Nolo Press, which puts out “trustworthy and approachable legal guides,” spent “two years and ‘hundreds of thousands'” coming up with a redesign for its book covers, according to Publishers Weekly. What did Nolo come up with? Dogs. Chip Kidd, book designer extraordinaire, happened to be guest blogging at Powell’s this week and registered his horror. (Thanks Laurie)
Puppies Sell
Firmin Week
If you haven’t been there already, it’s not too late to check out the LBC’s discussion of Firmin by Sam Savage, our Autumn Read This! selection. Also, don’t miss the post from author Savage. By the way, I highly recommend this tale of a literary rat. Firmin is among the few animal protagonists who is neither moralistic nor an allegory, he’s just a sentient rat living in a bookstore near Boston’s decrepit Scollay Square.Update: If you hurry, you can still get in on the Firmin giveaway going on at the LBC right now.
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Going the Distance
In Elmira, NY, six high school students banded together to break the Guinness Book of Records marathon reading record. Says the AP:They whizzed through more than 20 beloved children’s books, including the six-volume Harry Potter series, seven Goosebumps thrillers and Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia. They wrapped up their epic, 128-hour performance on the school auditorium stage with Oh, the Places You’ll Go, a Dr. Seuss classic.Meanwhile, in Albany, other long-distance readers, among them William Kennedy and Andy Rooney, joined forces for a 24-hour reading of Moby Dick, as part of “Why Melville Matters Now” weekend at the Albany Academies school.
For Our Reference
The other day I found a fascinating blog devoted to words, linguistics, languages and other related topics called Languagehat. I have been meaning to mention it for a while, and today I have good reason to. I don’t often talk about reference books on The Millions even though I use them every day. Lucky for us, Languaghat keeps track of these sorts of things. Today, he posts links to interesting reviews of new editions of two popular reference books, The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th Edition and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition.
War Book
One of the good things about working at my bookstore is that I can peruse any magazine I want without having to pay for it. Today’s unlikely canditate was Vogue which I was skimming looking for anything by my favorite food writer Jeffrey Steingarten. No dice. Instead I came across an article about NPR’s Anne Garrels who NPR listeners will recall from her gut wrenching reports from Bagdhad during the war. According to the writer of the article Farrar, Straus & Giroux will be releasing Garrel’s book about the war, Naked in Baghdad, this September. Something to look forward to. In other news, I’m about to get my phone number put on the new nationwide do not call list because there are few things that I dislike more than telemarketers. Have a good weekend…
City of The Big Shoulders
The title of this post is taken from a poem called “Chicago” by Carl Sandburg. The reference is to the men of the meat-packing industry, and the nickname came to represent the burly, blue-collar mentality of the place. At least, that’s what I’ve gathered so far. Mrs. Millions and I are more or less fully relocated in Chicago. We found an apartment and we’ll be moved in by the first of the month. The apartment is located in a neighborhood called Ravenswood. It sounds like something out of Edgar Allan Poe, no? We’ve been here about a week, and we’ve spent a lot of time driving around, looking for a place to live and getting to know the city. So far, it seems like a great place. Around every corner there seems to be a row of shops, cafes and restaurants, and driving by Wrigley when a game is on is remarkable. I can see that Chicago has its own very distinct identity, and being here makes me want to read some books that are about or set in the city. Some candidates: American Pharaoh by Adam Cohen, The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, Crossing California by Adam Langer, and The Coast of Chicago by Stuart Dybek.
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Let’s Translate this Thing: Murathan Mungan’s Cities of Women
Anglophones have a rare opportunity here for a bit of friendly cultural one-upmanship with the French: In a talk last summer, Mungan told the assembled that his French publishers rejected Cities of Women because they wanted to advertise him strictly as a novelist. The introduction of his stories and plays and poems to the market, they told him, would "confuse" the French people.
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