Challenging the longstanding myth that everybody loves those cute creatures known as penguins, the American Library Association reports that a children’s book featuring penguins has topped the list of library books the public objects to the most – for the second year running.

The 2005 picture book by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, And Tango Makes Three, is about a family of penguins… with two fathers. At least it’s in illustrious company – other titles on the ALA’s list of challenged books include Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass.

From the Associated Press:

The ALA defines a “challenge” as a “formal, written complaint filed with a library or school requesting that materials be removed because of content or appropriateness.”

[…]

Overall, the number of reported library challenges dropped from 546 in 2006 to 420 last year, well below the mid-1990s, when complaints topped 750. For every challenge listed, about four to five go unreported, the library association estimates.

“The atmosphere is a little better than it used to be,” [Judith] Krug [director of the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom] says. “I think some of the pressure has been taken off of books by the Internet, because so much is happening on the Internet.”

According to the ALA, at least 65 challenges last year led to a book being pulled.

The New York Times recently reported Guo Jingming to be the most successful writer in China. This may come as a shock to some, but not to star-crazed Chinese teenagers, who flock by the thousands to his book signings.

The pop singer turned author has seen three of his four novels sell over a million copies each, earning him $1.4-million last year.

Guo is the most successful of a dozen young celebrity authors who make up the “post-’80s” generation, some others of whom have also achieved book sales in the millions. This group includes the high school dropout and professional car racer Han Han, 25, who derides China’s inefficient educational system in his novels and regularly insults older, more established artists on his blog, and Zhang Yueran, 26, whose novel “Daffodils Took Carp and Went Away” features a bulimic girl who falls in love with her stepfather, is mistreated by her mother and is sent off to boarding school.

While the Chinese government frequently jails dissident writers or forces them into exile, it mostly ignores the antics of Guo and the other post-’80s writers. For all their flamboyance, they exemplify the social ideals of the new China — commercialism and individualism — said Lydia Liu, a professor of Chinese and comparative literature at Columbia University. They “don’t pose any threat,” Liu said. “They collaborate.”

In his latest column, David Milofsky, Book Beat author for the Denver Post, says he understands the frustration of authors who are unable to get their books reviewed in local papers.

Because a book editor can receive upwards of 10,000 books annually, of which perhaps one-tenth can be reviewed, there is a good deal of pressure applied by publicists and authors competing for review attention. Given the resources of New York publishers, it’s not surprising that most books reviewed by major publications are by well-known authors.

So how do unknown authors compete? They turn to the online world, where space is limitless, and, most importantly, where many people look for news and entertainment information.

Perhaps the most significant new outlet for reviews is the Barnes & Noble Review, which was launched just last October. In addition to being more nicely designed, the Review has the added advantage of many brick-and-mortar B&N bookstores to help promote it.

Jim Mustich, editor in chief of the B&N Review, said in an e-mail message, “We run one new 1,000-word review every weekday. In addition, we also review six titles in our Spotlight section and feature 50 titles with brief annotations in our Long List Section.”

Random U.S., that is. According to a New York Times report, Random House CEO Peter Olson is being replaced and will officially step down over the next few weeks.

Mr. Olson, who has run Random House, the world’s largest consumer publisher, since 1998, has come under mounting pressure in recent months as Bertelsmann’s financial results have been damaged by lower profits at Random House and steep losses in its American book clubs, which he also oversees.

Bertelsmann’s recently-appointed chief executive, Hartmut Ostrowski, has lost patience with the performance of this American outpost and wants to install his own person, said these executives, who spoke on condition of anonymity because it involved internal personnel issues.

“Outpost”?

An online survey of kids’ reading habits has turned up some surprising results – at least, surprising to Washington Post writer Jay Matthews. In the headline and intro to his article, Matthews drops the bomb that the Harry Potter series is not #1.

Children have welcomed the Harry Potter books in recent years like free ice cream in the cafeteria, but the largest survey ever of youthful reading in the United States will reveal today that none of J.K. Rowling’s phenomenally popular books has been able to dislodge the works of longtime favorites Dr. Seuss, E.B. White, Judy Blume, S.E. Hinton and Harper Lee as the most read.

