Alas, the Love Letter is No More

The Telegraph laments at how emails and Twitter posts are killing off hand-written love letters.

From the article...

“What makes them compelling is the emotional bond between sender and recipient,” says Dr Andrea Clarke, curator of Early Modern Historical Manuscripts at the British Library, who looks at other people’s letters every day. She has put together a collection, Love Letters: 2000 Years of Romance. The idea for the book came when she worked on the archive of the relatively unknown Yorkshire poet and playwright Gordon Bottomley.

“When I joined the library 12 years ago, the first archive I worked on was his,” Dr Clarke explains. “He was a sick man, incapacitated by crippling ill-health for most of his life, who poured out his heart in hundreds of love letters to the artist Emily Burton. They touched me deeply.” In one letter, written in 1899, Bottomley finally declares his love for Emily: “I love you: I do not know how to say anything else!” He begs her to burn the letter if she cannot reciprocate his feelings. Luckily for us she could, and the declaration is preserved.

Other highlights include what is believed to be the oldest valentine in the English language, written by Margery Brews to John Paston III in February, 1477, in which she addresses him as “my right well beloved Valentine”.

Curious about the 10 best love letters in history? Look no further.

And if you want to take a stab at writing your own love letter, take some advice.

Curious about the love letters between Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning? No longer!

Love in the Time of Cholera - the Fall Line

The Los Angeles Times has more on fashion designer Carlos Campos, here.

The Best Love Poems

Lustful gazing, unrequited yearning and passionate wooing – AS Byatt, Seamus Heaney, Hilary Mantel, Jeanette Winterson and many others pick the poems that stole their hearts. Plus Carol Ann Duffy writes a new poem for the occasion. Thanks, Guardian.

Writing these lovey dovey poems isn't easy. NPR discusses that, here.

And if you care to write your own love poem, try and make them not suck.

10 of the Greatest Kisses in Literature

The list, care of Flavorwire.

Inside Hollywood's Rare Book Addiction

The Hollywood Reporter reveals what stars collect books.

From the piece...

Highbrows might scoff that Hollywood doesn't respect serious literature, but they obviously haven't discovered the biz's high-end rare-book scene. Johnny Depp collects first-edition works by Jack Kerouac, Arthur Rimbaud, Dylan Thomas and Edgar Allan Poe. Other industry figures have assembled museum-quality collections devoted to everything from exploration (producer Kathleen Kennedy) and aviation (director Tony Bill) to novelizations of silent-era films (business manager Bill Tanner) and the poetry of William Butler Yeats (screenwriter Jeffrey Fiskin). CAA is a particular fan of vintage volumes as gifts. And bibliophiles including Brad Pitt and Steve Martin have been spotted at the California International Antiquarian Book Fair, which this year takes place at the Pasadena Convention Center. "People think I'm a high-end hoarder," says Brett Ratner, who has amassed thousands of photography books including three first editions of Robert Frank's The Americans.

Those in the business afflicted with bibliomania -- they include Whoopi Goldberg, Kelsey Grammer, Sony chief Howard Stringer, director Charles Shyer and Sarah Michelle Gellar -- can find themselves committing serious cash for the hard-to-find, out-of-print books. "I'm about to have a meeting with a gentleman who's nominated for an Oscar this year," says Mark Hime, who runs the appointment-only Beverly Hills shop Biblioctopus.

Portlandia - the Book

Awesome.

The Magic of Hugo Cabret

Martin Scorsese's film "Hugo" is adapted from The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick. In an exclusive interview, in the Guardian, the American artist talks about working with Marty, his love of cross-hatching – and why he always keeps a mirror on his desk.

From the story...

And being also the descendant of generations of French clockmakers, I have to ask Selznick about this adoration of the mysteries of clocks and mechanics that is the bedrock of Hugo Cabret. "It comes from my interest in magic," replies the artist – one of his early books is about Houdini – "from witnessing something you cannot explain unless you are the person doing it or designing it. What interests me about clocks is that everything is hand-made, and yet to the person looking at the clock, something magical is happening that cannot be explained unless you are the clockmaker. Just as a magician does something, a trick, that only he knows the secret of. It goes back to Ancient Greece and to the Golem: if machines can imitate life, then what is life? Then I read a book by Gaby Wood, Edison's Eve, about automata, and there's a chapter on Méliès's collection, and I began to think about the connections between clock-making, automata and magic – and the magic of film that was also hand-made, the costumes, the sets, the colouring. There is a sense in all these things that they are done by hand, and there's a sense of purpose. Hugo talks about the sadness of broken machines, and how fixing them gives a sense of purpose."

