Karl Kesel Trades His Back Pages for a New Life

A comic book writer is putting up his comic book collection up for auction to pay for medical bills and adoption fees for his new baby.

From a piece in the Oregonian...

After 40 years, he is letting the Marvels of his childhood go because, at the golden age of 53, Karl and his wife, Myrna, suddenly have their hands full.

With a 15-week-old baby.

The child of heroin users.

Their precious son, Isaac .¤.¤. and the adoption fees and medical bills that arrived with him.

Thus, the comics must go.

“I don’t necessarily feel like I’m putting away childish things,” says Kesel, a longtime writer and artist. “I may be putting away my childish things. But I’m embracing Isaac’s.

“I think I’m getting another childhood here.”

And adding to those tales that astonish.

Why Scientists Need Novelists, and Vice Versa

There's a symbiotic relationship between the two, notes the New Scientist.

From the piece...

McKenzie’s first book, Blood Ties, is about two teenagers who discover they are clones of other people. Her interest was in the emotional consequences for the characters, rather than the process itself. She turned to discussion forums where scientists were debating the ethics of creating clones of human beings and discovered this an excellent source of material: “One guy said, ‘What’s it going to be like for kids growing up knowing that they’ve been created as a copy of another person?’” She asked herself: "Why would people do that? To replace a dead child? Your son or daughter dies, say as a teenager, and maybe you’re too old to have more children naturally. Why wouldn’t you clone that dead child and create a new child that will look very similar to the one that you lost?"

Fiction has another effect too, says Elfick: it can inspire scientists about the future. As McKenzie reminded us, no one took much notice of the mobile telephony that was all the rage in Star Trek in the 1960s, but how ahead of its time was that?

So how do fiction writers and film-makers find out about science and scientists? McKenzie made sure she did her homework for her books. When she was writing The Medusa Project series, which follows a group of teenagers who were implanted at birth with a gene for psychic abilities, she asked a scientist; “How do I get a gene into an unborn child?” And she was told, “Wrap it in a virus.” So she did.

Ray Bradbury's FBI File

The Daily Beast digs in.

From the piece...

Bradbury got exactly what he didn’t want. The FBI investigation of Bradbury spans April 2 through June 3, 1959, and included surveillance from special agents.

“There’s some case notes to indicate they were parked outside the street of his house, watching his house. There were definitely agents stationed, watching his family and the goings on at the Bradbury home,” Weller says.

According to Martin A. Berkeley, a former member of the Communist Party and one of few named sources in the files, Bradbury, “was probably sympathetic with certain pro-Communist elements in the WGAw [Writers Guild of America, West].” He told the FBI that during a meeting of the Writers Guild, formerly the Screen Writers Guild, the union was considering whether to keep Communist Party members from joining, and Bradbury rose up and shouted, “Cowards and McCarthyites.”

Greatest Superheroes Based On Their Religious Faith

The greatest Methodist superhero? Superman.
The greatest Jewish superhero? The Thing.

Comic Book Religion offers up others, here.

From the piece...

Greatest Mormon Superhero: Captain Canuck

When it comes to religion, Latter-day Saints (or "Mormons") outnumber Jews in the United States (according to the 2007 survey of 35,000 people by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, based in Washington, D.C.). Yet there have been literally hundreds of Jewish super-heroes in published comics, but only a handful of Latter-day Saints - even fewer if one considers only super-heroes overtly identified by name as Latter-day Saints.

From this relative paucity, we have selected Tom Evans (the Canadian counterpart to Captain America) as the greatest Latter-day Saint superhero. Captain Canuck is a relatively prominent super-hero (at least compared to other Latter-day Saint superheroes). Captain Canuck was genuinely written as a Latter-day Saint by his creator and principle chronicler. Plus, he always displayed devotion to his beliefs and a strong moral center that Latter-day Saint readers can be proud of.
Captain Canuck is not as well known as some mainstays of Marvel and DC comics (a la Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, et al), but he is universally known among Canadian comic book fans. Captain Canuck was even honored on a Canadian postage stamp. Captain Canuck easily ranks in the top 2 or 3 most famous Canadian superheroes of all time, and he is well known and respected among comic book fans with interests in classic independent (non-Marvel/non-DC) superhero characters. But one knock against Captain Canuck's "greatest" status is the fact that he is NOT part of the two best known comic book universes: Marvel and DC.

