The wait is almost over. Gosh, it’s been exhausting. Pynchon’s new book is set to be on the shelves December 5.

“Spanning the period between the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the years just after world war I, this novel moves from the labour troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Göttingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.

“With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.”

900 pages? How the hell are we supposed to relax with that?

The real reason why Dan Brown’s book touched people?

[Jana Minor's] interest was piqued about six years ago after she learned about a movement to make the Catholic saint a more prominent figure in Christianity through a group of women at her church who meet occasionally to pray together.

“All of us are women who are struggling, like I am, to become all we can be in a world that doesn’t always recognize us, and certainly in a church that doesn’t always recognize us,” said Minor, 65, who said she grew up with very traditional ideas about women.

For Minor, Mary Magdalene is an example of a strong female role model in the New Testament, someone who opened herself up to God’s love and became an advocate of his message. Getting that idea across, Minor says, is far more important than debating the way she was depicted in “The Da Vinci Code.”

Stamp news!

Methinks Gerardo Sandoval is our kind of fella. He seeks to resolve the anglo-centricrity in America by making San Francisco Shakespearean English only.

His resolution states that the Board of Supervisors should make Shakespearean English the city’s official language. Moreover, the local newspapers, should “submit all queries, both written and verbal, in the Bard’s tongue.” And the San Francisco Public Library should “cease immediately the acquisition of all books that are not written in proper Shakespearean English and to dispose immediately of any existing books in the library’s collection that do not meet this criteria.”

Be sure to read the internal pdf; it’s absolutely wonderful.

Muramaki and Tremain shortlisted.

Peter Craven weighs in.

The whole exercise, replete with publisher Nick Hudson talking about White’s “fart-arsery”, suggests not only negligence or oversight but an entrenched philistinism and a quite hapless lack of expertise.

I wonder if Patrick White’s work ever sat on a slush pile before? How many manuscripts anywhere in this print-saturated literary world actually are accepted without recommendation? Few, I’d guess. The submitter is overly idealistic, which, of course, does not negate the publishers’ reactions to the ploy; why didn’t the publishers just come out and say what is more likely the truth: that the manu was unsolicited, that one chapter is not the typical submission (and that therefore they assumed the writer was unseasoned), that they’d never heard of Wraith Picket and so knew they couldn’t market the guy on any platform (except his very odd name, that is) and that even if the writing was good, it wasn’t, like, now and, taking all those details into consideration made it difficult for them to be excited about publishing this writer. They also might have mentioned that the stunt actually cost them time and money that might have been put to better use, i.e. reading the manuscript of some desperate young writer who is looking for a break, so thanks for adding some spice to things, and see you next time.

Are apparently endlessly fascinating to Arts page readers. Mind you, a book of amateur astronomy pictures actually sounds like a pretty good use of the technology. There’s no real market for the book besides other amateur astronomers and publishing it yourself ensures a kind of quality control the web can’t offer… Wait, are we talking about star pics or poetry?

HC will graphically novelize some of Fox’s higher brow material, including 28 Days Later and The Hills Have Eyes.

9/11: the comic. Yup.

“There are going to be a whole bunch of kids, teenagers and adults that will not read the report,” Colón says, adding that comics might offer an alternative. “The educational system at large has resisted them, I think, because of the term ‘comic book.’ I like to think of them as something that has more purpose.”

I will be the first to admit I am not comic-book savvy but something about this sends the bells off in my head. I’m thinking Latter Day Saints pamphlet for some reason.

And we aren’t talking gay/happy here, people.

Do they name black holes? Fetishism.

Irvine Welsh on his play about what went on behind with the little people the scenes during the filming of The Wizard of Oz. Maybe when your done there, Mr Welsh, you can bring it back across the pond to Toronto. Babylon Heights!

During filming, Judy Garland and Wizard of Oz producer Mervyn Le Roy commented on “dwarf sex parties” and “orgies and drunkenness” among the munchkin actors. Well, what else were they supposed to do? The small people, billeted separately from the other performers, were under de facto house arrest in their Culver City hotel. They were taken from there directly on to the studio set, and then taken straight back. The actors have since claimed, in accounts of that period and biographies, to have been paid far less than the other actors, even less than the dog playing Toto.

The munchkin actors were largely young people, many of them away from home for the first time and thrown together in a pressure-cooker environment. The fact that they happened to be of restricted growth is almost irrelevant. They did what they did, which in the case of the play is what we imagined most people in that position would do. What we see in Babylon Heights are human beings in a state of relative powerlessness, trying to cope as best they can.

