Category: publishing

When Raymond Scott brought the book to the Folger Shakespeare Library in 2008, librarian Richard Kuhta testified, ”He started flicking through the pages very quickly showing me it was a first edition. I was startled by the way in which the book was being handled and by the sudden realisation that the man seemed to know it was a first edition.”

“State lawmakers who attended a library trustees meeting yesterday at the main library in Copley Square scoffed at the gesture by the city. They made it clear that they would make good on their threat to strip the library of what remains of its state funding if the city follows through with plans to close any library branches.”

Nicholson Baker digs up a fan letter he wrote on a sunny Sunday in 1985, happy that “the good thing about Mr. Updike is that he is a true writer, and writes out the contents of his mind.”

“The price cuts were made as manufacturers of e-readers face a growing threat from Apple’s iPad. Even though it is far more expensive than the e-readers, the iPad, which starts at $500, performs a range of functions with a versatile, colorful display that contrasts sharply with the static, monochrome screen of e-book readers.”

“Our list is based unapologetically on talent and, to a lesser extent, potential….”

“In the winter of 1795 a young, talented and cheeky man named William-Henry Ireland signed the bottom of a tattered piece of paper “Wm Shakespeare.” It was the first of hundreds of notes, poems and plays that Ireland forged and passed off as William Shakespeare originals. The world was so desperate to read more of the Bard’s work that the trick actually worked — for a time.”

“The memoirs, which are banned on the mainland but were to arrive Tuesday in Hong Kong bookstores, appear to be excerpts of diaries that Mr. Li reportedly kept during nine weeks that ended in a bloody crackdown by the People’s Liberation Army in 1989, in which hundreds of unarmed civilians were killed.”

“At a time when people spend much of their time skimming websites, text messages and e-mails, an English professor at the University of New Hampshire is making the case for slowing down as a way to gain more meaning and pleasure out of the written word.”

“While conceding there are no whopping discrepancies of meaning in our translations, he has gleefully divulged the following piece of data: ‘Of the 56 sentences in the story, there is precisely one which is rendered just the same by both translators. That one sentence, incidentally, is the line of dialogue that goes: “Really?”‘”

“Yes, we are a little less focused, thanks to the electric stimulus of the screen. Yes, we are reading slightly fewer long-form narratives and arguments than we did 50 years ago, though the Kindle and the iPad may well change that. Those are costs, to be sure. But what of the other side of the ledger? We are reading more text, writing far more often, than we were in the heyday of television.”