Make Believe

In addition to the Jewish refugees who emigrated to North America in the years leading up to World War II, there was also a sizable contingent who fled East. In particular, an estimated 30,000 refugees journeyed to Shanghai between the years of 1933 to 1941. With them, the refugees brought all sorts of valuables, heirlooms, and artifacts. One family brought over 2,000 books. Now, over 70 years later, one Shanghai family is asking for help locating the owner of that library. Part One; Part Two. (h/t Bint Battuta)

This week in news that’s almost impossible to believe: after an intense bidding war, the rights to David Grann’s upcoming book Killers of the Flower Moon were bought by Imperative Entertainment for a whopping five million dollars. All this for a nonfiction book that isn’t due out for well over a year. Killers of the Flower Moon tells the story of the investigation into the mysterious deaths of several Osage Indians in the 1920s, who were at the time some of the wealthiest people in the world. The case was one of the first ever worked by the FBI.

Remember a few weeks ago when Paul Bogaards was kind enough to list us onto his Hierarchy of Book Publishing: The Top 100? We were entry no. 67, not nearly so powerful in the book publishing world as  the original publisher of Kathryn Stockett’s The Help,  Amy Einhorn; her hair was entry no. 4. Though we were deemed slightly better than New Jersey, which was listed at no. 68.  We even posted a curiosity about it. Well, the New York Observer’s got a follow up piece on the joke, and is calling the original Tumblr post a flame out. Bogaards takes a different tack, saying that his Twitter and Tumblr streams are “a curation of industry anxiety. Interspersed with humor. And cocktails.”