February 22, 2013 On the Shelf DFW: the Trading Card, and Other News By Sadie Stein David Foster Wallace: the trading card. While you’re at it: pro-book desktop wallpaper. On bribing librarians, and other ways to discover new books. Speaking of libraries: here is what Auden checked out of the New York Society Library. (How many titles can you decipher?) James Patterson and, oddly enough, the Duchess of Cornwall are teaming up to encourage fathers to read to their children.
February 21, 2013 On the Shelf Emoji Classics, and Other News By Sadie Stein 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.’”
February 20, 2013 On the Shelf Meet Your Literary Hero, and Other News By Sadie Stein #IWishICouldMeet, the popular Twitter hash tag, gets a literary twist as readers tell the LA Times which characters and authors they would love to meet #IRL. (And for the record, #ReuvenMalter.) Paul Muldoon—poet, professor, Poetry Society macher, New Yorker editor, librettist, and Rackett guitarist—lists his favorite rock books. This list of best sellers from around the world is fascinating and shaming. In fact, next, the blogger reading one hundred years of best sellers might want to tackle the Indonesian list. “The second half of the nineteenth century saw the rise of amateur press associations (ASAs)—small groups of writers, often without professional training, who would produce individual articles, pamphlets, or magazines mailed to all other members of the association; in other words, a progenitor of subscription-based blogging, and yet another example of primitive versions of modern social media.”
February 19, 2013 On the Shelf Cake and Pie, and Other News By Sadie Stein 2666, in pie-chart form. (Black, in case you were wondering, represents “dread, unease, foreboding.”) Not merely one book-themed cupcake, but a series. (We look forward to 2666.) “Let us not speak of the cookbooks.” A pair of academics attempt to organize their library. There is no Hilary Mantel–Kate Middleton feud! Mantel just called the duchess “a jointed doll on which certain rags are hung … without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character.” And no Anne Boleyn.
February 15, 2013 On the Shelf America in Love, and Other News By Sadie Stein Amazon.com has assigned a love story to every state. As a New Yorker, I find myself ambivalent about the choice of The Age of Innocence. Although Arkansas, arguably, has more of a bone to pick. “Wife wanted: intelligent, beautiful, 18 to 25, broad-minded, sensitive, affectionate. For accomplished artist and exciting life. NYR box 1432.” On America’s most erudite personals. (Yes, that was the first.) Happy one hundred, Harvard University Press. Comic book vendors around the nation are boycotting D. C. Comics following the announcement that the company has asked Orson Scott Card to write part of an upcoming Superman. Card is an outspoken anti-gay advocate. Meanwhile, a plan to erect a plaque to Enid Blyton in her home town is tearing Beaconsfield, Bucks asunder: some claim it would be wrong to celebrate an authors whose work is now deemed racist and sexist.
February 14, 2013 On the Shelf Roses Are Books, and Other News By Sadie Stein “Roses are books, Violets are books. Everything is books. EVERYTHING IS BOOKS.” “[S]he does not talk much, this quaint Fairy, but she looks whole histories. Her gaze is softly wistful, and often abstracted; at certain moments her spirit seems to have gone out of her on invisible wings.” Oh yeah, Oscar Wilde’s wife. Poet D. Vinayachandran received a state funeral yesterday in West Kallada, India. “Incidentally, I do not even remember whether I meant Sam Johnson or Ben Jonson … It is Jonson in my text, but is this a misprint? No one will ever know.” A new T. S. Eliot letter is found. (Well, new to us; it was written in 1957.)