Category: publishing

“Hill, who celebrates his 78th birthday today, was voted in ahead of nine other candidates with 1,156 votes, beating contenders including the Beat poet Michael Horovitz, the biographer Roger Lewis, Oxford-based performance poet Steve Larkin and South African poet Chris Mann.”

A jobless book dealer who posed as an international playboy “mutilated” a stolen £3m first edition of Shakespeare’s works, a court has heard. The prosecution at Newcastle Crown Court said he damaged it to hide the fact that it was stolen.

“Calling unannounced at [the Folger Shakespeare Library], the 53-year-old pressed reticent academics to back his claim that the 387-year-old treasure was previously unknown, kept in a box by the mother of a major in Fidel Castro’s army.” In reality, a prosecutor said, the man “allegedly forced locks at a sparsely attended exhibition in Durham to steal the book 10 years earlier.”

“The first sign there’s something different about ‘Alice for the iPad’ comes when … the White Rabbit’s old-fashioned pocket watch, dangling by its chain from text, starts swinging whichever way the reader is holding the iPad. … There’s something fitting about the sensation of gravity that the animations bring to a story with so much body-shrinking and mind-blowing going on [in] it.”

The former executive assistant of David Davidar, until last week CEO of Penguin Canada, is backing up a colleague who is “alleging that [Davidar] harassed her for three years when she worked at the company, including an alleged incident last fall in which he forced his tongue in her mouth.”

“Wednesday, people around the world will gather in libraries and theaters, pubs and restaurants, streets and squares to commemorate a precise set of events … that occurred between daybreak and midnight in a provincial European city on June 16, 1904 — events they know full well never happened.”

“Publishers and booksellers are in a rush to find more Nordic noir to follow Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy…. Scandinavian crime fiction has been popular among serious mystery readers for decades, but even best-selling novelists like Henning Mankell are not yet widely known in the United States.”

The suspect “would use a false name to sign in to the Royal Horticultural Society’s Lindley library in London, it is alleged. He would leave after stuffing valuable volumes … under a tweed jacket he would always wear on such visits … The books on the piece of paper [he was carrying when arrested] were listed in sequential order as to where they could be found in the library.”

“In her eight years at the Folger, [Gail Kern] Paster has acquired increasingly rare documents of the Elizabethan era; raised millions of dollars, despite the recession, for the historic building and collections; and overseen the inevitable march to digitization.”

“If I took the same interest in controlled substances that I do in books, I’d probably be in some 12-step program. Fortunately, while books are habit-forming they remain legal and there’s no evidence, no matter how musty, that they’re bad for the health.”