Reading this article, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the Werner Herzog film Even Dwarfs Started Small which details its own fair share of dwarfish debauchery. I wonder if the big people aren’t prone by some weird projection to mythologize the little people in these ways. The sideshow of the imagination?

As part of a concerted effort to keep my worrisome mind off the absolute insanity happening in Beirut, here are a few comic book stories I thought interesting:

• Going against the current trend of biting the hands that feed you, media giant Marvel grants fans access to copyright on characters featured in video game that will allow users to create their own stories
• Kevin Smith delivers the hysterical, if long-winded, truth about what went down with his Superman script lo those many years ago — that boy can tell a story
• A graphic novel roundup at Salon

Borders has a new chief executive with some really swell ideas.

One area where he sees opportunity, he said, is in translating the time consumers spend inside Borders stores into more dollars spent. “Our customers on average spend a lot longer in a store than what I’ve been used to,” he said. But, he added, “they like our stores; they’re staying there, but they’re not spending as much as they could.”

Mr. Jones said that with many music buyers migrating to digital downloads, the stores were already shrinking the space allocated to CD’s. “While we’re continuing in the music business, it does not now justify the space we have in the stores,” he said. “So we’re better off shrinking the music space and putting in Paperchase. And if you want to try new things and new ideas, one of the things is you have to find a place to put it.”

Stationary, coffee, yoga paraphernalia!!! What the heck? Why stop there? My vision allows for a huge communal jacuzzi, a funky wetbar, and maybe pay-what-you-can massage. Private reading rooms, would be nice, and a comfortable bed. Oh, and customer service people that know how to read (not just the alphabet).

Studs Terkel wins.

We know, already. But now a literary expert, whatever the hell that might be, has decided to get his name in the newspaper and is being quoted on the topic of why Harry Potter won’t die.

Whenever an author’s books become very popular in his or her lifetime, as is the case with Rowling, a tug of war starts between the author and the fans about who the characters really belong to. Rowling, like Conan Doyle (creator of Sherlock Holmes), is trying to assert her control. She’s reminding us that Harry is her character, not ours; she can kill him if she wants to. Doyle actually did kill off Sherlock Holmes, but Rowling won’t go that far because she cares about Harry. Conan Doyle was really sick of Holmes.

So that’s what an expert opinion looks like folks. Pretty nuanced, eh?

Random and other publishers aren’t satisfied with the bump in sales a movie adaptation offers. Now they want a cut, and who can blame them? Baby needs a new pair of shoes.

“The Devil Wears Prada,” the 20th Century Fox rendition of a bestselling novel published by Random House Inc., has racked up a surprising $83 million in ticket sales so far. A $100-million domestic gross is in sight. The Random House cut of the movie bounty for “Prada”? Nada. The most it can expect is a bounce from the sale of special paperbacks tied to the film, a gross that could approach $7 million.

Galled by decades of this kind of equation, New York publishing houses have launched ventures intended to get a bigger piece of the Hollywood action. And who could blame them? Publishers almost never control the film rights to the books they put on the market.

A Saskatchewan man is taking on film giants to block the filming of a Crouching Tiger sequel. Why? His dad wrote the books and he has promised the copyright to someone else.

A lament for the good old days of Ladybird when children’s books weren’t ridiculous pop culture guides or TV and movie tie-ins. Oh, and when they were all racist and classist, too, but you know, the past is ALWAYS better than the present.

Every May the various publishers of children’s books send out catalogues of their forthcoming titles so that bookshop buyers and literary editors can see what to look out for in the year to come.

Sometimes these catalogues are stuffed with treasures, but sometimes they are a grave disappointment. One catalogue this year lists Totally Take That, an unofficial guide to the pop band, and a series of books featuring some plastic dolls called the “Lil’ Bratz”, who offer advice on how to be a pop princess, how to put on a fashion show, and how to create gorgeous hairstyles for the hottest event of the year, “a super cool charity bash!”

Also included are a series of books about Miss Spider and her Sunny Patch Friends, another called Violent Veg, and a handful of “tie-ins” to characters such as Scooby-Doo and Batman.

It’s sad, though. I usually only look seriously at books for Baby Ninja when I see an original publication date of pre-1970. It’s only the occasional contemporary kids book that both interests us and fits our family politics without losing literary merit. Seems like kids books today are either so afraid of offending that they’re sterile and facile or completely oblivious to anything other than the bottom line of a sale and therefore pander to the lowest common denominator. Any suggestions for good kiddie books that have some bite and spine without making the world an uglier place?

