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“Having conquered the children’s market, Scholastic Inc., the U.S. publisher of J.K. Rowling’s multimillion-selling series, is targeting adults, ages 18 to 35. Potter ads featuring bikers, skateboarders and couch potatoes will appear in Rolling Stone and other magazines throughout October. ‘We felt we needed to think out of the box and reach out to readers who would not normally pick up a copy of Harry Potter unless somebody placed it in their hands’.”

The new Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary is out, and it includes 10,000 new words. But there were many words that had to be taken out to make room. “Among these ghost words, the most unjustly cashiered may well be “snollygoster.” A snollygoster is . . . a snollygoster is . . . actually, without a previous edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary handy, there’s no telling anymore what a snollygoster is. Luckily — and here’s a phrase that must give every last lexicographer at Merriam-Webster the fantods – – that’s what Google’s for.”

Lawrence Ferlinghetti says the Beat poets have been over-romanticized. “It is really much more interesting today than in the 50’s. There has been all of this mythologizing of the 50’s and the Beat generation in San Francisco and so forth, but it has been wildly overdone, because it was a really depressing period, I thought, on account of the general repressive atmosphere and the political climate. Mr. Ferlinghetti described the Beats in San Francisco as ‘New York carpetbaggers’ who were fixated on an America that doesn’t exist anymore.”

“Thirty years after Hitler wrote his last and largely unknown book, it was discovered by Jewish scholar Gerhard Weinberg – who has spent four decades trying to publish it in English.”