The Composites

What would police sketches look like of famous literary characters (like Humbert Humbert from Lolita above)?

Find out, here.

110-Year-Old Sudan Bookshop Struggles On

Perhaps the oldest bookshop in Sudan, maybe in all of Africa, has seen his business virtually stop.

From a piece in Africasia...

It's as if the dust-caked volumes have been sitting on the shelves of Sudan Bookshop for the past half century since some of them were published. Three weeks might pass without a single book being sold, said the shop's general manager, El Tayeb Mohammed Abdel Rahman, who has been associated with the business for decades.

But shutting the doors is not really an option for the 110-year-old store which Abdel Rahman believes is the oldest in Sudan, "and maybe in Africa."

"It is a famous place," he said, recounting how people tell him: "Please do your best not to close this shop."

Tucked away on a garbage-strewn side street in downtown Khartoum, the business reflected a "book culture" which developed under British and Egypt rule and in the post-independence years after 1956, said historian Abdullah Ali Ibrahim.

"So it is a very sad thing" to see the store decline along with the role of books in Sudanese society, Ibrahim said.

James Joyce - Children's Author?

Yes!

From a piece in the Guardian...

A children's story by James Joyce has been published for the first time ever by a small press in Ireland.

Joyce's The Cats of Copenhagen is a "younger twin sister" to his published children's story The Cat and the Devil, which told of how the devil built a bridge over a French river in one night, said Ithys Press. Publisher Anastasia Herbert called it a "little gem" which she said "reflects Joyce's lighter side, his sense of humour – which can fairly be called odd or even somewhat absurdist".

Like its predecessor, The Cats of Copenhagen was written in a letter to Joyce's grandchild, Stephen James Joyce, while the author was in Denmark and the four-year-old Stephen was in France. The new tale is "exquisite, surprising, and with a keen, almost anarchic subtext", said Ithys, which has printed a limited run of 200 illustrated copies, ranging in price from €300 (£250) to €1,200.

A Rebecca Remake Forthcoming?

Indeed!

Beavis and Butthead and...Books?

Indeed.

Hemingway and Gellhorn

What Does Shirley Temple Have to Do With Graham Greene?

Plenty!

Shelf Conscious

What do your books (and how you’ve arranged them) say about you?

From a piece on the Paris Review...

I knew a kid in college who wanted so desperately to produce a book that he couldn’t stand the sight of their spines. He stacked them—ten or so brown and black books, library hardcovers—in his dorm room, titles to the wall, lips facing forward. He didn’t really buy books, either—at least I don’t recall that he did—but he never passed a bookstore without entering to read. These same stores have since displayed his books in their windows.

“‘You can tell how serious people are by looking at their books,’” Susan Sontag told Sigrid Nunez, long ago when Nunez was dating Sontag’s son. “She meant not only what books they had on their shelves, but how the books were arranged,” Nunez explains. “Because of her, I arranged my own books by subject and in chronological rather than alphabetical order. I wanted to be serious.”

There are many varieties of nerd, but only two real species—the serious and the nonserious—and shelves are a pretty good indication of who is which. “To expose a bookshelf,” Harvard professor Leah Price writes in Unpacking My Library, a recent collection of interviews with writers about the books they own, “is to compose a self.”

Beauty and the Book

Can design alter the future of printed books? That is the question recently posed in the magazine Guernica.

From the article...

For many contemporary publishers and writers, of course, the idea of approaching form as content is nothing new.2 McSweeney’s Publishing, for example, has committed itself to exploring the formal possibilities of books for more than a decade; past incarnations of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern include a deck-of-cards story and eight volumes housed in a board tray whose cover flaps complete an image puzzle. Its new chidren’s imprint, McSweeney’s McMullens, has also enthusiastically adopted the design mantle.3 McMullens books come with dust jackets that fold out as gorgeous colorful posters, and a number of them are interactive. In Jordan Crane’s Keep Our Secrets (2011), readers are encouraged to rub away the heat-sensitive color-changing ink to reveal the secrets hidden beneath: “Miss Young’s chest is a cage full of canaries,” or “There’s a computer in the trash that knows how to write poetry.” The The Author-Illustrator Starter Kit (2011) contains a boxed set of three completely blank hardback books for kids to fill with their own content.