Another problem with Captain Canuck is the fact that it isn't clear that he was ever overtly identified by name as a Latter-day Saint in published comics. Captain Canuck was the creation of a devout Latter-day Saint comic book writer - Richard Comely. Captain Canuck says Latter-day Saint-style prayers in published comics and does and says a number of things which clearly hint at his religious affiliation. Among careful readers, there is no real question about what Captain Canuck's religion is and that he was a sincere, devout member, but because it wasn't mentioned by name, this fact is unknown by many.

But Captain Canuck is a Latter-day Saint and, moreover, he is a truly great super-hero. He represented Canada before there was Alpha Flight or other modern Canadian national heroes and he embodied Canadian ideals and philosophies more than most super-heroes who just happen to be Canadian. (Wolverine, for example, hardly represents Canadian values and ideals). Canadians, tolerant by nature, never seemed to mind that they were represented in superherodom by a member of a denomination that may be very prominent in Alberta but is a small minority in most of their nation.

21 World War I Recruitment Posters from Around the World

Enjoy!

12 of the Most Beautiful Literary Magazines Online

The list, care of Flavorwire.

On the Death of J.R.R. Tolkien

Happy Labor Day! 7 Authors Who Worked on the Side

The list, care of the Huffington Post.

Born and Raised...To Letter

Letterology highlights the man behind John Mayer's new album cover.

Kay Nielsen’s Stunning 1914 Scandinavian Fairy Tale Illustrations

Beautiful.

Awesome Bookends

Enjoy!

First Time Sex Writing

Jesse Bering discusses it on the Outlet.

From the post...

I was a sophomore in high school the first time I ever wrote about sex. There was a girl—let’s call her Wanda—who was serving at the time as something of a lily-white beard to my ninety-pound homosexual carcass, a clumsy, rather malodorous suit of meat tailor-made for the manufacture of two speciality adolescent male products: sebum and semen. The first, I know now looking back, oozed out of my pores to lubricate the magnificent apish pelage that once covered my ancestors’ bodies, but which now pools impotently into pustules on the glistening faces of today’s teenagers. And semen, of course, has its obvious reproductive function that even at my most naive I understood perfectly well. But believe it or not, scientists are only now beginning to fully understand that our testicular output is about more than just baby-making. In fact, only about five percent of a seminal emission consists of spermatozoa; the rest is an incredibly rich, chemical-filled, psychopharmacological concoction that many scientists believe can tweak and manipulate the bodies, minds, and behaviors of those inseminated. These astonishing facts, and other scientific tidbits, I explore in some detail in my new book Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?


Back to lily-white Wanda. The gossip, at least, was that she was not as lily-white as she appeared, and I liked her as much for her sordid reputation as anything else.

When Writers Attack Other Writers

Sometimes they kind of bash each other.

From a piece on Moby Lives...

1. Mary McCarthy vs. Lillian Hellman

Back when television talk shows had writers on and actually asked them interesting questions — in January 1980, to be precise — Mary McCarthy appeared on the Dick Cavett Show and he asked her what writers she thought were overrated. McCarthy cited John Steinbeck and Pearl S. Buck, but saved her most biting remarks for Lillian Hellman, “who,” she said, “I think is tremendously overrated, a bad writer, a dishonest writer, but she really belongs to the past.” Pressed by Cavett to explain what about Hellman’s work, exactly, was overrated, McCarthy said, “Everything … every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’”

The wealthy Hellman promptly sued the barely-solvent McCarthy for defamation.

Top 10 Books about War

The list, care of Hazlitt.

The Ridiculous Rise of Ayn Rand

Her writings have been popular of late. The Chronicle of Higher Education looks into it.

From the post...

Yet as much as I like it when intellectuals receive attention, I still find myself uninterested in Ayn Rand. I do not care what she would have thought of the current scene. That those who invoke her name treat her selectively is of almost no significance to me. I have the sense, moreover, that I am not alone, at least among those in the academic world. Despite a flutter of interest, she has been mostly ignored.

Rand wrote novels that are highly unlikely to be read and taught in departments of English. Her subject was the market, but no academic economists take her seriously, unless, of course, wealthy libertarians offer funds for that purpose. She considered herself an Aristotelian, but it is impossible to imagine departments of philosophy and political science adding her to the canon.

