The Paris Review

• Brace yourselves: great books as emojis. (Yes, that’s The Grapes of Wrath.)
• The Royal Mail is producing a series of (quite lovely) Jane Austen stamps.
• Tolkien’s cover designs.
• A heartening series of people shopping for books around the world.
• “‘Bookseller,’ say the books. ‘Can we do the Harlem Shake?’ ‘No!’ I shout. ‘There’ll be no novelty dances here. You’re better than that.’”

• Elvis Presley’s 1948 library card can be yours. At thirteen, The King checked out The Courageous Heart: A Life of Andrew Jackson For Young Readers from his high-school library.
• We appreciate this peek into book psychology by one who should know, Waterstones: “Being books, and not understanding most things beyond their limited understanding, the books attribute most events to Father Christmas.”
• Adam Gopnik remembers Robert Hughes.
• Some encouraging bookstore news, for a change: on their Kickstarter page, the founders of Singularity & Co. explain that their mission is to “choose one great out of print work or classic and/or obscure sci-fi a month, track down the people that hold the copyright (if they are still around), and publish that work online and on all the major digital book platforms for little or no cost.”
• In 2013, John Banville will bring Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled detective Philip Marlowe back from the dead under his crime-writing nom de guerre, Benjamin Black.

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