But it isn’t only this playfulness that lends McSweeney’s McMullens books their material impact. Amy Martin’s illustrations for Symphony City (2011) create a layered multidimensional and richly textural world, which often appears like original paper collages. In some places the visual environment of an urban landscape full of music she creates is so absorbing that I wondered what an e-book or iPad app could offer that print couldn’t. By email, McSweeney’s art director and editor Brian McMullen, who developed and gave his name to the imprint, offered a more practical reason for keeping to printed matter for kids: “Those of us who are parents aren’t convinced that kids need to be encouraged to spend more time than they already do in front of screens… Have you ever tried to tell a three-year-old it’s time to stop looking at one of these devices and hand it back to Daddy?4 It’s not a pretty scene. These devices are just not compatible with bedtime, in my experience, whereas a printed picture book, for whatever reason, is.”5

How to Understand Book Sizes

Matching Beers with Books

Shelf Awareness matches great beers with great independent bookstores, here.

10 Greatest Shakespeare Adaptations of All-Time

The list, care of PopMatters.

20 Epic Disney Princess Tattoos

Enjoy!

Harry Potter in 60 Seconds

The World of Charles Dickens, Complete with Pizza Hut

The New York Times travels to London to visit Dickens World.

From the article...

Dickens World, in other words, sounded less like a viable business than it did a mockumentary, or a George Saunders short story, or the thought experiment of a radical Marxist seeking to expose the terminal bankruptcy at the heart of consumerism. And yet it was real. Its existence raised a number of questions. Who was the park’s target audience? (“Dickens-loving flume-ride enthusiasts” seems like a small, sad demographic.) Was it a homage to, or a desecration of, the legacy of Charles Dickens? Was it the reinvention of, or the cheapening of, our culture’s relationship to literature? And even if it were possible to create a lavish simulacrum of 1850s London — with its typhus and cholera and clouds of toxic corpse gas, its sewage pouring into the Thames, its average life span of 27 years — why would anyone want to visit? (“If a late-20th-century person were suddenly to find himself in a tavern or house of the period,” Peter Ackroyd, a Dickens biographer, has written, “he would be literally sick — sick with the smells, sick with the food, sick with the atmosphere around him.”)

Well, despite its obvious absurdity, I wanted to go to Dickens World. I love Charles Dickens. I don’t mean “love” in the weak sense, the way people love frozen yogurt or casual Friday or the ’80s. I am — like probably millions of readers spread over many different eras — actively in love with Charles Dickens, or at least with the version of his mind that survives in his writing. (The man himself, as several new biographies remind us, was significantly harder to love.) Of all the mega-canonical writers, Dickens is the most charming. At a time of great formality in literature, he wrote irreverently, for everybody, from the perspective of orphans and outcasts. His best work — “Great Expectations,” “David Copperfield,” “Bleak House” — plays the entire xylophone of a reader’s value system, from high to low; you can almost feel the oxytocin dumping, sentence by sentence, in your brain. Taken together, his books add up to perhaps the most distinctively living literary world ever created. The chance to pay $20 to walk through a lovingly produced three-dimensional version of that world seemed (despite some nagging highbrow reservations) impossible to pass up.

And so I went to Dickens World.

Did Herman Melville Ever Meet Edgar Allan Poe?

There's no proof that they did...OR IS THERE?!

Best Blogs for Writers

A guy not named Bob lists them, here.

How Much Did the First Appearance of Thor Fetch at Auction?

About the price of a well-appointed condo. More, here.

How to Report the News

Carrots as Illustrated in Illuminated Manuscripts

Someone pays attention to that sort of thing - carrots in old books. Who? The World Carrot Museum.

From the piece...

Early handwritten herbals were often illustrated with paintings and drawings. Like other manuscript books, herbals were "published" through repeated copying by hand, either by professional scribes or by the readers themselves. In the process of making a copy, the copyist would often translate, expand, adapt, or reorder the content. Most of the original herbals have been lost; many have survived only as later copies (of copies of copies!), and many others are known only through references from other texts. They tend to follow the same pattern - the plant's physical appearance, smell, taste and natural habitat, followed by a discussion on any known medicinal qualities, culinary virtues, and then any useful products obtained from the plants roots, leaves, seeds or flowers. Sadly colour variations (of carrot) were rarely described until much later.