For those under Rand’s spell, all this is just more evidence of academe’s irrelevance. For me it demonstrates that, for all the attacks directed against it, American academic life still has standards. I will be teaching a course next semester called “Liberalism and Conservatism.” John Stuart Mill and Edmund Burke will be on the reading list.  So will libertarians such as Friedrich von Hayek and the founder of the National Review, William F. Buckley Jr. Contemporary liberals such as E.J. Dionne will be there. But not Rand. My reasons for excluding her may be the same reasons that other academics ignore her.

Rand’s “thought,” such as it is, boils down to two propositions. One is that selfishness is the highest of moral virtues. The other is that the masses, above all resentful of success, are parasites living off the hard work of capitalists far superior to them in every way.

Self-interest is a useful concept, while selfishness is not. That, I believe, helps explain why Adam Smith is a first-rate thinker and Ayn Rand is an amateur.

Reviewing Madonna's Junior High School Yearbook

BFF. Have a great summer! Don't ever change!

Thanks, Booktryst.

Hilary Mantel Books Set for Mini-Series

The fictionalized life of Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, is to be brought to TV in six-hour adaptation and expected to be broadcast in late 2013.

From a story in the Guardian...

Stressing the channel's commitment to drama in the face of cuts that from the new year will ravage the daytime schedule, BBC2 controller Janice Hadlow – who named Wolf Hall as among her favourite books of recent years – said the novels were "right in the cross hairs of what BBC2 viewers will enjoy".

"I think there is a cumulative, mounting hunger for the [dramas] that we do," said Hadlow. "That doesn't mean that all of them will be massive audience drivers but I think what drama injects into the channel is of such value … something so powerful that you'd want to protect that at all costs."

The Justice League of America That Never Was

CBS's Justice League of America intro from a 1990s TV show that never aired. God, I wish it had.

The Next Hunger Games?

Following 'Twilight' and 'The Hunger Games,' a slew of young-adult and middle-grade novels have been optioned for possible films. The Los Angeles Times offers a guide.

Dorothy Parker Left Her Estate To...

Martin Luther King, Jr. True thing. Vanity Fair has more, here.

What I Have to Offer

On the 30th of September 2011, in front of a sell-out theatre at the BFI in London, Charlie Kaufman delivered the final lecture in BAFTA's 2011 Screenwriters' Lecture Series...

What I have to Offer from Eliot Rausch on Vimeo.

A Brief History of Superman's Love Life

Because, I'm sure you were pining for a brief history of Superman's love life. You're in luck!

From a piece on Comics Alliance...

Lois Lane has been around since Superman's first appearance in 1938's Action Comics #1, and she's been in every single adaptation of the Superman story in other media: radio, newspaper comic strips, novels, animated cartoons, film, and television. The relationship Lois shares with Superman is complex; she spurns milquetoast Clark Kent in favor of alpha-jock Superman, who in turn spurns her. Consequently, Lois would think of insane plots to either reveal Superman's secret identity or trick him into marrying her while jealously fending off any romantic rivals. Superman generally kept Lois at arm's length, unless of course she suddenly took an interest in another guy or her ardor seemed to wane.

This status quo worked for a good four or five decades, but eventually the two developed a more realistic and mature relationship during writer/artist John Byrne's revamp of the Superman continuity for the emerging post- Crisis On Infinite Earths version of the DC Universe in the late 1980s. The new Lois Lane wasn't quite so hard on her Daily Planet co-worker Clark Kent, and Superman revealed his secret identity to her. After a few years as a couple, they finally married in 1996's Superman: The Wedding Album, and had one of the more healthy and stable super-relationships for the next 15 years. DC's "New 52" reboot undid their marriage, courtship and even the fact that Lois knew that Superman and Clark Kent were one and the same, freeing the Man of Steel up for a relationship with Wonder Woman that does not necessitate leaving Lois -- if they were never together, there can be no break-up.

The First Edition Covers of 25 Classic Books

The gallery, care of Flavorwire.

The Future of Reading Rainbow

25 Vintage Magazine Covers from Japan

Beautiful!

50 Funniest Lines in Literature

The list, care of Stylist.

A Bevy of Bookplates

Enjoy!

A Fleet Foxes-Related Literary Journal to Be Published

It'll be called Unified Field Collective.

From a piece in the L Magazine...

