Calligraphy, a centuries-old art form, is seeing a surge of interest, including among young people more familiar with coding than cursive. - The New York Times
The purchase, which has already been completed, adds more than 40,000 academic titles published under the Rowman & Littlefield and Lexington Books imprints, which cover the subjects of academic arts, humanities, and social sciences, including in such subject areas as business and psychology, in which Bloomsbury is "building a presence," the company said. - Publishers Weekly
The Standard, which has suffered six straight annual losses (most recently, £16.4 million through October 2022), hopes to repeat the successful switch to digital-only by its sister publication, the now-profitable Independent, while continuing to be released in hard copy each week. - Press Gazette (UK)
"In them one finds a little bit of everything: fragments and false starts, alternate endings, even drawings. The notebooks were where Munro tinkered and experimented, made detours and sudden revisions — where she surveyed the whole field of possibility before committing herself to a full, typed version of a story." - The Paris Review
The British investment firm Baillie Gifford became lead sponsor of the Hay Festival in 2015, but this year a number of the marquee participants at high-profile events canceled their appearances over what they see as Baillie Gifford's excessive ties to the fossil-fuel industry and the Israeli government. - The Guardian
The deal between OpenAI and News Corp. means that ChatGPT will be drawing text and info from The Wall Street Journal and Britain's The Times, yes, but also from the New York Post and the London tabloid The Sun. - The Guardian
That editors edit, which would seem to go without saying, turns out to be a pretty facile summary of a role whose essential ambiguities make it best suited to confidence men or obsessives. The most we can say is that the editor assists the writer. - Tablet
The most potent enemy of reading, it goes without saying, is the small, flat box that you carry in your pocket. In terms of addictive properties, it might as well be stuffed with meth. There’s no point in grinding through a whole book when you can pick up your iPhone. - The New Yorker
"Macquarie University research fellow Keagan Brewer and his co-author Michelle L. Lewis seek to corroborate previous suspicions that the enigmatic illustrated text served as a medieval guide to the female reproductive system — based on its imagery and context, as opposed to its (still-unreadable) text." - Artnet
John S. Jacobs escaped his master in 1839, joined a whaling crew and eventually landed in Australia, where he published The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots — a memoir of enslavement and escape and a ferocious critique of the US Constitution — in a Sydney newspaper in 1855. - The New York Times
"People attempting to recover from unhealthy obsessions unanimously report a tendency to overthink to the point of debility. Riding the subway uptown to the Scrabble club, I considered the ways I’d replaced one addiction with another." - The Paris Review
The German novelist shares with translator Michael Hoffmann the £50,000 award for Kairos, which "follows the destructive love affair between a 19-year-old student and a married man in his 50s who meet on a bus in East Berlin around 1986. Their relationship comes to embody the German Democratic Republic's 'crushed idealism.'" - BBC
"The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a Penguin Random House division, announced Monday the dismissals of Alfred A. Knopf publisher Reagan Arthur and Pantheon/Schocken publisher Lisa Lucas. A publishing official … said that the restructuring was for financial reasons." - AP
Whether they’re from classics or gothic novels, Cannes usually shows some Very Serious Literary fare looking for distribution - and this year is no different. - LitHub