European herbal medicine is rooted in the works of classical writers such as Pliny the Elder who wrote Historia Naturalis; and Dioscorides, a Greek physician and author of the first known illustrated guide to medicinal plants whose De Materia Medica (78 C. E.) formed the basis of herbals in Europe for 1,500 years and the most influential herbal of all time.

For most of human history, people have relied on herbalism for at least some of their medicinal needs, and this remains true for more than half of the world's population in the twenty-first century. Much of our modern pharmacopoeia also has its roots in the historical knowledge of medicinal plants.

Top Ten Non-Dickens Books for Dickens Fans

Do you like Dickens but have read most all his work? Fear not. Time Magazine lists some Dickens-y books, here.

From said list...

4. The Woman in White (1860), by Wilkie Collins

The first sensation novel, and one of my favorite novels of all time, this stolen-identity saga by one of Dickens’ closest collaborators and protégés draws on split-narrative techniques to piece together the mystery of its title character. After appearing in the road one night to a poor artist, Walter Hartright, the elusive woman in white crosses paths with Walter’s new patrons, half-sisters Laura Fairlie and Marian Halcombe, as they fall prey to the schemes of Laura’s nasty new husband, Sir Percival Glyde. One insane asylum, mustachioed Italian villain, moated estate, secret society, illegitimate child and falsified tombstone later, the novel arrives at its artful conclusion. It could have been so bad — if it weren’t so good.

Comma Chameleon

Grammar nerds - the comma is hard to use. Most of the time it's misused.

From a piece on Book Riot...

The comma is the most misused punctuation mark in the English language. My source you ask? The school of correcting freshman grammar for a decade. The semi-colon is probably misused at a higher rate per attempt, but the sheer tonnage of misplaced and missing commas is staggering.

There are three main reasons for this:

1. They are the most frequently used punctuation mark, so they have the most opportunity to be botched.

2. It has a variety of uses, not all of which are consistent. Some of the usages are more stylistic decisions than grammatical imperative, which is doubly confusing.

3. We often use commas to signal a pause, which is not a grammatical unit. In our attempts to make our writing “read” better we use commas like salt, adding them to taste.

There are so many rules, gray areas, and exceptions in written English that it’s often helpful to know what the guiding principle of each punctuation mark is. The important thing to remember about commas is that their function is to separate, and the function of separation is clarity.

The Amazing Spider-Man

The Evolution of Cereal Box Design

Enjoy!

Vietnamese Kids Seek Out Banned Books

The government can ban all the books they want. The young people of Vietnam will read them anyway.

From an article in the Washington Post...

“The more the government tries to ban something, the more young people try to find out why,” the 20-year-old said in the capital, Hanoi.

Vietnam’s graying Communist Party is all about control: It censors all media, squashes protests and imprisons those who dare to speak out against its one-party system. But today, as iPhone shops rub shoulders with Buddhist pagodas, cultural authorities are finding it increasingly difficult to promote their unified sense of Vietnamese culture and identity — especially among the country’s youth.

“This is a key turning point for the younger generation,” said Thaveeporn Vasavakul, a Southeast Asia scholar who consults on public sector reform in Vietnam.

“Despite one-party rule you see pluralism in the cultural and political thinking. And the younger generation is standing there, looking around, and seeing a lot of options to choose from.”

Creative Writing Can Be Taught

Creative writing professors, on the Huffington Post, answer questions about, well, creative writing.

From the piece...

Is there a crisis in literature?

TIM MAYERS: Those of us with even a cursory knowledge of literary criticism know that literature as a concept, as a canon, or as a term has been contested throughout its existence. To assert that a stable notion of literature has persisted throughout the history of writing is a spectacularly ignorant claim. Alexander Pope, for example, penned broadsides against the so-called hacks populating Grub Street. Not only does literature change in meaning over time, but it also is--and has been--the subject of deep disagreement among contemporaries. Yes, of course, literature is in crisis. That's its very nature. And that has little to do with the rise of creative writing in the academy.

