forge my own highly specific map of literary experience and influence. I’m not getting any younger, after all. Fifteen hours – the average it takes to read a book (and I tend to be on the slow side of this average) – is an increasingly precious chunk of time. Professional book reviewers, you have my sympathies.

My Father's Library

Forbes has an essay about a father's book collection and what it might teach his son.

From the piece...

Like drug addiction and poor pronunciation, book collecting is one of those sins prone to be passed from generation to generation. My grandfather, Carl Jones, even published the stuff in his home--a kind of literary moonshine. His high-grade history and magic books still enjoy cult status. For my father, it must have been like growing up in a crystal meth lab, with all the tweedy chain-smoking book pushers hanging out in his childhood home. Dad never had a chance. At first he was hooked on the quality stuff: 19th- and 20th-century classics, history and science fiction. Then his habit got expensive, with letters, manuscripts and first editions. Later in life he reverted to paperbacks, newspapers and endless magazine subscriptions--the crack of bibliophiles.

He cut it all with memorabilia. Writers' personal possessions mingled with ours as if their owners lived with us. Hemingway's skis with leather bindings sat next to ours in the garage rafters. I was greeted every morning in the hallway by a full-length signed photo of Zane Grey with giant tuna. I watched TV in the remote exile of our basement while sitting on Charles Dickens's stiff-backed writing chair. When choosing nails from the toolbox, I had to avoid using the large rusty ones from Jack London's ranch in Sonoma. His Dictaphone rested on the stair landing.

When I was still young enough not to repeat tales like this to my mother, Dad brought me to Sonoma to visit a fellow Jack London fanatic with a bookstore right next to the Jack London Ranch. "Here's something for the collection," Dad's jovial book pal said, pulling out from his desk drawer a large clear plastic bag filled with gray powder. "Jack's niece," he announced. "She died without any relatives, so now I've got her remains."

Muggles Take to Broomsticks

There's quite the burgeoning sport out there. It's based on a fake game in a kid's novel. NPR has more, here.

What Do You Do With Your Old National Geographic Magazines?

Sean Miller makes bookshelves out of them.

In Ink on a Flyleaf, Forever Yours

The New York Times scrawls on the internet a brief lament. That is, when books go, and we move more and more towards Kindles, Nooks and iPads, we'll lose the personal inscription scrawled inside the books people gave others as gifts.

From the piece...

I acquired my first inscribed books inadvertently. My great-aunt Aida, who died more than 40 years ago, still speaks to me simply through something she wrote on May 27, 1967, in a book of paintings by her husband:

To Peter,

With love from his godmother.

I can’t remember when exactly I started buying books that were signed or inscribed by authors I don’t know personally. But certainly the many readings and signings in New York City, to which I moved a dozen years ago, played a role. Now, no matter what city I’m in, I’m likely to visit its shops of rare and used books. For instance, on a trip to New Orleans, I bought a copy of “North Toward Home,” a memoir by Willie Morris. It was inscribed, on Nov. 28, 1967, in Morris’s elegant hand, to Abby Catledge, the second wife of Turner Catledge, a former executive editor of The Times:

For such a lovely

woman, in the hope she

will find in these pages

some indication of the

love and great emotion

I feel for the place we

have in common —

Willie Morris

The personality comes through.

20 Sci-Fi Novels That Will Change Your Life

The list, care of io9.

The Vatican Archive

The Telegraph takes a peek inside the Pope's private library.

From the piece...

No, the real reason for this lies elsewhere in the Tower of Winds, in rooms lined with miles and miles of dark wooden shelves – more than 50 miles of them in fact.

Here, bound in cream vellum, are thousands upon thousands of volumes, some more than a foot thick.

This is the Vatican secret archive, possibly the most mysterious collection of documents in the world.

Here you can find accounts of the trial of the Knights Templar held at Chinon in August 1308; a threatening note from 1246 in which Ghengis Khan’s grandson demands that Pope Innocent IV travel to Asia to ‘pay service and homage; a letter from Lucretia Borgia to Pope Alexander VI; Papal Bulls excommunicating Martin Luther; correspondence between the Court of Henry VIII and Clement VII; and an exchange of letters between Michelangelo and Paul III.

The Unemployed Restaurant Critic

The Seattle Times has a moving story about a man who was once a thriving restaurant critic for a thriving newspaper. He's now unemployed and uses food stamps to get by.

How to Save the News

The Atlantic has some ideas.

From the piece by James Fallows...

That goal is a reinvented business model to sustain professional news-gathering. This is essential if the “crowd sourcing” and citizen journalism that have already transformed news coverage—for instance, the videos from inside the Iranian protests last summer—are not to be the world’s only source of information. Accounts like those are certainly valuable, but they will be all the more significant if they are buttressed by reports from people who are paid to keep track of government agencies, go into danger zones, investigate and analyze public and private abuse, and generally serve as systematic rather than ad hoc observers. (I am talking about what journalism should do, not what it often does.)

Google’s likely route toward this destination, however, differs in crucial and sometimes uncomfortable ways from the one the existing news business would probably choose on its own. The differences are natural, given the cultural chasm that separates a wildly successful, collectively cocky, engineer-dominated, very internationally staffed West Coast tech start-up from a national news establishment that is its opposite in all ways: East Coast–centric, liberal arts–heavy, less international in staff and leadership (more Brits and Australians than in the tech industry, fewer Indians, Chinese, and Russians), dominated by organizations founded in the distant past, and at the moment strikingly downcast and even panicked.

Here’s an important illustration of the difference: people inside the press still wage bitter, first-principles debates about whether, in theory, customers will ever be willing to pay for online news, and therefore whether “paywalls” for online news can ever succeed. But at Google, I could hardly interest anyone in the question. The reaction was: Of course people will end up paying in some form—why even talk about it? The important questions involved the details of how they would pay, and for what kind of news.

Assassination Books

Lindsay Porter, author and cultural historian, notes five good reads about political assassination.

The Troubling Statistic of the Day

The Telegraph reports that children are more likely own own a cell phone than a book.