From Literary Hub

The Little-Known ‘Slow Fire’ That’s Destroying All Our Books
Chloe Vassot on the Relentless, Inevitable Process of DecayBy Chloe Vassot • October 17, 2019

How to fix a book: first, gather your tools. The bone folder that feels familiar in your hand, the knitting needles still sticky with glue, the X-Acto knife, the tiny Tupperware of ( Read more... )

From Chronicle of Higher Education

A Scholar of Proverbs Built a Vast Collection of Books. Then Opportunity Knocked.
By Emma Pettit July 15, 2019

Good artists copy; great artists steal. Perhaps Benjamin Franklin knew as much, because when he wrote his famous Poor Richard’s Almanack, he did not cite sources for the proverbs that peppered its pages.

To ( Read more... )

From GQ (Gentleman's Quarterly) UK
Why we hope Terry Pratchett's Discworld can live on after his death

Terry Pratchett's dying wish that all his unfinished work would be destroyed has been carried out thanks to a steamroller and a hard drive. Is it possible another novelist may be allowed to pick up the master fantasy writer's mantle?

News that Sir ( Read more... )

Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's war, 1941-1945, by Leo Marks

That's Marks as in Marks and Co., booksellers at 84 Charing Cross Road, London. He half grew up in the store, and broke his first code there: the price enciphered inside the cover of every book. At age 8.

That's Marks the screenwriter of " Peeping Tom", the 1960 horror-thriller that ( Read more... )

From Public Domain Review via JSTOR Daily Frankenstein, the Baroness, and the Climate Refugees of 1816

It is 200 years since “The Year Without a Summer”, when a sun-obscuring ash cloud - ejected from one of the most powerful volcanic eruptions in recorded history - caused temperatures to plummet the world over. Gillen D’Arcy Wood looks at the ( Read more... )

From The New York Times, in Obama’s Secret to Surviving the White House Years: Books via Wikipedia
Transcript: President Obama on What Books Mean to Him
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI, chief book critic, January 16, 2017

And then there’s been the occasion where I just want to get out of my own head. [Laughter] Sometimes you read fiction just because you want ( Read more... )

I was going to go to bed, when I stumbled on this. I couldn't not watch it. BBC. YouTube 49:21Terry Pratchett Back in Black

"Embedding disabled by request"
"This video is unlisted. Be considerate and think twice before sharing." What does that mean?

This entry was originally posted at http://thnidu.dreamwidth.org/1588784.html. You can comment ( Read more... )

Behind the Scam: What Does It Take to Be a ‘Best-Selling Author’? $3 and 5 Minutes.

Brent Underwood, on MediumI would like to tell you about the biggest lie in book publishing. It appears in the biographies and social media profiles of almost every working ‘author’ today. It’s the word ‘best seller ( Read more... )

Your description and reviews of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Deseret Alphabet Edition) (Deseret Alphabet Classics) (Volume 48) are all wrong and misleading. This is not "master paper engineer Robert Sabuda"'s "pop-up version of Dorothy's adventures in Oz" (Amazon review), nor is it the "beautiful, oversize, lavishly illustrated Centennial Edition" ( ( Read more... )

My daughter just sent me some links about Amazon's nastier behaviors:

• Salon: Worse than Wal-Mart: Amazon’s sick brutality and secret history of ruthlessly intimidating workers
• Wikipedia: Amazon.com controversies
  • Hachette and agency pricing

This entry was originally posted at http://thnidu.dreamwidth.org/1563935.html. You can comment here, or there ( Read more... )