ANNA LEAHY: Literature suggests a host of assumptions, including genius, isolation, and inspiration that only partially capture the writing life--then or now. Charles Darwin claimed that his idea of natural selection came to him in a flash, but Steven Johnson points out that Darwin's notebooks indicate he'd worked it out over almost three decades.

In a New Yorker article a few years ago, Malcolm Gladwell highlighted that the experimental innovator is at least as important as the precocious genius when we look at artistic talent and production. Creative writing is about doing the work of writing, and the experimental innovator benefits from time, support, and guidance. That's what creative writing classes and programs provide. That's what novelist John Irving said to John Stewart on The Daily Show, namely that a creative writing program and his mentor Kurt Vonnegut showed him, "You do these things better than those things. Why don't you do more of these things and fewer of those?" Irving remains grateful for the time this saved him in his development as a novelist.

STEPHANIE VANDERSLICE: Conflating creative writing and literature doesn't serve a useful purpose, especially if the main issue is teaching. Thousands of creative writers--some publishing during their time, some not (Emily Dickinson)--aspire to write work of literary merit that will transcend their own era, or perhaps they merely aspire to a writing life because they are compelled to do so, just as a painter is compelled to paint. Most of these artists have evolved past the desire to simply express themselves. In fact, as studies like Greg Light's "How Students Understand and Learn Creative Writing in Higher Education" in Writing in Education show, realizing that making literary art transcends self-expression is the first step in the writer's development. Like most artists, they struggle to define their own aesthetic and to find their place within any number of literary traditions.

Fashion Critique of G.I. Joe Characters?

Indeed!

From a piece on Comics Alliance...

Chris: I think our fashion critique of Rise of Cobra would be pretty short, and probably limited to two words. But the ones we're looking at have some truly timeless designs -- Occasionally timelessly awful, but I think the point stands. So I thought we'd start at the top with the single greatest fashion icon of all time: DESTRO! Not since Dr. Strange has a man rocked the high collar/amulet combo so effectively.

Bethany: Holy accessories, Batman! Does this guy have a disco collar, an amulet, two gauntlets (one with darts and another with grenades), and TWO garters? Not to mention, the collar, amulet, darts, grenades, and garters are matching impeccably!

Chris: And he has a pair of Batman's boots. Do you think that might be why I like Destro and Batman so much, even though they're completely different from each other? Because of the boots?

Bethany: Scalloped Batman-esque boots are usually a good indicator of what kind of character you're about to get invested in. That's how I decide whether or not I want to befriend people nowadays. Question: Is that a mask that he's wearing or is that what his face looks like? And if it's the latter, is he wearing a flesh-toned shirt under that suit?

Sherman Alexie and Neko Case Interview One Another

Thanks, Believer!

The Marginalia on Bibles Done by Medieval Nuns

Enjoy!

Bookstore Cats of the World

Enjoy!

Why Do Old Books Smell?

Ten Great Science Fiction Books for Girls

The list, care of Flavorwire.

Amazon.com - The Brick and Mortar Store?

Perhaps.

From a piece on Launch...

Let's assume the rumor of Amazon launching big, Costco-like stores is true. What would it be like for folks in Oakland, Los Angeles or New Jersey to drive to a huge mall complex, past Target and Walmart and into an Amazon store?

The first scenario: the store could just be a showroom with display units of appliances and "geniuses" running around showing you the top 25 vacuums in action. Or the top 10 juicers actually making juice.

It could be Consumer Reports meets the Apple Store on crack!

There wouldn't have to be any inventory, you would simply play with the stuff, talk to a professional and swipe your Amazon Prime credit card (or Amazon phone) and have it at your house in the next 24 to 48 hours.

Remember, Amazon has been experimenting with same-day delivery in some markets with some items. And no inventory might solve its sales-tax problems.

Remains of the Days

The New York Times explores books that explores the world of PBS's hit series Downtown Abbey.

From the article...

Until “Downton Abbey,” I never realized how many of my deepest desires involved ironing. True, it would also be nice to have a great deal of furtive sex with my social inferiors, preferably in crinolines. But at this point, I’d settle for a crisp newspaper.

I know I should feel guilty about my cravings for these things. But that’s the beauty of shows like “Downton Abbey” and its venerable ancestor “Upstairs, Downstairs”: the lives of the gentry are filled with so much intrigue, excruciating protocol and silent suffering that it would be churlish to resent their unimaginably comfortable existence.