In the case of the inaugural issue, we can expect a 10'' transparent vinyl pressing of rare tracks from the aforementioned Pecknold, Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Amen Dunes, Grizzly Bear spin-off Department of Eagles and more, while its 60 pages will work off the theme of "transition" (each issue will carry a theme, natch). Round one features a journal entry penned by recently freed West Memphis 3 member Damien Echols on adjusting to life after 18 years on death row, an excerpt from Gloria Steinem's forthcoming book, a photo essay on adolescence by noted rock photographer Autumn de Wilde, a contribution from SPIN's Charles Aaron, and another from Animal Collective sister/visual collaborator Abby Portner, among 30-plus other pieces. Also worth mentioning: Both Beach House and Sub Pop are listed among the collective's roster. Perhaps a hint of what future issues will hold?

Books Ranking Literary Devils by Their Relative Fearsomeness

The list, care of Flavorwire.

Kafka

Blast Off Into Space...

...with a good book.

The New York Daily News offers some suggestions, here.

And have you SEEN this Mars stuff? Awesome....

Happy Birthday, Norton Anthology

Fifty years ago this fall, undergraduates were assigned their first Norton Anthology, often the only required text for a college freshman’s survey of English literature. 

The editors discuss its importance for the New York Times.

From the piece...

The Norton Anthology plays a crucial role in a humanities curriculum that is said to be under great pressure. Have you noticed the effects of this pressure?

Greenblatt: Of course we have noticed. The issue is not so much the anthology, but rather the fate of the whole enterprise of studying what Matthew Arnold called the best which has been thought and said in the world. For generations that enterprise occupied a key place in college and university education everywhere, but there are signs that it is in trouble. Humanities departments are fretting about a decline in majors, and those students who do major in literature, art, philosophy and history often clamor only for contemporary topics.

Has the Norton Anthology then lost its relevance?

Greenblatt: Not at all. The Norton Anthology was based on the idea that it actually matters to plunge into a comic masterpiece written in the 1300s or to weep at a tragedy performed in the 1700s. What would it mean for a culture to give up on its past? It is vitally important to remind people that the humanities carry the experience, the life-forms of those who came before us, into the present and into the future. Through reading literature we can make ghosts speak to us, and we can speak back to them. Besides — as many studies have shown — cultural knowledge turns out to be good for your career.

Bruce Davidson's London

The Stories of Julie Hayden

Have you ever read a story by Julie Hayden? Do you even know who Julie Hayden is? Neither did S. Kirk Walsh, writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

From the piece...

JULIE HAYDEN’S ONE AND ONLY book, The Lists of the Past, was released 36 years ago this summer by Viking Press. Ten of its stories were originally published in the pages of the New Yorker, where Hayden worked for 16 years before her death at age 42.

I discovered Hayden while driving with my husband from Los Angeles to our home in Austin, Texas. For the road trip, I had downloaded multiple podcasts, including several fiction programs from the New Yorker. Along a barren stretch of Highway 10 in southeast Arizona, we listened to Lorrie Moore read Hayden's story "Day-Old Baby Rats." The story follows a tormented woman as she wanders the streets and subways of Manhattan, through stores and other public spaces, and finally through the heavy doors of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. In the darkness of a confessional, while sipping Scotch from a flask, she tries to ask a priest for help. A slightly older and more broken-down version of Sylvia Plath’s Esther Greenwood, Hayden’s nameless protagonist embodies the acute loneliness of living in Manhattan — how the distorted lens of irrational fears and past traumas can transform the city into a dangerous landscape, seemingly impossible to navigate.

By the time the story was over, my husband and I had exited the highway and parked outside a diner. Only a few cars were in the lot, which was on a hill overlooking distant mountains. It was an odd and wonderful setting in which to listen to a story that so fully took me back to New York City — where at times during my early twenties I had experienced similar loneliness and intoxication. Over burgers and fries, my husband and I talked about the emotional power and mastery of the story and how it reminded us of our lost, younger selves. Neither of us could believe that we had never heard of this extraordinary writer.

And in Today's Book Burning News

Let's all torch 50 Shades of Gray, yes? It's vile.

From a piece in the New York Daily News...


A British charity is proposing a mass burning of copies of E.L. James' "50 Shades of Grey," the sexy trilogy that is easily the most popular book of the season, charges that it is pure trash aside.

The burning is being organized by Clare Phillipson, who heads Wearside Women in Need, an organization that battles domestic abuse. It is based in Washington, England. The bonfire is scheduled for Nov. 5, and Phillipson appears to be collecting volumes for the occasion. However, it is unclear if she needs a permit from municipal authorities to hold the burning.