Peas in a pod? I suppose that’s not fair. I just can’t get anything but shivers of revulsion when I see authors doing anything but resisting this administration.

Silence of the City is a clearing house for those who’ve been rejected by the NYer’s Talk of the Town. What a great idea.

The prospect of breaking into the seemingly impenetrable fortress that is The New Yorker can make a writer contemplate crazy and desperate things. So it was for Mac Montandon, when, a couple years ago, he received an assignment to write an article on spec for the magazine’s Talk of the Town section. To Montandon, who’d been trying, unsuccessfully, to break into the magazine, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. But on the day he’d arranged to conduct the crucial interview, one that couldn’t be postponed, his wife went into labor with the couple’s first child. “I’ll probably sound like the bastard of all time,” the 35-year-old journalist says, “but I was a little conflicted.”

Ah, the web. A place for all us rejects to gather in solidarity.

Following up on yesterday’s post about litcritting ourselves to death — how about Tintin as a rubric for all literary endeavour?

Stranger still is McCarthy’s thesis about the Tintin oeuvre. Rather than accept it as a series of charming, beautifully rendered, comic book adventures about a boy with a quiff, a talking dog, and a journalistic career which doesn’t involve much journalism, he would like to persuade us that it holds the key to the secret of literature itself.

Hergé’s writing, he would have us believe, presents a human tableau worthy of Balzac involving situations ‘managed with all the subtlety normally attributed to Jane Austen or Henry James’; his world is a place where ‘Molière-style social comedy runs effortlessly into Dumas-style adventure with Conradian boxed narratives throughout which…volleys of Rabelaisian obscenities echo and boom.’

SSHRC funding at work. Nice! (Thanks, F)

Maud points to a Doris Lessing article on Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

As for me, I learned of the clitoris from Balzac – not of its existence or its uses, but that it was part of the lexicon of love, with a status. Lawrence knew everything about the G-spot, though he would not have heard the term and probably would have found the idea of localising it and naming it abhorrent. The vaginal orgasm at its best, as described by him – his informant must have been one of his lovers – is as accurate as his talk about the clitoris is ignorant. But we are in an emotional battlefield here: Lawrence came too quickly, said Frieda, and then, complained Lawrence, she had to bring herself to orgasm with the aid of the pesky clit. But with sexual accomplishment as a banner of progress in this polemical war, what they said in their times of complaint was probably not more than the half of it.

You know, I totally was not prepared to go there with this article. Now that I’m there, it’s not so bad, but still. There should be an emoticon for that noise a cartoon rabbit makes when he shakes his head repeatedly in disbelief. The tripletakicon or something. Oyoyoyoyoy!

Kathryn, I can’t believe you’re not on here…. Ooooo!! Buuurrrrnnn!

More lit than chick.

More than 20 years on, Mills & Boon has given way to the phenomenon that is chick-lit and – what do you know? – Jane Austen has been repackaged for that ragingly successful market. Headline Books has published a new edition of the six novels, each of them billed as “a classic romance”, its matchless prose contained within the kind of bright, girly cover usually associated with Marian Keyes or Cecilia Ahern.

The visual implication is that, had Austen been writing today, she would have had no trouble swapping her bonnets and billets-doux for blow-dries and e-mail. She would have given Fanny Price a makeover and sent Anne Elliot to mend her broken heart with an evening’s speed-dating. As for Elizabeth Bennet – would Jane Austen perhaps have written Bridget Jones’s Diary, that updating of the Pride and Prejudice story in which Mark Darcy falls, despite himself, for a flawed-but-lovable heroine? Who knows, she might even have made it on to the Richard and Judy Summer Book Club list.

Abebooks.com profiled in the Toronto Star.

An adaptation of Monica Ali’s fantastic book Brick Lane is being threatened by a vocal group of protesters from … Brick Lane.

Coordinating the campaign from his sweetshop armed with three mobile phones and an address book, the chair of the Brick Lane Traders’ Association, Abdus Salique, warned of the damage film could do to community relations. “Nobody can come with a camera make a film about that book here. She [Ali] has imagined ideas about us in her head. She is not one of us, she has not lived with us, she knows nothing about us, but she has insulted us.”

He brushed aside suggestions that a work of fiction couldn’t be seen as an attack on a community. “It’s not a fiction book,” he explained. “This is all lies. She wanted to be famous at the cost of a community.”