And there’s another draw for Americans, particularly in an election year. We continue to labor under the delusion that we live in a class-free society — that social mobility is a birthright, not a remote possibility. If we’re not continually upgrading our circumstances, as Newt Gingrich reminds us, it’s our own damn fault. We are expected to be “Oprah”-ishly self-actuating and self-improving, and only sloth prevents us from achieving spiritual clarity and financial success. How perversely comforting, then, to turn our attention to a world where you will die where you are born and where the heroes are the rare overachievers who work their way up to butler from footman.

Ten Sequels Based on Classic Books

The list, care of the Christian Science Monitor.

The Digital Pop-Up Book

Do You Like Dogs? Do You Like Books?

Then you'll probably like Dogs in Books.

You'll also probably like a survey of antiquarian dog books, here.

Unemployment Lit

Like many of its readers, the novel has always lived for the weekend; historically, the workaday world of the office and factory has been considered too mundane to be of much interest.

Even less sexy to fiction than the topic of work is the topic of losing work. Being fired, losing homes to foreclosure, searching for a new job in middle age — these are the grim situations so many readers today are facing. The good news is that a few standout recent novels have ingeniously decided to tackle unemployment head-on.

NPR discusses them, here.

Edmund White on Gay Fiction

He discusses it with the Browser.

From the piece...

Do you think you would be such a prolific writer – or even a writer at all – if you weren’t gay? I remember you once said that when you were young you wrote about gay themes as a form of therapy.

For sure, in my early writing I felt like I was drowning and that writing was the only way of putting my head above the water, but the water was constantly rising. I think I had so many mental problems when I was young and I was constantly in therapy. That was certainly true for my teenage years and my twenties. I think that after I was 30 things changed a lot and I began to take more pleasure in the craft of writing and see novels as almost problems to be solved – artistic problems rather than psychological ones.

You teach creative writing and have done so for many years. You once said you found teaching in the early years a very useful education for yourself as a novelist. Do you still find that today?

I used to teach literature courses and that was certainly useful to be able to examine how books were put together. Now I only teach creative writing seminars and workshops. It’s instructive in a different way. For one thing, it keeps me in touch with how young people feel and the things they are thinking about and the way they are talking. For another, I’m constantly thinking about the construction of stories and novels. Issues like suspense and tension, characterisation, dialogue, percentages of dialogue to description and so on. All those rather technical issues get discussed in class and I think they are ones that I’m always thinking about and that must be useful for a writer.

And talking about gay writers, the New York Times reviews a book about American gay writers at the ramparts of the gay revolution.

Fantasic Four Gets a Reboot

The reboot is being done by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and David Marquez.

The New York Times discusses it...

ADAM W. KEPLER: This is a curious project. Marvel has retold the origin of the Fantastic Four a number of times in the last 20 years with the “Heroes Reborn” initiative and the launch of the Ultimate Universe and I’m not sure there is a demand for yet another iteration.

GEORGE GENE GUSTINES: I was filled with doubt as well – we saw another look at their 1963 origin in the 2005 “Fantastic Four” film too – how many do we need? But that may be sour grapes from a long-time reader. In the quest for new readers, this graphic novel serves as a very entertaining introduction to the Fantastic Four, putting a modern spin on some of the tropes of the heroes and the genre.

KEPLER: What sells this book in my mind is that only the first 30-odd pages are dedicated to the origins story; from there, the creators take the characters in new and unexpected directions. It’s a shrewd formatting move on Marvel’s part. If this story had been released as single issues, I would have hated the first issue, since it would have been made up entirely of the origins story. As a longer graphic novel however, Mr. Aguirre-Sacasa had the time and space to prove that this will not be a simple rehash. By the end, I was ready to read the second book.

Jimmy Fallon's "Do Not Read" List

25 Things I Learned from Opening a Bookstore

A charming list, care of Open Salon.

From said list...

8. If you put free books outside, someone will walk in every week and ask if they're really free, no matter how many signs you put out . Someone else will walk in and ask if everything in the store is free.

9. No one buys self help books in a store where there's a high likelihood of personal interaction when paying. Don't waste the shelf space, put them in the free baskets.

10. This is also true of sex manuals. The only ones who show an interest in these in a small store are the gum chewing kids, who will find them no matter how well you hide them.