Gawker offers some three-step advice on turning your blog into a book deal. Sounds like satire, but it’s actually sound and practical stuff. To wit:

Your personal blog isn’t good enough. Book deals for personal, story-telling blogs fizzled out a few years ago. There’s just too much research for the publisher and no guarantee of mass appeal. The latest book deals look more like movie deals: A conceptual hook will draw people in even if some of the jokes fall flat.

Atop the list of workable conceptual hooks is “Whimsical Recognizable Aspects Of Everyday Life,” a la Stuff White People Like. Sadly, “Occasionally Snide Notes on the Book Publishing Industry Especially in Canada” is nowhere to be found.

Fans of the BBC TV nature show Planet Earth will be pleased to learn that Scholastic in the U.S. has announced a tie-in series of kids’ books. As CNN.com reports:

Scholastic’s publishing program will launch in September 2008 with a full-color, 48-page Planet Earth Scrapbook and a Planet Earth Reader featuring incredible full-color photography in an easy to read format. The program will continue with three January 2009 publications (a second reader, a board book and scrapbook), followed in April 2009 by a full-color 98-page Guide to the Planet timed to coincide with Earth Day.

Scholastic’s publishing program will include a variety of formats, including paperbacks, board books, phonics books, novelty, readers, and scrapbooks to reach a combination of readers from pre-schoolers, to the middle grades, to young adults — encouraging families to share in the wonderment of our planet. Each book will be a visual celebration of our planet, raising awareness and engendering a sense of appreciation. High-quality 30% post-consumer waste recycled paper will be used for all Planet Earth titles.

The piece also notes that Scholastic has American and Canadian (English- and French-language) rights to the tie-in books.

It looks like Vladimir Nabokov’s son Dmitri has resolved his dilemma about what to do with a fragmentary manuscript his late father left behind. (Quick recap: Vladimir wanted it destroyed, but Dmitri felt it was too worthy to consign to oblivion.) After some much-publicized soul-searching, Dmitri has indeed decided to allow “The Original of Laura” to be published. At least, that’s what he told German magazine Der Spiegel, in an interview summarized on the Guardian website. Doubtless many will condemn the younger Nabokov for failing to respect his father’s wishes, but Quillblog will not judge.

An Ontario community reading campaign has gone with a non-fiction title for the first time in its history. The “One Book, One Community” program, based in the Kitchener-Waterloo area, has gone with Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon’s The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating, first published last year by Random House Canada. The campaign will last throughout the summer, concluding with author appearances and other events in September.

This is the seventh year for “One Book, One Community”: previous choices have been mostly CanLit fiction, with a venture into science fiction (Robert J. Sawyer’s Hominids) in 2005.

Some book-related links:

• A history of Bond covers (International Herald Tribune)
• Neil Gaiman on an idiotic, censorious lawsuit (MTV.com)
• The future of the Business Book Awards (The Globe and Mail)
• Pimp my Bible (Mediabistro.com)
• Determining the world’s favourite books (The Guardian)

We hear a lot of talk about an arts-science divide in our culture, each side supposedly wary of and ill-informed about the other. But New Scientist is doing its bit to bridge the gap – the magazine has posted a feature on “life-changing books” as chosen by scientists.

Many of the choices are indeed rather technical in nature – Handbook of Mathematical Functions, The Idea of a Social Science, The Art of the Soluble – and a couple of sci-fi classics, from Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick, turn up as well. Some other intriguing picks include Peter Singer’s animal-rights manifesto Animal Liberation (chosen by Jane Goodall), Alice in Wonderland (developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik), and Catch-22 (physicist Lawrence Krauss).

With his new satirical self-help title, author Martin Kihn counsels us to be more aggressive, and he took his own advice when titling the book: it’s called A$$hole: How I Got Rich and Happy by Not Giving a Damn About Anyone and How You Can Too (Broadway/Random House).

That hook has scored Kihn a Q&A in Newsweek, but apparently the magazine thinks its sensitive readers cannot withstand the word “asshole” unless it’s spelled with dollar signs. Whenever the a-word comes up in the interview, writer Brian Braiker substitutes a euphemism, such as “family-unfriendly word that NEWSWEEK generally avoids.”

To his credit, though, Baiker has some fun with it, using a different euphemism every time one is called for – which is often. Here’s the full list.

