A number of indie book stores, squeezed by patrons using their shelves only for research into later online purchases, are starting to charge admission for in-store readings and events, the New York Times reports.
Indie Bookstores Charge for Readings
How to Finish a Fairy Tale
“I just didn’t see the textual evidence for it. If Mark Twain wanted to make somebody black, he would make them black. He was not shy about dealing with matters of race.” For The New Yorker, Mythili G. Rao on the complicated backstory to the upcoming publication of The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine, a “new” children’s book by Mark Twain. See also: our consideration of Twain’s self-deprecating travelogue The Innocents Abroad.
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Tuesday New Release Day: McCarthy; Doten; LeCraw; Connors; Ackerman; Sumell; Albert; Tedrowe; O’Hagan; Filipacchi; van den Berg
New this week: Satin Island by Tom McCarthy; The Infernal by Mark Doten; The Half Brother by Holly LeCraw; All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found by Philip Connors; Green on Blue by Elliot Ackerman; Making Nice by Matt Sumell; After Birth by Elisa Albert; Blue Stars by Emily Ray Tedrowe; The Illuminations by Andrew O’Hagan; The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty by Amanda Filipacchi; and Find Me by Laura van den Berg. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2015 Book Preview.
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How They Did It Before Sears
The more you know! In Victorian times, sitting for a photograph could last hours due to primitive camera technology and the need for long, long exposures. This, predictably, didn’t jibe with kids, and so parents had to adopt an ingenious workaround: disguising themselves in the picture so they could physically restrain the youngsters. (Don’t miss Part 2, either.)
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Save the Languages
Researchers at Comanche Nation College and Texas Tech University are creating a digital archive to reconstruct the Comanche language before its 25 remaining speakers die out. Meanwhile, researchers from Moscow State University and the Russian Academy of Sciences have recorded audio and video footage of twenty isolated Alaskans who speak a unique form of the Russian language. (Bonus: An Australian researcher recently uncovered a whole new Aboriginal dialect.)
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Titanic Fixes
Neil deGrasse Tyson just continues to fix the world, one piece of astronomical minutiae at a time. Theatergoers sitting through screenings of Titanic 3-D will no longer see an incorrect star field thanks to a “snarky” email sent by Dr. Tyson to director James Cameron.
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Crippling Anxiety
Accustomed to your Crippling Anxiety in New York? Crippling Anxiety on the West Coast is just as good. Pair with Sarah Labrie’s reflections on social media anxiety.
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“Speaking of Memory”
In an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Peter Birkenhead goes back to Nabokov‘s Speak, Memory and considers “the way our memories tell themselves to us: in hints, collisions, and rushes, overlapping, upside down, out of order.” Pair with our own Garth Risk Hallberg‘s piece on reading Ada, or Ardor.
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I know that bookstores are suffering greatly because of eBooks. We need to help them as much as we could if we would like them to survive. I also understand the urgency that bookstores have to make money wherever they could to try to make up for all their losses. However I think most of the people that are attracted and come to bookstore events and book signings are people that support the stores already. Would this turn people from buying books from a store that changing for every small event they offer?