Words

Even as government officials seemed a bit cavalier about it all – talking about herd immunity, for instance – people sensed that a shutdown was coming. “Sales of fiction rose by a third, while children’s education went up 234% to the third highest level on record. Puzzle books, handicrafts and true crime also saw sharp rises.” – BBC

Carmen Esposito’s Save Yourself was meant to be released on a book tour that saw the comedian and podcaster performing in cities across the country. But then, COVID-19. In the book, she writes, “Humans are scared out of our minds and want to be saved. We want to know why we are here, what we are supposed to do, and how to protect ourselves.” – NPR

That’s right, Camus’ The Plague is leading a wave of “pestilence fiction.” Get this: “The British publisher of The Plague, Penguin Classics, says it is struggling to keep up with orders. ‘We’ve gone from shipping quantities in the low hundreds every month to the mid-thousands.'” – The Guardian (UK)

Some of the still laid-off Powell’s staff are unhappy with the way the company has handled the store closures and layoffs, but for others, the present is a little rosier. CEO Emily Powell wrote on Friday in a memo on the website, “Thanks to your orders on Powells.com, we now have over 100 folks working at Powell’s again – all full time with benefits.” – The Oregonian

Remember last fall and winter? Well, there were plans: “Months ago, in what now feels like another era, publishers planning their 2020 schedules hoped to avoid releasing books in the fall, typically the industry’s biggest season. Editors and writers worried that new releases would be lost in the deluge of political news leading up to the presidential election, so publishers jammed some of their biggest titles into the spring.” – The New York Times

Jill Lepore: “The literature of contagion is vile. A plague is like a lobotomy. It cuts away the higher realms, the loftiest capacities of humanity, and leaves only the animal. “Farewell to the giant powers of man,” Mary Shelley wrote in “The Last Man,” in 1826, after a disease has ravaged the world. “Farewell to the arts,—to eloquence.” Every story of epidemic is a story of illiteracy, language made powerless, man made brute. But, then, the existence of books, no matter how grim the tale, is itself a sign, evidence that humanity endures, in the very contagion of reading.” – The New Yorker

“It is the middle of a plague — ‘a pestilence so great and universal, that already it has been three months since it started, and many have died and many more continue to die.’ This does little to stop a group of scholars who have sealed themselves off from the world in a Mexico City convent, where they toil on a series of volumes devoted to indigenous knowledge.” Carolina Miranda recounts the story of the Historia General de las cosas de la Nueva España, a 12-volume manuscript from 1576 now known as the Florentine Codex. – Los Angeles Times

“Book festival Wordplay, originally slated to take place in Minneapolis in May, will now happen virtually in April and May in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. All of the original 100+ participants, including Alison Roman, Michael Ian Black, Charles Yu and Scott Pelley, are still slated to take part in the festival.” Steph Opitz, Wordplay’s founding director, tells a reporter how it’s coming together. – Forbes

With little advance notice, the 84-year-old film-maker’s book arrives at a time when much of the world is preoccupied with the coronavirus pandemic. Arcade is an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing and a Skyhorse spokeswoman said no decisions had been made on whether Allen would give interviews. – The Guardian

“This is the first time in our history that we have had to have a layoff,” owner Nancy Bass Wyden Bass Wyden wrote in a statement. Employees will receive a week of pay in addition to payment for any vacation time they have accrued. “We are also working with our union and our providers to extend health insurance as long as possible.” – Publishers Weekly

No one seems to fully agree on why reading books or watching movies about apocalyptic pandemics feels appealing during a real crisis with an actual contagious disease. Some readers claim that contagion fiction provides comfort, but others argue the opposite. – The Conversation

Mo Willems, Grace Lin, Gene Luen Yang, Amie Kaufman and so many others are offering drawing lessons, read alouds, virtual book tours and so much more online. Oliver Jeffers: “We are all at home, but none of us are alone. … Let’s be bored together.” – The New York Times

After days – and lots of angry tweets, posts, and other pushback from staff who said they had no masks, no gloves, no hand sanitizer, and were still being forced to take cash – and the CEO saying “his stores are ‘no different to a supermarket or a pharmacy’ as he vowed to keep the book chain open,” he has at last closed for the duration. – The Guardian (UK)

You can read an awful lot for free through libraries’ online services. Also, here are some tips on how to find reading community when your book group can’t meet in person. – The Washington Post