• aggressively un-nice person
• curse word synonymous with “unbelievable jerk” that begins with the letter A
• epithet that begins with the first letter of the alphabet
• buttocks personified
• human derrieres
• scatalogical body part
• a-hole
• rectal
• orifice
• disagreeable people
• excretory opening
• scatalogical body part
• posterior portal
• the word we have refrained from printing thus far in this interview
• begins with A, you figure it out

All of us at Q&Q would like to congratulate review editor Nathan Whitlock, who will launch his first book, A Week of This: A Novel in Seven Days, with an event tonight under Pages Books’ This Is Not a Reading Series banner. At Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel at 7:30 p.m., Nathan will deliver a mock lecture entitled “Seven Steps to a Seven Day Novel,” after which musician Alex Lukashevsky will perform songs inspired by the novel.

Speaking of David Hajdu’s new book about anti-comic book hysteria in the 1950s, The New Republic has an online dialogue with Hajdu and American comics commentator Douglas Wolk. TNR also has a gallery of some particularly, ah, vivid comic-book covers from the 1950s.

People, of course. But not, it turns out, in the book from which the film was adapted, as this New York Times blog post explains (on the occasion of Charlton Heston’s death).

A few other book-related stories:

• Ontario Review, R.I.P. (from the Joyce Carol Oates-related site Crossing the Border)
• Oops: Bishop Gene Robinson’s British publisher nearly prints his memoir sans final chapter (The Independent)
• Atheneum Publishers founder Simon Michael Bessie, R.I.P. (Chicago Tribune)

Here’s a twist: Amazon UK is angry at British publishers for – wait for it – applying deep online discounts to their books.

From The Times:

An online price war for books has broken out, pitching Amazon against some of Britain’s biggest publishers.

Amazon is angry that Penguin, Bloomsbury and others are discounting titles on their websites, encouraging customers to buy direct instead of using the online retailer.

As nice as it is to see an online book retailer getting a taste of its own medicine, the end result will probably not be good for books:

There are fears that Amazon may retaliate by regarding a publisher’s online price as the recommended retail price and applying its trading terms to that. If a publisher discounts a £20 book to £15 online and Amazon has a contract for a 50 per cent discount on the full price, Amazon would pay the company £7.50 instead of £10. Publishers say that this would be unfair and could ultimately drive up prices.

In a move that should have people talking at the upcoming London Book Fair, HarperCollins U.S. has announced plans to launch a new-style publishing program. The man in charge is publishing veteran Robert S. Miller, who is credited for building Disney’s Hyperion publishing program.

According to a press release from HarperCollins:

As President and Publisher of the yet-to-be-named entity, Miller will publish approximately 25 popular-priced books per year in multiple physical and digital formats including those as yet unspecified, with the aim to combine the best practices of trade publishing while taking full advantage of the internet for sales, marketing and distribution. Authors will be compensated through a profit sharing model as opposed to a traditional royalty, and books will be promoted utilizing on-line publicity, advertising and marketing.

The references to leveraging the web sound like the usual breathless PR-speak, but compensating authors through a profit-sharing model does indeed sound like something new and notable. Who knows what it’ll mean for the authors in practice, but it’ll probably be an experiment worth watching.

Meanwhile, The New York Times has posted an article examining HarperCollins’ plans, in which it reports that Miller also aims to reduce (or altogether eliminate) costly returns. The article doesn’t make clear how he plans to do this, except to say that:

The new group will also release electronic books and digital audio editions of all its titles, said Jane Friedman, president and chief executive of HarperCollins, a unit of the News Corporation.

“At this moment of real volatility in the book business, when we are all recognizing things that are difficult to contend with, like growing advances and returns and that people are reading more online, we want to give them information in any format that they want.”

Is book publishing going the way of the record industry? The Society of Authors, which represents more than 8,500 professional writers in the UK, is concerned that book piracy on the Internet is eating into authors’ sales.

Times Online reports:

Tracy Chevalier, the author of Girl with a Pearl Earring who also chairs the London-based organisation, said that her members were deeply concerned that the publishing industry was failing to adapt to the digital age.

The internet is awash with unlicensed free digital copies of individual chapters or in some cases entire books. Prominent victims of book piracy include Jamie Oliver and J. K. Rowling but the most vulnerable writers are less well-known poets, authors of short stories and writers of cookery books.

Some of the biggest names on the internet are effectively becoming digital publishers, not necessarily with the support of the book industry. Google is locked in legal disputes with authors and publishers over its plans to make available free electronic copies of every book over the next ten years. Amazon has found that its “Search Inside” function, which allows readers to see selected pages of books, has increased sales.

