June 24, 2013 On the Shelf Fake Blake, Back Covers, and Other News By Sadie Stein So what’s with all the women’s backs on book covers? “Could I have chosen my own genius and condition, I would have made myself a great poet,” said John Quincy Adams. Judge for yourself. A school librarian has discovered that a poem called “Two Sunflowers Move into the Yellow Room”—attributed to Blake and included on many a school reading list—was in fact written in the United States in the 1980s. Following some extremely (and legally) questionable advice on “getting awesome with women,” Kickstarter has banned all seduction guides. This week’s Bookriot Sunday Diversion—guessing a book title based on its Library of Congress catalog subjects—is, in our humble opinion, nearly impossible.
June 21, 2013 On the Shelf Anonymous Library Sculptures, and Other News By Sadie Stein Anonymous, bookish sculptures have been popping up at Scottish libraries. “It’s nice to go out with a bang”: Alice Munro may (or may not) retire. This will, predicts The New Republic, result in the sort of tedious furor that accompanies any such statement. Some pediatricians are prescribing books to small children: great! (Lollipops are, presumably, a thing of the past.) Tom Wolfe’s next book, The Kingdom of Speech, is a “nonfiction account of the animal/human speech divide.”
June 20, 2013 On the Shelf Sendak Does Tolstoy, and Other News By Sadie Stein Maurice Sendak illustrates Tolstoy. And speaking of collaborations! Appropriately enough, there is now an interactive app for William Shakespeare’s Star Wars. Everyone loves Bloomsday; why no Dalloway Day? (Dalloday?) Ten words for which we could really use English equivalents. (Although, really, we should just learn the ones we don’t know. Especially age-otori.) “Gertrude Stein, with her gnomish, arty, aphoristic tendencies, would seem to be ideal. ‘There is no there there’ may be one of the great proto-tweets.”
June 19, 2013 On the Shelf Discarded Books, Fake Names, and Other News By Sadie Stein In “Expired,” photographer Kerry Mansfield works with discarded books, to eerie effect. How Orwell, Voltaire, and Ann Landers chose their pen names. Meet Simon Vance, the name (or voice!) in audiobooks. Stephen King published Joyland with lofty, print-only intentions. But of course, it is now a pirated e-book. In non-news, Barbara Taylor Bradford is less than impressed by Fifty Shades of Grey.
June 18, 2013 On the Shelf Typewriter, Tip, Tip, Tip, and Other News By Sadie Stein Behold the typewriters of famous authors. Speaking of: if you have $60,000–$80,000 handy, you can buy Hemingway’s. MESSAGES SENT WITHIN THE U.S. NAVY NO LONGER HAVE TO BE WRITTEN OUT IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. In other cultural upheaval news, brace yourselves for the latest OED changes. The strange, amazing world of Game of Thrones fan fic.
June 17, 2013 On the Shelf Undiscovered Joyce Title? And Other News By Sadie Stein An Irish press is publishing a collection of ten short pieces by James Joyce, calling it “almost certainly the last undiscovered title” by the author. But did Joyce want them published at all? Scholars choose sides. Speaking of cashing in, “for a day celebrating a book many admit to never having read, Bloomsday is a brilliant piece of marketing.” Harvard’s Graduate School of Design has started something nifty called the Library Test Kitchen, dedicated to preserving libraries with new design concepts. Student designs are displayed in—wait for it—a “Labrary.” After bedbugs were detected in the environs of the Chappaqua Library, a bedbug-sniffing dog was provided to case books from a recent library sale. “If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere,” declared one mom (whose new set of Harry Potter was cleared by the beagle). Without further ado: the trailer for Salinger.