Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today's stories:
Several best-selling U.K. authors including Neil Gaiman, Hilary Mantel, Ali Smith, and Philip Pullman, have joined Waterstones bookstore’s Buy Books for Syria campaign, through which the authors’ books will be donated by publishers and sold for charity by Waterstones. The initiative intends to raise £1 million in donations for the Syrian refugee crisis. (BBC News)
At NPR, Colin Dyer looks at the pervasiveness and usefulness of the book blurb. Dyer traces the first instance of a book blurb to a note Ralph Waldo Emerson sent Walt Whitman in 1856 after reading Leaves of Grass; an excerpt of Emerson’s note (“I greet you at the beginning of a great career”) appeared on the spine of the second edition of Whitman’s collection.
Yesterday marked the beginning of the thirty-third annual Banned Books Week, a nationwide celebration of challenged and censored books. At Slate, Ruth Graham suggests that the real reason to celebrate is that “there is basically no such thing as a ‘banned book’ in the United States in 2015.”
Following the news that e-book subscription service Oyster is shutting down, Publishers Weekly reports on various questions raised about the sustainability of the subscription model for digital books.
At Electric Literature, John Freeman—former editor of Granta and current editor of Freeman’s, a new literary biannual published by Grove Press—talks about how literary magazine editors find new writers.
A collection of fifteen hundred rare books is expected to fetch more than $15 million at auction. The collection, which Sotheby’s will auction off in New York City in December, includes works of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature such as John Donne’s first published work, Pseudo-Martyr (1610), as well as the first ever English book about canines: John Caius’s Of Englishe Dogges (1576). (New York Times)
Last Friday, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington announced he will retire this Wednesday, September 30, instead of at the end of the year as scheduled. Deputy Librarian of Congress David Mao will serve as acting librarian until a new librarian is appointed. Billington’s announcement of his early departure follows reports of the library’s recent computer failures and other technological problems that have occurred throughout the year. Billington has held the position for the past twenty-eight years. (Washington Post)
Penguin Books turns eighty this year. T Magazine provides an infographic of the mass-market publisher’s legacy.