Ms Chevalier told The Times that the century-old model by which authors are paid – a mixture of cash advances and royalties – was finished. “It is a dam that’s cracking,” she said. “We are trying to plug the holes with legislation and litigation but we need to think radically. We have to evolve and create a very different pay system, possibly by making the content available free to all and finding a way to get paid separately.”

As with music downloading, having book excerpts and other content on the Web has been shown to increase interest in the material, but that doesn’t appear to be translating into sales. And given how long it’s taking the music biz to wake up to the realities of the digital age, perhaps it’s timely that the Society of Authors is taking up the issue in the literary realm.

Bengali-American author (and Quillblog fave) Jhumpa Lahiri is already getting lots of press for her new story collection, Unaccustomed Earth (published here by Knopf Canada). But an online Q&A with The Atlantic Monthly caught our eye because Lahiri addresses a question that could be asked of many authors: why doesn’t she write book reviews herself?

I don’t like to judge. I don’t feel comfortable doing that. But by saying that, I don’t mean to judge people who do. A critic is an extremely valuable thing in art or literature or music, but I don’t feel it’s what I want to do. Before I wrote a book, I wrote some reviews and it was great fun. I’d get free books and write up a little something and I was into it. But then something changed. I think it was writing my own book. To be honest with you, and maybe this is shirking my duty in some way, I like to try and stay as disconnected as I can from the world of contemporary writing because I just think it’s best for my writing. I want to be a little bit unplugged. If you’re reviewing, you have to stay on top of what’s coming out and what’s going on, and put yourself into that discourse. It’s a much more active and engaged position than I want.

It was a very good year for Bloomsbury Publishing, the U.K. originator of the Harry Potter series. In just-released 2007 results, the firm’s profits more than doubled, to nearly ₤18-million. As Reuters reports, Bloomsbury’s 2008 profits are expected to drop by ₤10-million. CEO Nigel Newton says he’s still feeling bullish, though: he tells Reuters, “We have a clutch of strong titles coming out this year, including … a new Margaret Atwood novel, and the Deathly Hallows coming out in paperback.” We could have sworn, though, that Atwood’s book had in fact been delayed until 2009….

From The Wall Street Journal:

Amazon.com Inc., flexing its muscles as a major book retailer, notified publishers who print books on demand that they will have to use its on-demand printing facilities if they want their books directly sold on Amazon’s Web site.

The move signals that Amazon is intent on using its position as the premier online bookseller to strengthen its presence in other phases of bookselling and manufacturing. Amazon is one of the biggest booksellers in the U.S., with a market share publishing experts estimate to be about 15%. Amazon doesn’t comment on sales.

The news appeared first on Writers Weekly, an e-zine for freelance writers. They have accumulated a huge number of links to stories about the move in the press and on the net and are providing daily updates.

On The Tyee, Crawford Killian reviews Barack Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope. Killian focuses on the Democratic contender’s rhetorical style and notes that he seems to break all the rules of effective communication – but Killian decides that this is a good thing.

Obama has a remarkable fondness for 60-word sentences rich in subordinate clauses.

Reading his book, I itched to edit the text. Short, punchy sentences and paragraphs would jolt readers whether they read him on paper or on a website. Tough editing, I thought, could make it comparable to Tom Paine’s Common Sense – a document to detonate a revolution.

On reflection, though, I recalled that Common Sense wasn’t written in short, punchy sentences either.

Ultimately, argues Killian, Obama’s long-winded style is a rare and welcome sign of respect for his audience.

For decades, Canadian and American politicians (and their apologists) have chosen one of two registers: the windbag addressing millions, or the con artist addressing halfwits. For the halfwits, short words in short sentences are essential. For the quarter-wits, make it a 10-second sound bite.

Such registers convey a contempt quite as thorough as Conrad Black’s. Yet North American voters have tolerated this contempt, even seemed to demand it, since Ronald Reagan and Brian Mulroney.

Now, after two or three decades of discourse in this moronic register, Barack Obama is talking to American voters as if they didn’t have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Give Yann Martel credit for persistence. It’s been nearly a year since the author launched his campaign to set Stephen Harper’s reading list, and it’s still going, with a new book every two weeks. Granted, the publicity’s almost completely died down, and (to no one’s surprise) there’s been no perceptible political effect. But hey, at least one fringe benefit has emerged – Martel’s citations can serve as back-cover blurbs.

