Category: Miscellaneous

Posted on by

Last Call for Mass Market Paperbacks

The decision made this winter by ReaderLink to stop distributing mass market paperback books at the end of 2025 was the latest blow to a format that has seen its popularity decline for years. According to Circana BookScan, mass market unit sales plunged from 131 million in 2004 to 21 million in 2024, a drop of about 84%, and sales this year through October were about 15 million units. But for many years, the mass market paperback was “the most popular reading format,” notes Stuart Applebaum, former Penguin Random House EVP of corporate communications. Read more

(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)

Posted on by

Did You Know Mapmakers Used to Make Up Fake Towns in Order to Catch Plagiarists?

Incidentally, this concept where creators add subtle little incorrect details to protect their copyright isn’t just limited to maps. You can (or, if they’re doing it right, you can’t) find made-up words in dictionaries, fictional entries in encyclopedias, fake phone numbers in phone books, non-existent businesses in business directories, meaningless strings in software code, extra screws in architectural plans, bad advice in medical textbooks and glaring factual errors in light-hearted books about maps. Read more

(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)

Posted on by

‘A Noble Madness: The Dark Side of Collecting from Antiquity to Now’

James Delbourgo’s “A Noble Madness” is a brilliant, droll study in the shifting profile and consistent obsession of the stop-at-nothing, buy-or-die collector. Mr. Delbourgo, a history professor at Rutgers University, finds that the collecting mentality, like most things, divides into ancient and modern. The ancients believed that those who loved too much were possessed by gods; Suetonius wrote that Caligula, who believed he was a god, once ordered his troops to fill their helmets with seashells, the “spoils of the ocean.” We moderns, Mr. Delbourgo argues, have gone from theories of “demonic possession to accusations of superstition, obsession, sexual neurosis, and pathological greed down to the recent invention of the medical term ‘hoarding disorder.’” Read more

(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)

Posted on by

A Smuggled Book Changed His Life. Now He’s Built 500 Prison Libraries.

Reginald Dwayne Betts carjacked a man who was asleep in his car in a parking lot in Fairfax County, Virginia. Betts, who was 16 at the time, was tried as an adult and spent nearly a decade in state prison, much of that time in solitary confinement. Books weren’t allowed in “the hole.” But the men in the prison devised a pulley system using torn sheets and pillowcases to pass books from the general population to people in solitary. “Imagine yourself as a teenager, 17 years old, in solitary confinement, and you’re just calling out, ‘Yo, somebody send me a book,’” Betts said. “Somebody sent me Dudley Randall’s “The Black Poets,” and it radically changed my life.” Betts started writing every day and reading anything he could get his hands on. Books transformed him, he says, revealing that other ways of living were possible. When Betts got out, he earned his bachelor’s degree, then a law degree from Yale Law School. He became a poet and an advocate for prison reform, as well as a MacArthur “genius grant” recipient for his work with his nonprofit Freedom Reads, which installs libraries in prisons across the country. Read more

(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)

Posted on by

Virginia Woolf’s Lost Book is Coming Soon

More than 80 years after her death, a new book by Virginia Woolf will be published next month after the manuscript was discovered in a stately home. Scholars say the book, a collection of three comic stories about a giantess named Violet, is the first significant literary experiment that Woolf completed, at the age of 25, eight years before the publication for her first novel, The Voyage Out. Read more

(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)