“I’ve seen her, I’ve talked with her,” he claimed. “She never told us she’d write a book. Now she can’t even come to Brick Lane.”

Ah, reactionary ignorance leading to threats of physical violence… Will you never die?

Bookslut points to an article on our slow, agonizing descent into the maw of the potty-mouth. Is an anti-cursing crusade then a blessing crusade? Just asking.

In 2004, she spent $10,000 on T-shirts, hats and bumper stickers that promoted clean language. She set up a Web site to peddle the items and gave away stickers and signs in her hometown of Spokane.

But less than two years later, Foster has given up her crusade. The Web site was flooded with hundreds of expletive-laden e-mails after she appeared on a Showtime television series. The site has since been taken down, and she has a closet full of unsold anti-cursing merchandise.

Baby, that fucking sucks. Oops, sorry… let me rephrase: that fucking bites.

Pope Benedict is writing a book about Christ. Well, there’s some news. Isn’t that what Popes are supposed to do?

The book, expected to be completed by the end of the summer, focuses on Jesus, the human race and Christianity’s relationship with other faiths.

The work, which Benedict started before becoming Pope in April 2005, comes at a time when he seeks to restore a strong sense of faith among Catholics in the face of growing secularism and competition form other religions, including Islam.

I wonder if anyone has ever rejected a Pope manuscript? I wonder if I could get a job at the Ignatius Press as the rejector? “Your work lacks compassion.” “Your manuscript is a little whole-y.”

Blyton is hot merchandise these days. First, revisions to correct the politics and now, spin-off dolls to go with the upcoming cartoon TV show of the Famous Five.

Cartoon incarnations of the Famous Five are set to hit TV screens next year, but purists see them as another threat to Enid Blyton’s legacy.

The new 26-part series is due to be shown across Europe in early 2007, but there are fears that its new, modern setting will make the original books obsolete.

Oh, I doubt that; look what its done for Thomas the Tank Engine book sales. So. If you’re jolly cross about all this, here’s where to go to express your indignance. Save the Blyton!

Asne Seierstad is not the only one made famous by his book, apparently. Mr and Mrs Rais, depicted in the book, fear for their lives; Mrs Rais has sought asylum.

It appears Mrs Rais applied for asylum in Sweden because she has family there, but Mr Rais has not done so and it is as yet unclear whether he will.

But even though she has applied to live in Sweden, Mrs Rais could end up living in the same country as Seierstad. As her visa for the Schengen zone was issued by Norway, rules state that her asylum application must be processed there. “I wish her welcome to live in Norway,” says Seierstad.

Mrs Rais’s asylum application is the latest development in a long-running and bitter saga. Ever since The Bookseller of Kabul was published, Mr Rais has repeatedly threatened to sue Seierstad for impugning his reputation: he claims the book portrays him as a tyrannical traditionalist bent on imprisoning women.

I worry this might be one of those days when I find nothing funny. All I can say is that if that after seeing The Road to Guantanamo last night, I wouldn’t want to be a woman living in Afghanistan either. And by the way, the docu-drama/interview documentary is extremely well-done and I highly recommend it.

88 years old.

His books featured raw violence and sex, drawing condemnation from morality groups of the day. But they sold hugely, with lurid paperback covers often featuring a scantily dressed woman and a gun.

Spillane wrote his first Hammer novel, I, the Jury, in 1946 in less than three weeks. He went on to produce twelve more Spillane stories, including The Killing Man and One Lonely Night.

Here’s the interview the CBC refers to and a snippet from same:

The Twisted Thing, yeah, that was rejected…editors are funny, they were still old time editors and they didn’t like this new-style stuff…there’s too much sex, too much violence…but actually, it’s a true story, the story it was based on was true…and when I finally turned it in…wow, it went right to the top. I held it for 18 years, they were desperate for something new…finally I said, yeah, how about this one. (Laughs) I got one like that now. I turned a book into Dutton, not a Mike Hammer, and they’re holding because the editor doesn’t like it. I don’t care what the editor likes or dislikes, I care what the people like. I don’t want that editor to tell me what the people want.

Here’s the Guardian obit.

NorthWords Writers Festival. Of course, all the words are synonyms for “snow”… but still.

The top ten words in the SF dictionary. (Thanks, Phil)

Turns out we’re not living in a blockbuster culture, but a culture of niche and eccentricity. This bodes well for my new book on hispanic-FTM-tranny-midget GIs with eye patches, peglegs and histories (or herstories, as the case may be) in snake handling cults.

