The Paris Review

I was delighted and relieved, recently, to run across the Tumblr Stoop Books of Brooklyn, which has been garnering some well-deserved Internet buzz. Delighted because the Tumblr is a fun sociological study, really well executed; relieved because (in my mind) its existence obviates the need for me to create something similar. You see, for some months now, I have been keeping track of the books left on the giveaway table of my apartment building’s lobby. (On my lackluster Instagram feed, I tag these images with the rather lame #uwsidestories.)

I have long thought, vaguely, that they’d make a good “photo piece”—I suspect it would have to do with print media, or ideas of ownership, or maybe the isolation of urban life—but given the reception of a recent neighbor-based work by an actual photographer, this seems increasingly ill-advised.

In any case, it would have taken energy away from my other hypothetical Tumblr, “Gnomic Utterances,” which will consist of pictures of gnomes with cryptic things written under them.

Selected from the AbeBooks’ Weird Book Room.

In the age-old battle between book and bath, man has tried many things: the reading tray, the conveniently placed towel, the waterproof page. An eight-year-old has gone one better, inventing a device that suspends the book safely above the tub.

• Day Jobs of the Poets.
• Have you seen James Patterson’s personally-funded “book industry bailout” ads?
• By a hair, print still trumps digital in the UK.
• “How I overcame snobbery to self-publish an e-book.” One man’s story.
• Gillian Flynn: “That’s exactly my goal: to make spouses look askance at each other.”