While authors can be colorful, book dealers are often notably cranky and eccentric. One conducting business in fashionable Cecil Court put up a sign that read, “Do not mistake courtesy on my part as an invitation to stay all day.” - Washington Post
Fiction: The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen. History: Covered With Night by Nicole Eustace and Cuba: An American History by Ada Ferrer. Biography: Chasing Me to My Grave by Winfred Rembert. Poetry: frank: sonnets by Diane Seuss. General nonfiction: Invisible Child by Andrea Elliott. - The New York Times
The trade group the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America "started a diversity initiative in 2020 to 'encourage and promote the participation of L.G.B.T.Q.+, BIPOC, and underrepresented groups,'" but some Millennials and Gen Zers had started on their own. - The New York Times
"Mary Rambaran-Olm, a literary scholar who focuses on race and early medieval England, accused editors at The Los Angeles Review of Books of 'torpedoing' a strongly negative review ... because of their friendship with the fellow white scholars" who wrote the book she reviewed. - The New York Times
The Rapid City district has decided to destroy books by Eggers, Bechdel, Booker Prize-winning Bernadine Evaristo, Imbolo Mbue, and Stephen Chbosky. Why? Authors and topics are kinda, uh, gay, and the school board is homophobic. Eggers will replace them all. - The Guardian (UK)
Penguin Random House has partnered with a raft of advocacy organizations on a public campaign called "Open Books Open Doors", while the Authors Guild has launched a Banned Books Club on the app Fable, on which users organize social media book groups. - Publishing Perspectives
These toxic books, produced in the 19th century, are bound in vivid cloth colored with a notorious pigment known as emerald green that’s laced with arsenic. - National Geographic
Not only are these teens gathering to obtain, and read together, the books that conservative school boards and politicians are trying to keep out of their schools, they're organizing and lobbying local, state and Federal officeholders to reverse the bans. - The Washington Post
John McWhorter: "The idea that for Black people standard English is something wholly apart is simply inaccurate. For most Black Americans, both Black and standard English are part of who we are; our English is, in this sense, larger than many white people's." - The New York Times
I can imagine the internet hot take: Why punish people who can afford to buy books by making them free to read for everyone? Or: Government giveaways: why we shouldn’t let people who can afford books read them for free. - Chicago Tribune
The United States is facing an unprecedented wave of schoolbook banning. PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for freedom of expression, tallied 1,586 book bans in schools over the past nine months, targeting 1,145 books. - Washington Post
The 1631 printing of the King James Bible gets its nicknames, and its fame, from a typo: the printers omitted the word "not" from the Seventh Commandment, rendering it "Thou shalt commit adultery." Only about 20 copies now remain; this is the first discovered in the Southern Hemisphere. - The Guardian
"Julie Finch, … the former CEO of the Cheltenham Trust, … has been appointed CEO of the Hay festival and will succeed founder and former director Peter Florence, who resigned from his role after a bullying claim was upheld last year." - The Guardian
The hyphen underwent an assault from a different corner in 2007, when Angus Stevenson, an editor of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, removed the hyphens from sixteen thousand words. - The New Yorker
