WORDS

In 1957, undercover police bought a copy of the poetry collection which featured “Howl” at City Lights bookstore in San Francisco — and proceeded to arrest owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti and manager Shig Murao for selling obscene material. Their trial set a major precedent in First Amendment case law. - BBC (MSN)

We appreciate that each of us is a link in a millennia-long chain of language, connected to people over the centuries by the words they bequeathed us. Following where, and through whom, that chain has passed is the business of etymology. - Psyche

“If the past few years of American literary publishing have had a zeitgeist, it has been more like a series of geists from zeits past.” - n+1

Having identified books as the “highest quality source of training data” for Anthropic’s L.L.M.s, it initiated a covert program called Project Panama, defined succinctly in court documents as “our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.” “Destructively scan” means precisely that. - The New Yorker

Writers have been posting on social media that publishers seem to be claiming more than their fair share of some payments. - TechCrunch

I don’t read Pauline Kael to track my sensibility with hers on an aesthetic oscilloscope. I read her because I think she—more than any writer I know, including Agee—brings the whole of herself to writing about movies.  - Hedgehog Review

“Even if you’re writing about stereotypically bad sex, your language should be fresh and surprising.” - LitHub

Publishers and authors are wrangling, and third parties are getting into it, and in general, this isn’t great. - The New York Times

As she said, “It's one of the ironies of trying to be a writer and an activist at the same time that just when you feel you have the most to write about, you have the least time in which to write it.” - The New York Times

That would be the 120-foot scroll of architectural tracing paper on which Jack Kerouac typed — single-spaced — his original draft of On the Road. He produced the whole megillah in three very caffeinated weeks. - AP

The decline of the English major offers a lesson in what young people want. Teenagers in the 2020s have a spiritual thirst that is unmet by a curriculum without order and greatness and charm. A field without a bible like the Norton doesn’t satisfy them. - Portico Quarterly

The company launched in 2020 to offer shoppers a way of buying books online that supported independent bookstores and to divert sales away from Amazon and competing platforms. It operates both as a proprietary sales channel and offers affiliate sales for independent stores and influencers. - Publishers Weekly

“Oxford University Press plans to offshore its financial operations department to EXL Services, which will provide the service from the (Indian) subcontinent. More than 30 Unite the Union members walked out on Tuesday over the plans, with the industrial action set to last until 11 September.” - BBC (Yahoo!)

“The magazine’s January issue will be its last in print, according to Joan SerVaas, the president and publisher. In a letter to The Post’s 50,000 subscribers ..., she attributed the decision to a combination of rising production costs, declining advertising revenue and shifting reader habits.’” - The New York Times

“(The shops), many of them tucked away ... inside buildings, have long offered a refuge and a window to a freer world for some mainland Chinese readers seeking ideas suppressed at home. But these spaces now are under threat following a wave of bookseller arrests over alleged sedition under a 2024 national security law.” - AP