Last Days For Salon?

Is the online magazine Salon on its last legs? This week its stock was demoted toWall Street’s Little League. “The San Francisco company has said it could run out of money by Dec. 1, barring an emergency infusion of cash.” In the past two years, Salon has slashed staff and scaled back. “In all, Salon had revenue of $1 million in the last quarter. That is tiny by business standards, the equivalent of sales at two neighborhood gas stations.”

Art Of Familiarity

Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations puts out its first new edition in 10 years. “Massachusetts bookseller John Bartlett first published his book of quotations in 1855 as a literary reference work. Shakespeare still leads everybody with 1,906 of the 25,000 quotes from more than 2,500 people in the 17th edition. The Bible is next with 1,642 entries. The book quotes about 100 new people, among them Mother Teresa and Maya Angelou, Alfred Hitchcock and Hillary Clinton, Jerry Seinfeld and J.K. Rowling, Katharine Graham and Princess Diana.”

$100 Million For Poetry?

“One can but wonder what this will do for that most marginalized literary form. Visibility, for sure, since suddenly there’s lots of 0000’s at the end of the $$$$’s attached to the word poetry. Poets are a quirky lot, and the first, but not lasting, reaction from some was concern, since this peripheral art’s loneliness was seen as part of its strength; the next common reaction was that the idea of connecting money to poetry was somehow unpoetic.”

Touch Me… Feel Me…

There is a visceral thrill to collecting books. Sure they’re difficult to store. But “most true book-heads will not be content with contact by catalogue alone. They must sniff the dust of ages, they must browse, they must handle the goods. Dealers have responded to this urge by peregrinating around the country offering their wares at book fairs.”

This is Getting Ridiculous

If you want to get a sense of the plot of the next Harry Potter book, it’ll only cost you $9500 or so. The latest installment of the wildly popular series by J.K. Rowling still has no official publication date, but Rowling has announced that she has prepared an index card with 93 ‘random words’ on it which hint at the plot, and that card will be auctioned next month at Sotheby’s in London. Seriously, an index card. Will be auctioned. At Sotheby’s.

Bellesiles Stands Fast

Michael Bellesiles, the historian who resigned his professorship last month after a panel of his peers concluded that he had made up much of the information and many of the sources for his controversial book on the history of guns in America, remains defiant about his scholarship, insisting that his facts are good, and that he was not motivated by anti-gun political leanings. He denies that Emory University paid him off to go quietly, and continues to carry on a vigorous e-mail debate with some of his sharpest critics.

Regressing to Harry

Everyone has read Harry Potter by now, of course, and the franchise shows no signs (so far) of waning in popularity among all age groups. But why are adults so interested in these books aimed at children? Certainly, they are well-written and exciting, but what is it about today’s world that is making grown-ups more interested in reading about sorcerers and witchcraft than about love, sex, tragedy, and other more traditional ‘adult’ literary subjects?

No Hard Feelings – Poet Gives Mag $100 Million

Some 30 years ago, the editor of Poetry Magazine rejected a submission by one Mrs Guernsey Van Riper Jr. of Indianapolis. Over the next few decades she kept submitting poems and he kept rejecting them. It turns out she was fabulously wealthy, and, now 87 years old, has just made a gift to the influential Poetry of $100 million over the next 30 years, with “no strings attached.”