If this makes you feel just a tad depressed about the culture around you, cheer up: hope is on the horizon. It may feel as you walk past the multiplex and into the chain bookshop where Katie Price’s bestseller is stacked up, and then home to pick up the television schedules dominated by reality shows, that we live in an age when there is little room for anything but the blockbuster, the bestseller, the audience-chaser, the top celebrity. But if you listen to some of the voices out there, it turns out that this isn’t what is going on at all.

The opposite is true, at least according to a writer called Chris Anderson who has come out with a buzzy new book which tells us that we are not living in the culture of the blockbuster and the bestseller.

Whew. See, Random House? You’re not taking such a risk after all. Now where’s the rest of my advance before I sick Rico here on you?

Memoirs deal with pain and suffering because we are all rubberneckers at heart. But what is missing from the contemporary memoir? I mean besides honesty?

It’s no news, of course, that so many recent memoirs, good and bad, well or execrably written, deal with hurt and healing. But when so many memoirists are busy confessing to so much, we easily miss what the form has come to exclude. Contemporary memoirs tend to be either convalescent or nostalgic in mood. (It’s as Augustine said in his “Confessions”: “I remember with joy a sadness that has passed and with sadness a lost joy.”) But is there nothing more to life than recovery and grief? Is there no idea of the good life we can sustain beyond the possession of health? To understand what’s gone missing, it’s useful to recall something about the turn of the 19th century.

Zzzzzzzzzzzt–*…. Huh, wha? No, no… just resting my eyes….. zzzzzz…..

Is theory killing English studies? John Sutherland offers a theory.

The complaints are familiar enough – inside and outside the discipline, among young and old. One hears them continually. English, once thought to be the heart of humanities, is in a bad way. It has been “theorised” to destruction.

So how true is the allegation? I’ll offer, by way of answer, three examples of current scholarly writing, picked at random from recent output.

Oooo… this is going to huuuurrrrt. Don’t you just hate it when people use your own words against you? Imagine how this site will haunt me when I decide to run for office in ten years. Note to self: kill internet…

Aussie hero gets the boots put to him by his own countrymen. Those fellas down there will turn on you in a second!

HE is the nation’s most lauded novelist, our only Nobel prize-winning writer, twice a winner of the Miles Franklin award and three times the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medallist. Yet without his name on the cover, Patrick White’s work is apparently of little value to Australia’s publishing industry.

Inquirer submitted, under a pseudonym, chapter three of White’s The Eye of the Storm to 12 publishers and agents. This novel clinched his Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973, with the judges describing it as one of his most accomplished works.

Not one reader recognised its literary genius, and 10 wrote polite and vaguely encouraging rejection letters. The highest praise was “clever”. A low point was a referral to a “how to” book on writing fiction.

Ouch!

Why little magazines are important.

Most of the magazines that have made a difference to poetry since the end of the second world war have had some kind of editorial mission, and most of them have been the child of passion of one or two editors.
…
A reader nourished over time on the serious little magazines will develop a clear sense of what the poetic intelligence of the day is up to, how it grows and changes.

The best literary magazine in Canada is Brick. Maybe one of the best in North America, even the English-speaking world. Most of the others here are storage containers for sloppy, provincial work. Sorry, I’m cranky today. I also like The New Quarterly. I hear Vallum is good too, but I haven’t seen it. Anyone else have a vote for favourite/least favourite?

A nice little flash presentation that hand holds you through the 10 dimensions of string theory. Ow! My cerebral cortex!

That’d be a pretty decent coup in itself. Some disagree, though, suggesting that Heaney’s publisher ought not to have put his book forward for the Forward Prize.

“Of course it’s not unfair,” said Seren’s spokesman, Simon Hicks. “It’s like saying Brazil should not enter the World Cup. Well, they did enter – and they didn’t win. You can’t complain because someone like Heaney publishes a book the year yours is out.”

I think they should fire the judges and let Bingham and Heaney conduct a good old-fashioned flyting.

A 172 line poetical essay by Percy Bysshe Shelley has been found. And the cheek!

The pamphlet is a quarto, consisting of twenty pages with a final leaf of notes on the recto and errata on the verso; printed on paper with a watermark date of 1807, it is stitched and uncut, still very much in the same state as it was when it was issued. The poem is dedicated “TO HARRIET W–B–K”, that is Harriet Westbrook with whom Shelley eloped in August 1811: this constitutes the first printed reference to the poet’s wife. The dedication is followed by a “Preface”, a short essay touching on politics and religion, calling for “a total reform in the licentiousness, luxury, depravity, prejudice, which involve society”, not by warfare, which he vigorously denounces, but by “gradual, yet decided intellectual exertions”. The poem which follows consists of 172 lines of rhyming couplets.