Crossword editors are strange arbiters of cultural relevance. Read tweets by Awkwafina or Olivia Wilde on learning that they’ve been immortalized in the black-and-white grid—it’s the bookish version of handprints on a slab outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. But any pub-trivia attendee—exposed to categories on craft beer or things that smell like sourdough or whatever the emcee is into—will tell you that personnel is policy. – The Atlantic

“Organisers will struggle to recoup the large infrastructure costs they have already committed to, as 70% of the festival’s income comes from ticket and book sales on site. In a statement on Thursday, the festival said the not-for-profit event was now in ‘immediate financial jeopardy’ and would need to raise funds in 10 days to ‘plot a sustainable route forward’.” – The Guardian

Newton published his findings on the laws of motion in the 1687 book Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Now, by sheer accident, a rare first-edition copy of this groundbreaking book was found in a library on the French island of Corsica. (Fun fact before we continue: Newton made his discovery while “socially distancing” himself during the Great Plague of London in 1665. He was a 20-something Trinity College student at the time.) – Hyperallergic

“We have been forced to make the unthinkable decision to lay off the vast majority of you in the coming few days. Many people have spoken publicly demanding we pay our employees and extend health insurance for the duration. No one can possibly know how much I wish I could make that happen. We are simply not that kind of business – we run on duct tape and twine on a daily basis, every day trading funds from one pocket to patch the hole in another.” – Powell’s

“In a surprise announcement today, Macmillan abandoned its controversial embargo on new release e-books in libraries, effective this week. ‘There are times in life when differences should be put aside,’ reads a brief memo from Macmillan CEO John Sargent addressed to librarians, authors, illustrators, and agents.” – Publishers Weekly

“The authors I contacted all jumped at the chance to do something to benefit both the bookstore and those readers facing isolation, even though many of those authors themselves are entering a period of great uncertainty.” – The Guardian

The potential long-term effects for book retailers are sobering. Many in the industry are worried that independent bookstores will be devastated as local and state officials mandate social distancing and order some businesses to temporarily close. – The New York Times

Writers Bloc, a series of talks, readings and discussions, pulls in sold-out crowds for the likes of Rachel Maddow, Cory Booker, Joy Reid, Elizabeth Warren, and the Pod Save America guys. Yes, in La-La Land. – The New York Times

Newsstands are even registering a small bump in sales. That was clear in Milan. In a busier newsstand, near a major shopping street here, I had to wait to pay for the newspaper. And when my turn came, I had to ask my questions quickly. The newsagent was impatient, answering with short sentences, and insistently looking over my shoulder. A line was forming. – Quartz

Plagues functioned as a setup for an even more crucial theme in ancient myth: a leader’s intelligence. At the beginning of the “Iliad,” for instance, the prophet Calchas – who knows the cause of a nine-day plague – is praised as someone “who knows what is, what will be and what happened before.” This language anticipates a chief criticism of Homer’s legendary King Agamemnon: He does not know “the before and the after.” – The Conversation

“If you read The Plague long ago, perhaps for a college class, … perhaps you paid more attention to the buboes and the lime pits than to the narrator’s depiction of the ‘hectic exaltation’ of the ordinary people trapped in the epidemic’s bubble, … caught up in ‘the frantic desire for life that thrives in the heart of every great calamity’: the comfort of community. The townspeople of Oran did not have the recourse that today’s global citizens have, in whatever town: to seek community in virtual reality.” – Literary Hub

What the library tells you is not that there is that much to read, but that there are no limits as to how much there is to know. The essence of the library is its limitlessness. The more time you spend in it, the more you realize that no time could ever be enough; no matter how hard you strive, you will never know it all. The revelation of your finitude comes with embarrassing pain. And when you have realized that you cannot live without that pain, your perverse relationship with the library has reached its climax. – Los Angeles Review of Books

The retailing giant has already been removing “tens of thousands” of listings from “bad actors” attempting to artificially raise prices on items such as face masks and hand sanitiser. Now it is fighting a losing battle against the writers rushing out self-published books to profit from coronavirus fears. Generally shorter than 100 pages, dozens have been published in the last few weeks, promising worried readers ways to prevent or avoid the virus. – The Guardian

This paragraph barely skims the surface of the life of P-Orridge: “Genesis led the influential British rock bands Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, dabbled as a dominatrix in New York, ran a soup kitchen in Kathmandu, hid out from Scotland Yard, organized a cultlike fan club that asked initiates to send in their bodily fluids, and undertook a long-running surgical project to merge identities with her wife, Jacqueline Mary Breyer, in a single nongendered being they called a ‘pandrogyne.'” – The New York Times