May 29, 2013 On the Shelf Tom Hanks Hoards Typewriters, and Other News By Ellen Duffer Hemingway’s typewriter, not in Tom Hanks’s house. Everyone agrees that getting rid of books is deeply sad. Liberace, pre-Soderbergh, wrote a cookbook that now sells for around $500. Included is a salad recipe that orders you not to omit the pickles. This is a fantastic headline: “Vintage typewriters find new life in hands of writers, actors and old repairmen.” Just ask Tom Hanks, who apparently likes to buy restored machines that belonged to the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles. While e-book reading is on the rise, a new poll says parents overwhelmingly prefer reading print with their kids. Memoirist Rachel Howard says writing is like drawing: “Later, I could go back and do what artists call rendering—working the drawing, adding detail. But now I had a solid gesture sketch to work from.”
May 28, 2013 On the Shelf R.I.P. Mr. Merker, and Other News By Sadie Stein Kim Merker’s edition of “Within the Walls,” by Hilda Doolittle. Image via New York Times. Kim Merker, who hand-pressed beautiful poetry books for decades, has died, at eighty-one. Twenty-five signs you’re addicted to books. (In a whimsical way. Not a My Strange Addiction way.) Can you ever really own an e-book? No. Which doesn’t mean they aren’t big business at Book Expo America. Speaking of BEA … enjoy it from the comfort of your own home!
May 24, 2013 On the Shelf Your Borders Gift Card Is Useless, and Other News By Sadie Stein “Useless, useless.” —John Wilkes Booth Listen to James Salter read (Booker-winning!) Lydia Davis’s “Break It Down.” We sort of would have assumed this, but apparently it took a Manhattan federal judge to declare that unredeemed Borders gift cards are, in fact, worthless. (Sorry, everyone whose bar and bat mitzvahs I attended!) Oh dear. Poet David R. Morgan has confessed to multiple instances of plagiarism. (He says he’s “deeply sorry.”) Meet Rosamunde Pilcher. In her native England, “the eighty-eight-year-old is regarded as a successful, if stylistically limited, writer of romantic novel. In Germany, she is nothing short of a national heroine—Julian Fellowes, Colin Dexter, and Ealing Studios rolled into one. More than one hundred of her love stories, set in Cornwall and Devon, have been turned into television films, all shot on location—but with German actors—and invariably aired on Sunday afternoons.”
May 23, 2013 On the Shelf Manuscripts Lost and Found, and Other News By Sadie Stein A lost Pearl S. Buck manuscript, found in a Texas storage unit, will be published this fall. In other literary surprise news: on public display for the first time is a previously unknown Tolkien poem, “The Fall of Arthur,” part of a magical literature exhibition at the Bodleian Library. It’s sad enough when a bookstore closes, but what to do about the inventory? Seattle-area Once Sold Tales scrambles to place 500,000 books by month’s end. Eoin Colfer lists his top fictional villains. Discuss. Keith Richards claims to owe fifty years’ worth of library fines, which the Huffington Post estimates at over $30,000.
May 22, 2013 On the Shelf Celestial Homework, and Other News By Sadie Stein This is Allen Ginsberg’s reading list for his class “Literary History of the Beats.” (Yes, he is on it.) RIP children’s author Bernard Waber, who brought us Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile. Australia’s Qantas Airlines is introducing a series of novels, Stories for Every Journey, designed to last the duration of each flight. (Well, not every journey; this seems to be specifically aimed at the “Bronze to Platinum One” customers.) “‘Let me use your reading material as an impetus for awkward conversation’ is a time-honored tactic of creepers the world over.” A plea to be left in peace. [Editor’s note: That said, being randomly asked, in a Left Bank branch of Paul bakery, if I was reading “a novel of old Paris” remains one of the highlights of my life.]
May 21, 2013 On the Shelf Nobel Tweets, and Other News By Sadie Stein From The Hairpin, “Etymological Origins of Words Related to Insults.” (And we really like that nice is on there.) A little reading-room escapism to brighten your Tuesday. “5 candidates have been selected for 2013 #NobelPrize in #Literature according to Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy.” A rather innocuous tweet by the Swedish Academy (yes) has launched a flurry of Nobel speculation. Angry Wikipedia revenge-editor Qworty turns out to be novelist Robert Clark Young. Writes Andrew Leonard, dramatically, “Qworty’s edits undermine our faith in this great project. Qworty’s edits prove that Wikipedia’s content can be shaped by people settling grudges and acting out of spite and envy. Qworty alone, by his own account, has made 13,000 edits to Wikipedia. And Qworty, as the record will show, is not to be trusted.”