11. Under no circumstances should you put the sex manuals in the free baskets. Parents will show up.

E-Books vs. Print Books - Stop Already!

NPR wants the debates to cease.

From the post...

There's really no need for a discussion about the technology any longer. Readers like the Kindle and Nook are great. They work. They're cheap. You can put a lifetime's worth of books on one — including a ton of public domain classics for a buck or less each. You can cobble together a virtual classics bookshelf for less than the cost of a round of drinks. Amazing.

Of course e-books aren't perfect. I am a scribbler, and you cannot scribble in the margins of an ebook. Not all books are available in digital editions (Martin Amis' Money, for instance, and most of Saul Bellow). E-books do not allow you to advertise your literary affectedness on the subway. And then there's the matter of all those barren bookshelves, in your home and at the soon-to-be-closed local independent bookseller.

Here's the thing: you don't have to be a print book person or an e-book person. It's not an either/or proposition. You can choose to have your text delivered on paper with a pretty cover, or you can choose to have it delivered over the air to your sleek little device. You can even play it way loose and read in both formats! Crazy, right? To have choice.

How to Write Like Shakespeare

More Intelligent Life lays it out for you.

From the piece...

Golden Rule

Use other people’s material. Shakespeare was the rewrite man Hollywood can only dream of. Give him Plutarch’s 80-page essay on Mark Antony and he’ll give you the 3,500-line tragedy “Antony and Cleopatra”. He was unencumbered by modern anxieties of originality, only inventing the plot for “The Tempest” and one or two others. Unlike some rewrite men, he doesn’t tidy up the original, he untidies it. He takes plays with happy endings and leaves them ambivalent, he obscures motive (Coleridge wrote of Iago’s “motiveless malignity”) and adds seemingly extraneous characters and glancing scenes. He introduced 2,000 new words (“horrid”, “lonely”, “zany”) and many everyday phrases (“flesh and blood”, “cruel to be kind”). His work occupies an eighth of the “Oxford Dictionary of Quotations”.

How to Read a Poem Aloud

The Last Poem Charles Bukowski Ever Wrote

Enjoy.

Louisa May Alcott Goes to War

Eager to support the North, the budding author volunteered for a fledgling corps of female nurses.

From a story on History Net...

In hospitals as well as in the field, the greatest danger to soldiers and caregivers alike was disease. Less than one month after she took up her duties in Washington, in early January 1863 Alcott came down with typhoid pneumonia. At first she stubbornly tried to keep up with her duties, despite a high fever and racking cough, but she soon was confined to bed. Even then she continued to write letters and sew for the soldiers until she became dangerously ill. Her supervisor, Hannah Ropes (whose own Civil War letters and diary were finally published in 1980), wrote asking her family to come and take her home. Ropes herself subsequently fell ill and died on January 20. The next day Louisa agreed to let her father take her home.

Often delusional (and perhaps poisoned by the mercury-laced calomel she'd been dosed with), Alcott was not well enough to leave the house until spring. But as soon as she could work, at the urging of friends and family she set about revising for publication the letters she had sent and the journal she had kept. Hospital Sketches first appeared in the Boston Commonwealth, a weekly newspaper, in four installments in May and June 1863.

To Alcott's surprise, the sketches proved to be extraordinarily popular, and were quickly reprinted in newspapers across the North. Two publishers vied to produce an expanded version in book form, which appeared in hardcover that August. It too turned out to be a success with a public hungry for news about its "boys." The volume was reprinted again in 1869 with additional material, as Hospital Sketches and Camp and Fireside Stories, and again did well, selling another 3,000 copies.

In retrospect, Alcott's illness could be viewed as a fortunate outcome of her brief service, for it meant she was invalided out of nursing relatively early in the conflict (Sketches was in print before the Battle of Gettysburg) and enabled her to be first in the field with a firsthand account of how wounded troops were treated.

Top Ten Literary Believers

The list, care of the Guardian.

Librarian Porn

The Paris Review takes a look at this erotica sub-genre.

From the piece...

