“Not everyone lives in a great city, not everyone lives near a great city, and not every great city is a great city for bookstores.”
Category: words
Remember That Big, Expensive Plan To Remodel The New York Public Library?
It was scrapped, and in the new plan, the planners acknowledge that it would have cost at least $200 million more than they’d claimed.
Hay’s Indie Bookstores Are Dying As The Festival They Made Famous Thrives
“Hay is a market town, and it’s whatever the market will bear. At one time it was sheep, it was butter, it was cheese, it was books. And now maybe Hay is heading for the next thing, which could well be ideas.”
Yale Gets A Big Donation For Poetry – And Opera
“The professorship comes with considerable leeway. The person selected can teach the poetry of any era, in English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Russian, ancient Greek or Latin.”
Actually, Women Do Write War Literature (And Rather A Lot Of It)
“Military women are too often portrayed in the media as victims rather than heroes. Now, however, women are telling their stories, adding to the tales of war and homecoming that men have been recording from the Odyssey and Iliad on.”
Libraries Have So Many Books – And Librarians Have To Toss Them
“At the heart of the [weeding] method is a formula consisting of three factors—the number of years since the last copyright, the number of years since the book was last checked out, and a collection of six negative factors given the acronym MUSTIE, to help decide if a book has outlived its usefulness.”
Keeping A Small, Indie Press Alive While The Publishing World Flails
“She was surrounded by aspiring novelists there and saw the kind of sweat and pain that can go into writing a novel. She witnessed how a promising new voice could blossom when given a little encouragement but also understood the tragedy of a good novel unpublished.”
British Education Minister Takes US Authors Out Of School Syllabus
“Longtime American favorites including John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” and Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” are off the syllabus for a major high school English qualification under new guidelines that focus almost exclusively on writers from Britain and Ireland.”
How Do You Design A New Bookstore For The 21st Century?
“Design on its own will not save the bookshop. If you leave the model as it is and redecorate, nothing’s going to change. The solution needs to be much more fundamental: informed, strategic and daring.”
The Iranian Kerouac: Ali Eskandarian And The Great Punk Beat Novel
“Singer Ali Eskandarian was gunned down in New York last year with members of punk band the Yellow Dogs. He had just written Golden Years, an On-the-Road style novel that’s now being hailed as a cult classic.”