Her main objection appears to be that the power dynamic between Ana Steele and Christian Grey borders on the abusive. One imagines the books' delving into BDSM does not thrill her, either.

Jon Stewart on Literature

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Drugstore Cowboy Author Dies in Prison

RIP James Fogle.

From a piece in the Seattle Times...

Fogle died Thursday at a prison in Monroe, Wash., about 30 miles from Seattle, said Selena Davis, a state corrections spokeswoman. A judge had sentenced him to almost 16 years in prison for holding up a pharmacy in a Seattle suburb in 2010, the last in a string of crimes that put him behind bars for most of his adult life.

Fogle died of probable malignant mesothelioma (meh-soh-thee-lee-OH'-muh), the Snohomish County Medical Examiner's office said Friday.

The ailing Fogle was emaciated and connected to several medical machines in the last week of his life, close friend Daniel Yost told the Seattle Times in a phone interview from Los Angeles.
He was terminally ill and barely able to breathe, but his sharp wit and creative drive were ever-present as he pushed Yost, one of his final visitors, to get another of his novels, the autobiographical "Doing It All," onto the big screen, the Times reported.

Unusual Cookbooks

100 Novels Everyone Should Read Before They Die

The list, care of the Telegraph.

It's Read Comics in Public Day

Don't be shy. Go out there and enjoy it!

Ian Falconer Interviewed

The author and illustrator of Olivia is interviewed by the New York Times.

From the piece...

What were your favorite books as a child?

Fairly obvious choices. Dr. Seuss’ “The Cat in the Hat” and “The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins”; Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are,” “Nutshell Library” and “Higglety Pigglety Pop!” ( a great favorite); William Steig’s “Sylvester and the Magic Pebble.” 

What makes a good children’s book?

That’s a bloody good question. O.K., if I had to say one thing, it would be to not underestimate your audience. Children will figure things out; it’s what they do best — sorting out the world. 

What’s the best book by an illustrator you’ve ever read?

I’d have to say “Higglety Pigglety Pop!” The story is sort of slow and moody, but very funny, and the monochrome drawings beautiful.

The History of the Ballpoint Pen

Because you were dying to know, yes?

From a review in the Wall Street Journal...

Through much trial and error, and with the help of his early backer and business partner, Andor Goy (1896-1991), Bíró developed a working ballpoint pen. The two men signed a contract to produce and market the pen in 1938. Thus a simple but remarkable invention came into a world about to be convulsed by death and destruction. We see Bíró refining the pen and experimenting with recipes for the ink paste essential to his concept while fleeing dangers that seemed to chase him across Europe as war brewed and then broke out.

Bíró comes across as amazingly tolerant of, even oblivious to, the uncertainties and dangers that threatened his life and the fate of his invention. He was not totally naïve; he tried to safeguard his commercial interests. Nor were his successive entrepreneurial collaborators totally unscrupulous. At each stage, Bíró tried to strike the best deal he could, though his own shares dwindled steadily—and at one point he had to choose between keeping his remaining shares or selling them to help his family flee to Argentina. Understandably, he had no regrets about bartering to save lives. Yet Mr. Moldova rightly emphasizes the ultimate irony that "the inventor who conducted the thousands of experiments needed to perfect the ballpoint pen ended up without a penny of stock in the factory where they had taken place." Inventors, beware!

Kurt Cobain...

The sticker book?

Making Literary Cocktails

The Most Book Loving Generation Alive

Gen Y? Yeah, Gen Y!

From a piece in the Christian Science Monitor...

Baby boomers’ share of book expenditures fell from 30 percent in 2010 to 25 percent in 2011, while Gen Y’s expenditure grew from 24 percent in 2010 to 30 percent in 2011 – a near-mirror-image swap. Not as surprising, about 43 percent of Gen Y’s purchases are geared toward online book buying, ”adding momentum to the industry shift to digital,” according to the report.

This news piqued our interest, but we can’t say we were entirely surprised. As The Beat wrote, “…this is really just a matter of time and aging…” It’s also, they pointed out, a message to publishers of a potential shift in audience taste. After all, this newly dominant Gen Y audience “was raised on Bruce Timm, The X-Men, and Buffy,” says The Beat.

Scary times ahead in publishing.

