Oxford University’s right to print books was first recognised in 1586, in a decree from the Star Chamber. But the centuries-old printing history of Oxford University Press will end this summer, after the publishing house announced the last vestige of its printing arm was closing. Read more
Category: Miscellaneous
Hobby Lobby Sues Oxford Professor Over Stolen Bible Artifacts
Craft chain Hobby Lobby is going to court again, this time to recover some $7 million it paid a former Oxford University classics professor for ancient fragments of the Christian gospels and other artifacts that turned out to be stolen. Read more
Jamie Lee Curtis’ Comet Pictures & Blumhouse Adapting Patricia Cornwell’s ‘Kay Scarpetta’ Novels For TV
Jamie Lee Curtis’ Comet Pictures and Blumhouse Televison have secured the rights to the books and are developing them as an hour-long drama series centered on the eponymous forensic pathologist. Read more
The Literature of the Con: Great Books About Grifters and Swindlers
Con men flourish in two diametrically opposite times—when the people have nothing and are desperate for anything that will raise them out of poverty; and when there is boundless plenty for the vast majority, when countries are newly awash with easy money, and there are countless newly rich men and women who can just as easily be separated from their money as they acquired it. Read more
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56 Delightfully Unusual Words for Everyday Things
If your dream is to talk like Moira Rose from Schitt’s Creek, look no further than Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words, one of the dictionaries Catherine O’Hara used to tweak her iconic character’s lines. Read more
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We need comic novels more than ever. So where are they?
A nation recovering from the worst health emergency in 100 years needs novels full of humor. But if laughter is the best medicine, our fiction is in dangerously short supply. It’s an odd and persistent problem, compounded by the fact that most of the novels marketed as funny are, in fact, not very funny. Or they traffic in wit so dry their lips would crack if they smiled. Read more
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For the Washoe Tribe of Lake Tahoe, a sundown siren is a ‘living piece of historical trauma’
In Minden, Nevada, a siren goes off every day at noon and 6 p.m. Members of the Washoe Tribe have been asking the town to silence the 6 p.m. siren because of its affiliation with a racist sundown ordinance that was in place for much of the 20th century. Read more
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Robert Macfarlane on Roger Deakin and the Origins of Wild Swimming
To Roger Deakin, water was a miraculous substance. It was curative and restorative, it was beautiful in its flow, it was a lens through which he often viewed the world, and it was a medium of imagination and reflection. “All water,” he scribbled in a notebook, “river, sea, pond, lake, holds memory and the space to think.” Read more
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A Lost Bronte Library Surfaces
A trove of manuscripts acquired from the Bronte family in the 19th century, all but unseen for the past century, will be auctioned at Sotheby’s. Read more
77 Strange, Funny, and Magnificent Book Titles You’ve Probably Never Heard Of
The humorous literary award known as the Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year has been running since 1978, with past winners including Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality (1986) by Glenn C. Ellenbogen, The Joy of Waterboiling (2018) by Achse Verlag and The Dirt Hole and its Variations by Charles L. Dobbins (2019). But we can go back centuries earlier to find their ancestors. The following are some of the more curious lurking in the corners of library catalogues. Read more
