Hugh Cullimore talks $450,000 first editions and rare pamphlets with Tom Ayling, a specialist in JRR Tolkien texts. Read more
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Category: Miscellaneous
The American City Where Almost Everyone Seems To Be Writing a Book
The chief reason for Iowa City’s bookish demeanor celebrates its 90th anniversary this year; in 1936, the town’s University of Iowa set up the first creative writing degree in the United States, after decades of nurturing creative writing talent as part of wider academic programs. Today, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop is globally famous, with a roster of former faculty and alumni that reads like a who’s who of modern American letters — Kurt Vonnegut, Curtis Sittenfeld, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, Flannery O’Connor, to name a few. The Pulitzers and National Book Awards for alumni continue to stack up and in 2008, the town was named America’s first UNESCO City of Literature. Read more
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Maldives Barefoot Bookseller
Dream jobs are a rare find, but nothing quite beats the role of bookseller in the Maldives, specifically at Soneva Fushi, one of the world’s most sublime resorts. Read more
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Book of the Month Club Celebrates Their Centennial
This year is not only the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Book of the Month Club—it also marks a decade since chairman John Lippman relaunched the iconic service and rebranded it Book of the Month. When Lippman, whose background is in finance and music, acquired BOTM in late 2012 from parent company Bookspan, it was being buffeted by both the rise of online bookselling and the explosion of e-books. Lippman’s goal was clear: to create a new business that would appeal to readers who were increasingly buying books online. Even after the acquisition, Lippman wasn’t sure his plan would work. But now he’s happy to report to PW that BOTM has grown every year since the relaunch, and it currently has more than 400,000 members and around 60 employees. Read more
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Dad Books Are a Dying Breed
Sales have been sliding for nonfiction titles about politics, biographies and other books often aimed at men. Read more
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How To Clean Your Books Without Ruining Them
Was Twilight topping the charts the last time you cleaned your home library? It’s time. A book restoration expert walks us through the process. Read more
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Eight of the Most Fascinating Biographies to Read
Each is animated by the author’s love—for their subject, for language, and for pushing the boundaries of what the genre can do. Read more
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The Rise of Smutty Book Clubs
Smutty book clubs are now gaining traction across the world. In London, Main Character – a new romance-novel-themed shop in Spitalfields – is holding monthly Smut Clubs and “spicy read” open-mic nights. Toronto-based romance-only book store Hopeless Romantic now has four book clubs to keep up with demand and the breadth of the genre – contemporary romance, ‘dark and spicy’, queer, and romantasy. Read more
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How Math and Literature Are Unexpectedly Connected
“The universe is full of underlying structure, pattern, and regularity, and mathematics is the best tool we have for understanding it,” writes [Sarah] Hart in her book, Once Upon a Prime: The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature. “That’s why mathematics is often called the language of the universe, and why it is so vital to science.” In her book, Hart reveals a long list of literary greats who love mathematics such as James Joyce, Edgar Allan Poe and George Eliot. She also points to popular authors today who use math in their work like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Michael Crichton who wrote Jurassic Park.
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Here Are a Few Offbeat Books You Might Enjoy
Every book is a doorway into another world, and some worlds are weirder than others. We asked members of the campus community to recommend a few that expand our notions of what literature can be. Read more
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