Porn books and librarians have always had a passionate, mutually defining relationship—it was, in fact, a prudish French librarian in the early nineteenth century who coined the word pornography. So it comes as no surprise that the sexy librarian, a fixture of the pornographic imagination, is most at home in books. Each year, new titles are added to the librarian-porn bookshelf. This past season’s crop included additions like Hot for Librarian by Anastasia Carrera; Lucy the Librarian—Dewey and His Decimal by John and Shauna Michaels; The Nympho Librarian and Other Stories by Chrissie Bentley and Jenny Swallows; A Librarian’s Desire by Ava Delaney, author of the Kinky Club series; and soft-core selections like Sweet Magik by Penny Watson. The conventions of the form—the dimly lit stacks, the librarian’s mask of thick glasses and hair tied into a bun, et cetera—are, of course, well known. Unlike video porn, where these conventions are typically used as a wholesale substitute for narrative, porn books still feel the compulsion to tell a story, to make the glasses and bun mean something. I was curious just what story these new books were telling. What does our most current version of the librarian fantasy say about us? To answer this question, I visited the library.

Dr. Seuss vs. Shakespeare

Perhaps the Greatest Comic Book Store in the World

It's in Paris. It's called BD Spirit.

From a story in Publishing Perspectives...

“We don’t carry books that just sell well. Our positioning might be a little severe, but we want our books to fit into the history of comics,” said Manuel Morin, owner and co-founder of the shop, who has also served as a member of the Grand Jury at the renowned Angoulême comic book festival, which just ended this past weekend.

Comics are a serious business for 30-year-old Morin, who has been collecting and dealing comics since he was a child. As a history buff and a passionate comic collector he has merged his two interests — he sees comics in the context of history, as a barometer for society. But he’s not too serious that he can’t have a few laughs with a client who is buying old Marvel comics with which he is wallpapering his bathroom wall.

An only child with parents who were intellectual Communists, Morin was left to read whatever he liked and he gravitated towards comics. “Culture was very important for my parents, it was a sort of ideology, that you couldn’t leave culture to the bourgeois.”

Perhaps the Greatest Comic Book Auction Ever

It's happening at Heritage Auctions.

From a piece on Crunch Roll...

The Billy Wright Collection, a newly CGC-pedigreed collection – featuring five of the top six comic books in the hobby, all unrestored and all offered without reserves – leads the way in Heritage’s Feb. 22-24 Vintage Comics and Comic Art Signature® Auction, taking place at the Fletcher-Sinclair Mansion (Ukrainian Institute of America) at 2 East 79th Street (at 5th Ave.).

“While a relatively small collection of little more than 300 comic books,” said Lon Allen, Managing Director of Comics Auctions at Heritage. “The Billy Wright Collection represents not only five of the top six comics in the business, but also 45 of the top 100 comics overall, all unrestored.”


Those top comics include Detective Comics #27 (DC, 1939) CGC FN+ 6.5, the first appearance of “The Bat Man” (Estimate: $475,000+); Action Comics #1 (DC, 1938) CGC GD/VG 3.0, the most important comic book ever published (Estimate: $325,000+); All-American Comics #16 (DC, 1940) CGC VF 8.0, the debut of Green Lantern (Estimate: $125,000+); Batman #1 (DC, 1940) CGC VF+ 8.5, a superb copy of the first official Batman comic (Estimate: $125,000) and Marvel Comics #1 (Timely, 1939) CGC VF- 7.5 (Estimate: $125,000+).

Barnes & Noble in the Fight of Its Life

Will it survive the digital world - with Amazon.com permeating the landscape?

From a piece in the New York Times...

Inside the great publishing houses — grand names like Macmillan, Penguin and Random House — there is a sense of unease about the long-term fate of Barnes & Noble, the last major bookstore chain standing. First, the megastores squeezed out the small players. (Think of Tom Hanks’s Fox & Sons Books to Meg Ryan’s Shop Around the Corner in the 1998 comedy, “You’ve Got Mail”.) Then the chains themselves were gobbled up or driven under, as consumers turned to the Web. B. Dalton Bookseller and Crown Books are long gone. Borders collapsed last year.

No one expects Barnes & Noble to disappear overnight. The worry is that it might slowly wither as more readers embrace e-books. What if all those store shelves vanished, and Barnes & Noble became little more than a cafe and a digital connection point? Such fears came to the fore in early January, when the company projected that it would lose even more money this year than Wall Street had expected. Its share price promptly tumbled 17 percent that day.

Lurking behind all of this is Amazon.com, the dominant force in books online and the company that sets teeth on edge in publishing.