The report also charted the continued growth of e-book consumption, which rose from 4 percent of sales in 2010 to 14 percent in 2011. And due to the slow economic recovery, more affluent households have taken over a larger share of book expenditures. Some 57 percent of book spending came from households earning more than $50,000 in 2011, up from 54 percent in 2010.

Dramatic Readings of Obama Campaign Emails

What Did Herman Melville Do After Writing Moby-Dick?

He didn't go to Disneyland. He went to the Holy Land.

From an interesting piece in Tablet...


But Pittsfield, in the wake of Moby-Dick’s poor reception, was not a happy place for Melville. His farm was losing money, and his career seemed to be in shambles. He followed Moby-Dick with Pierre (1852), another financial and critical disappointment, and then several stories for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine and Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, among them Bartleby the Scrivener (1853) and Benito Cereno (1855). Each short story hints at the author’s anger, despair, and exhaustion. Another novel, Israel Potter, published in 1855, did little to change his reputation or circumstances, and those closest to Melville grew increasingly worried; the writer seemed fatigued, unhappy, and even, some suggested, suicidal.

Given Melville’s anguished state, his wife, Elizabeth Shaw, proposed—and his father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, agreed to finance—a trip overseas. Melville had previously gone abroad to London in 1849, shortly before the completion of Moby-Dick, and had enjoyed the trip immensely. But that had been a different time in the author’s life; he was a successful novelist writing a book he believed would be immediately celebrated as one of the greatest works of the 19th century. Six years and many disappointments later, Melville had good reason to be down.

Nonetheless, on Oct. 11, 1856, Melville boarded the Glasgow, a steamer bound for England. As Howard C. Horsford recounts in his historical note to the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Melville’s journals (for which Horsford served as editor), Melville visited Hawthorne in Liverpool, and Hawthorne said afterward that Melville seemed “a little paler, and perhaps a little sadder” than he’d been before. But as Melville journeyed on, the trip appeared to revive his spirits. As he sails the Mediterranean in mid-winter, Melville’s exuberance is clear. In his journal, he notes “such weather as one might have in paradise,” of “stars shining with brilliancy,” and “gloriously clear” evenings. This attitude, though dotted with days of despair, generally continued through Constantinople, Alexandria, Cairo, and Rome.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's Handwritten Great Gatsby Manuscript

Cool!

Is the Literary Recluse a Dying Breed?

Yes. :(

Damn you social media.

From a piece on Lit Reactor...

To Kill A Mockingbird was published in 1960. Since then, Harper Lee has appeared in public a handful of times. She never wrote another book, and she rarely grants interviews. 

In 1951, J.D. Salinger published his first novel, The Catcher in the Rye. As the book grew in popularity, the author withdrew from public, moving from his Manhattan apartment to Cornish, New Hampshire. From there, he published three more books, all without maintaining a public profile.  

Only a few photos of Thomas Pynchon exist, nearly all from high school and college. He's published eight novels, and despite some high-profile "appearances"--like in animated form, as himself on The Simpsons--there's still a great deal of speculation about him.  

These authors, and others, carry an air of mystique that make them bigger than their writing. They leave more questions than they answer: Why didn't Lee finish The Long Goodbye, her second book? How many novels did Salinger write that will never be released? What does Pynchon even look like? 
These are authors we feel like we know, but we never really did.
 
They're also a dying breed--the literary recluse, rendered obsolete by blogging and social networking.

Early 1900s Postcards Show Off Early "Photoshopping Skills"

A gallery, care of Wired.

Top 5 Literary Paintings

The list, care of the Telegraph.

Highlights from the 2012 National Poetry Slam

Watch Your Favorite TV Characters Talk about Books

Enjoy!

8 Great Moments in the History of Editing

The list, care of Mental Floss.

From said list...

1. The Catch in Catch-22: The Edit That Became an Idiom

In 1961, author Joseph Heller finally submitted his manuscript for Catch-18 to his editor, Robert Gottlieb. Although Heller had spent seven years perfecting the story, Gottlieb saw room for improvement. The editor taped the pages to his office wall and restructured the novel, giving more emphasis to the now famous Major Major character and instructing Heller to delete entire 60-page sections. But most importantly, Gottlieb wanted to change the title.

