Category: publishing

“The British Library has raised £635,000 to save a rare 15th Century manuscript from being exported. The manuscript, called The Wardington Hours, was sold to a German dealer at auction in December. But culture minister David Lammy placed an export ban on the book to give the library a chance to match the price.”

“The librarian from Ohio popped a wheelie on his book cart, and the audience went wild. The team of librarians from Texas wore red, white, and blue feather boas as they danced the boogie-woogie while pushing their book carts in pinwheel formation. The Delaware team outfitted their performance vehicles in silver lamé and dressed in rhinestones, as they executed their signature ‘wave-canon’ maneuver. Welcome to the Third Annual Bookcart Drill Team World Championships….”

“The FBI’s Philadelphia office has recovered the ‘priceless’ lost manuscript of Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, the novel that won the Bucks County resident the Pulitzer Prize and was instrumental in her winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938.” The manuscript, which the FBI said had been “missing since at least 1966,” contains annotations in Buck’s hand.

In books, film and television, Jane Austen is hot. “But this year’s wave of books and biopics is tinged with something different. Instead of acknowledging the enduring pleasures of Austen’s satire, or demonstrating how smoothly her centuries-old observations apply to contemporary society, this round of fanaticism is more interested in going back in time — or perhaps simply backward — to play dress-up in empire-waisted gowns with suitably dashing suitors to swoon over.”

“Sales in the US for Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything have been phenomenal. The book, published just seven weeks ago, is already in its 11th printing, and Hitchens has been commissioned to compile a companion volume, The Portable Atheist.”

“A rare first edition of a Harry Potter book has sold for £9,000. The book, one of only 500 published by Bloomsbury in 1997, had a pre-sale estimate of £5,000-£7,000. Bonhams sold the hardback on behalf of a woman who had bought it originally with book tokens she had been given as a school prize.”

“Peter Chase and Barbara Bailey, librarians in Plainville, Connecticut, received a National Security Letter to turn over computer records in their library on July 13, 2005. Unlike a suspected thousands of other people around the country, Chase, Bailey and two of their colleagues stood up to the Man and refused to comply, convinced that the feds had no right to intrude on anyone’s privacy without a court order (NSLs don’t require a judge’s approval). That’s when things turned ugly.”

The New York Public Library is demonstrating a 1,600-pound machine hooked up to the internet that will print any of 200,000 public-domain books on demand in six to eight minutes.

“A Manhattan jury decided Friday that Laura Albert had defrauded a production company that bought the movie rights to an autobiographical novel marketed as being based on LeRoy’s life. The federal jury, after a short deliberation, awarded $116,500 to Antidote International Films Inc. The San Francisco author, who went to strange lengths to hide her identity behind the nonexistent LeRoy, condemned the jury’s decision, saying it had ominous implications for artists.”

Writer Laura Albert has been found guily of going beyond use of a pseudonyms and commiting draud. “Among the battles waged at the trial — art versus commerce, truth versus fiction, reality versus the imagination — it was perhaps the battle over JT LeRoy’s purpose in the world that was most in dispute. Before his identity (or, rather, nonidentity) was revealed last year in a series of newspaper articles, the production team at Antidote considered him that rare commodity in today’s biography-obsessed entertainment world: a gifted writer with a titillating past that only enhanced the value of the work.”