Here’s the Guardian on Shelley:

During his lifetime, because of his revolutionary politics, he had the utmost difficulty in getting anything published – Queen Mab did not sell any copies at all. During all his life, this “greatest of English lyrical poets” made precisely £40 from his writing, and most of that was from a novel he wrote while still at school. Some of his reviews give a fair indication of what the literary and political establishment thought of him at the time: “Mr Shelley … would overthrow the constitution … would pull down our churches and burn our bibles … marriage he cannot endure.”

The Shakespeare Folio has undersold at only £2.8. Someone got a real deal there.

Well, inadvertantly. The pulled Harper’s issue led people to seek the copy out in other stores. And they bought it. Amazing reportage, no?

Novelist Michel Basilières worked at the Manulife Centre Indigo store until 2004, and was present when she pulled Mein Kampf off the shelves in 2001.

“She didn’t want it in the store; it was Heather’s personal decision,” he says. “She does read a lot. She is really very hands on. She makes decisions on what to stock. There is no policy.”

So if HRH Reisman bans more books, things could be looking up for the independents.

We’ve posted on this before but here’s a longer article; what I don’t get is why she’s still a maid if the book is selling so very well. I hope she isn’t be messed about with.

“When I wrote I felt like I was talking to someone and after writing I would feel lighter, as if I had taken some sort of revenge against my father, who never took care of me as a father should, and against my husband,” she says. “I never thought that other people might be interested in reading my story.”

Kumar, however, was immediately struck by what she had written.”I was amazed; I knew it was very special,” he says. He photocopied it and sent it to friends in the publishing world.

“They liked it and said it reminded them of Anne Frank’s writing – she was a girl who wrote a diary and died young,” Halder adds. “I was encouraged to write down everything, my whole life. I had no plan to start a book, I was just writing.”

The massive suckage of high school text books on display.

Just how similar passages showed up in two books is a tale of how the largely obscure $4 billion a year world of elementary and high school textbook publishing often works, for these passages were not written by the named authors but by one or more uncredited writers. And while it is rare that the same language is used in different books, it is common for noted scholars to give their names to elementary and high school texts, lending prestige and marketing power, while lesser known writers have a hand in the books and their frequent revisions.a

I’ve often learned more from the doodles in the margins, illustrations and end papers of text books than from the text itself. Do kids still doodle and draw genitals on Brezhnev in text books? Um, is Brezhnev still in text books?

If you haven’t heard, it’s expected to fetch millions. The Guardian asks the question we’ve had on the tip of our lips since we read about this last week. Why? Darling, don’t be facile. It’s Willy the Shake, the greatest English writer ever born. Yes, but you aren’t buying him, you’re buying an old book. Oh, dear.

However ludicrous the prices fetched by paintings, you can see why a wealthy person or institution would be willing to stump up. There it is on the wall: beautiful, unique, luminous. But the First Folio is not aesthetically delectable. The print quality is not wonderful and there are many printing errors. It contains an artwork, the Martin Droeshout engraving that is our only certain likeness of the bard, but it is a cack-handed portraiture. And the book is not unique.

The governor of Louisiana has vetoed a bill that would make an atrocious piece of doggerel the state poem. Chalk one for the good guys!

The world as we know it may never be the same.

The LDS Church’s Deseret Book chain no longer will supply Seagull Book & Tape with works written by about 140 influential LDS authors – a decision that could cripple the smaller, privately held competitor. Deseret Book and Seagull each operate a chain of LDS-oriented bookstores, in addition to publishing their own titles by Mormon authors. Even though they compete in publishing and retailing, the two companies have carried each other’s line of books for years.

I suggest Seagull diversify; maybe, look for another partner, someone young and…oh forget it.

From rags to riches, eh?

We have no retail experience. We love books, but have never before attempted to sell them. But all three of us wanted a new challenge, to escape office life and to be motivated by our work. Most of all, we wanted to create a bookshop that focused on the pure indulgence of reading; that would be everything that everyone tells you a bookshop should be. Two weeks ago, after months of planning, we finally opened Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights on John Street in Bath.

Ooh, I hope he’s right about all this. It sounds like the kind of stores, the used bookstores, except without the dust, that I used to spend the day in when I was young and free and hopelessly book-crazy.