Letters of Note posted an incredible letter from a former slave, and Kottke rounded up some more info he and others uncovered about the letter writer.
The Story Behind the Letter
Curiosities: Cartoon Batting Averages
Colson Whitehead says “Wow, Fiction Works!“The LA Times has a clip from the movie version of David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, directed by The Office star John Krasinski. (via)Carolyn writes about the real-life connection between Walker Percy and Bruce Springsteen.The Village Voice shows off the final results of its highly scientific system of determining New Yorker cartoonists’ batting averages.Cambridge Information Group, which owns Bowker, AquaBrowser, ProQuest, Serials Solutions and RefWorks makes an investment in LibraryThing.Vote in The 2009 Tournament of Books Zombie Poll.A book that has turned out to be so wrong it has become a collectors item (check out the prices): The Bush Boom: How a Misunderestimated President Fixed a Broken Economy
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Clickity-Clack
Half a century ago, it would have been inconceivable to think that one day, the clack of typewriter keys would disappear from daily life. The rise of the personal computer, in Sadie Stein’s words, turned an everpresent sound into a “living anachronism.” She reflects on the value of the typewriter in a blog post for The Paris Review Daily. (It might also be a good time to read our own Bill Morris on typewriters and pen pals.)
Image of the Text
Recommended Reading: A brief history of book illustration and books as objects, over at Literary Hub.
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A TumBelivr event in San Fran!
Tumblr and the Believer are throwing a party at San Fransisco’s Make-Out Room! Sheila Heti will be there, and so will Issac Fitzgerald, and Melissa Graeber. If you’d like to cover this event for #LitBeat, well, just get in touch!
Danielle Steel Has Had Enough
Ultra-bestselling author Danielle Steel went off recently about something that’s been bothering her for ages. “I think some people are threatened if one is enterprising or has many/varied interests,” she writes. In particular, “it’s about men who don’t like women getting out there, doing something new or innovative and accomplishing something.”
Getting the Word Out
In his write up here of an important, but overlooked essay on copyright by Lewis Hyde, guest contributor Craig Fehrman noted that the Hyde essay had been downloaded only 746 times in nearly four years. Now, after the piece here about it, and subsequent linking by Boing Boing, the essay is the second most popular on the Social Science Research Network.
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Ernest Hemingway in Cuba
A restoration center has opened on Hemingway's property in Cuba, with holdings that include manuscripts, letters, and photographs.
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