Earlier that year, writer Leon Uris had released a war novel called Mila 18, and Gottlieb didn’t want any confusion between the two books. What followed was an exchange of frantic letters in which Heller and Gottlieb considered and rejected various numbers for the title. They decided 11 didn’t work because of Ocean’s 11; 14 was “an unfunny number;” and 26 just didn’t feel right. “I’ve got it!” Gottlieb blurted out one night in a eureka moment. “It’s Catch-22! It’s funnier than 18.” The edit stuck, and a major, major idiom was born.

The Difficulty of Insider Book Theft

Oxford University Press takes a look at the black market rare book trade.

From the post...

He seems to have treated the place as his own personal collection, stealing and selling hundreds — maybe thousands — of rare and antiquarian books during his 11 month tenure. This has provoked the normal amount of head-shaking and hand-wringing. But what is most striking — aside from the embarrassing appointment of the unqualified de Caro to the job in the first place — is how terrible a thief he was.

For an insider, stealing rare books, maps and documents is easy. It takes no talent and very little planning. But turning those stolen items into cash while also staying out of jail requires skill, and a great deal of effort. De Caro, like many insiders before him, seems not to have properly thought this through.

The first step in the successful insider heist is to identify items unlikely to be either missed by the institution or recognized by buyers as stolen. For the same reason that stealing the Mona Lisa is a bad idea, taking the most famous or in-demand items in a library or archive is ill-advised. They’ll be likely recognized as missing and, in any event, will raise suspicions in anyone knowledgeable enough to pay full price for them.

Top 20 Books to Argue About

Do you love the book? Or hate it? A list, care of Stylist.

How Paperbacks Transformed the Way People Read

An interesting history of paperbacks, care of Mental Floss.

From the post...

Here’s a little perspective: In 1939, gas cost 10 cents a gallon at the pump. A movie ticket set you back 20 cents. John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, the year’s bestselling hardcover book, was $2.75. For a nation suffering 20 percent unemployment, books were an impossible expense.
But in just one day, Robert de Graff changed that. On June 19, 1939, the tall, dynamic entrepreneur took out a bold, full-page ad in The New York Times: OUT TODAY—THE NEW POCKET BOOKS THAT MAY TRANSFORM NEW YORK’S READING HABITS.

The ad was timed to coincide with the debut of his newest endeavor, an imprint called Pocket Books. Starting with a test run of 10 titles, which included classics as well as modern hits, de Graff planned to unleash tote-able paperbacks on the American market. But it wasn’t just the softcover format that was revolutionary: De Graff was pricing his Pocket Books at a mere 25 cents.

Despite its audacity, de Graff’s ad wasn’t brazen enough for his taste. A former publishing exec who’d cut his teeth running imprints for Doubleday, de Graff wanted the ad to read THE NEW POCKET BOOKS THAT WILL TRANSFORM NEW YORK’S READING HABITS. His business partners at Simon & Schuster were less confident and forced the edit. Even though some European publishers were making waves with paperbacks—Penguin in England and Albatross in Germany—New York publishers didn’t think the cheap, flimsy books would translate to the American market.

They were wrong. It took just a week for Pocket Books to sell out its initial 100,000 copy run. Despite industry skepticism, paperbacks were about to transform America’s relationship with reading forever.

The End of Coffee Table Books?

That was the question recently posed by the Independent.

From the article...

In the past few years, says Tom Tivnan, features editor of The Bookseller: "Illustrated books and art books have withstood the digital decline that the rest of the industry is facing. The 'beautiful' books are the print books that will survive in the digital age. The latest Bookscan figures suggest, for example, that sales of individual monograph art books were up 70 per cent last year."

The coffee table book is a 20th-century creation; hardly surprising, given that the coffee table itself was only introduced to Great Britain in the late 19th century. Until the post-war period, printing such large editions was prohibitively expensive. But as printing costs decreased and middle-class incomes rose, they became an essential fixture in any bourgeois household. Designed to be admired, they favour pictures over words. Typical subjects include art, photography, fashion or the natural world. The coffee table book is the best excuse for displaying soft porn in plain sight. Kramer once spent an entire series of Seinfeld trying to flog a coffee table book about coffee table books.

"Illustrated books are mostly produced in the Far East now," Tivnan explains. "That may cause some ecological concerns, but it's much cheaper for publishers, and the quality is high. So we could be entering a golden age. There's going to be a split between cheap, e-book convenience reads, and the books that people want to live with, put on their coffee tables or shelves."

The Sandman Movie That Never Was

Some concept art, care of Collider.

Quebec's Garden of Decaying Books

Pretty!