Back on January 21, Martel sent the PM an advance galley of The Cellist of Sarajevo, by his Knopf Canada stablemate Steven Galloway. Martel’s letter to Harper includes some condescending barbs all too typical of this exercise: he writes that he sends short books because “you are probably busier than most people, and you probably feel that you are more importantly busy.” But he also praises Cellist as “a grand and powerful novel,” in a passage that Knopf was so pleased with that they’ve reproduced it on the back cover.

Borders, the second-largest bookselling chain in the U.S., may be forced to sell itself off after hitting a financial crunch. Here are some takes on the chain’s troubles:

• Borders bookstore may be up for sale (Times Online)
• Giant Bookstore Chain Goes Broke, To Get Mopped Up By Even More Giant Bookstore Chain (Wired)
• Could Indigo target Borders? (The Globe and Mail)
• Did Borders kill the small, downtown bookstore? (MSNBC.com)
• The Rise and Fall of Borders (Gather.com)

Miriam Toews has accepted a short writer-in-residence gig at the University of British Columbia, and this week Toews’ agent, Carolyn Swayze, held a soiree at Christianne’s Lyceum of Art & Literature in Kitsilano to welcome the author to Vancouver. Below, Swayze and Toews chat; visible in the background (right) is Bill Richardson. (Photo by kc dyer.)

(More photos after the jump.)

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Some book-related links:

• Barnes & Noble catches fire, headline writer gets chance to make literary reference (Wood TV)
• Novelist strike fizzles (The Onion)
• Forget fake memoirs – are books ever true? (The New Yorker)
• Five novels a week? (Telegraph)
• NY bookseller settles discrimination suit (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)
• Adam Bellow in at HarperCollins (New York Observer)
• The poetry brothel (The Globe and Mail)
• Top 10 books about boredom (The Guardian Book Blog)
• Dark Horse inks deal with Universal – finally, someone’s going to make some comic book movies…. (Comic Book Resources)

Last weekend The New York Times ran a piece putting forth Seattle as the new hub of literary culture. Writer Julie Bick pointed to the city’s star librarian Nancy Pearl, but also to a confluence of corporate behemoths:

In many ways, Ms. Pearl’s rise in the book world parallels Seattle’s rise in the publishing world. Though the big publishing houses are still ensconced in New York, the Seattle area is the home of Amazon, Starbucks and Costco, three companies that increasingly influence what America reads.

Very late in the piece, Bick concedes, “The flip side of the success of the big Seattle booksellers is the gradual decrease in the number of small independent stores, which have struggled as a result of a variety of factors.” That theme has now been picked up by one Seattle observer. In a reader blog run by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Michael Lieberman writes:

There is no doubting the merits of Seattle as a literary town, books and book culture have played a significant role in the city’s rise from an outpost to a leading 21st century city but there is doubt as to whether these new business models are actually helping the literary cause.

Over at The Tyee, John Dolan has a long essay about the latest fake-memoir cases, Misha Defonseca’s Surviving with Wolves (Holocaust survivor escapes into the nurturing arms of a wolf pack) and Margaret B. Jones’s Love and Consequences (South Central girl grows up running with the gangs). Dolan argues that the appeal of such books is their glamorization and exoticization of suffering:

Only now do stories about cold and hunger without happy magical endings become popular, because that form of suffering is, for most of us, a nice distraction from the actual sufferings we undergo.

And that actual suffering?

This new kind of indoor suffering, which does not involve physical violence or privation, is the suffering that drives authors to go to the huge effort and risk of making up tales of more glamorous forms of suffering. They do it because their kind of suffering is not recognized yet: the suffering of not being famous in a culture that values only a few famous people, with the rest reduced to adoring, starved spectators. The suffering of being one of those slavish spectators will be understood, I suspect, a century from now.

The latest Frankfurt Book Fair controversy involves the event’s “country of honour” selection for 2011. Frankfurt has unveiled Iceland as the recipient of the 2011 honour – disappointing another Scandinavian country, Finland, which considered itself the frontrunner. A Helsingin Sanomat report is crying politics:

[Finnish cellphone giant] Nokia’s decision to close down its factory in the German city of Bochum has aroused plenty of negative feelings against Finland in Germany, as has been regularly reported on these pages.

“In fact, [Frankfurt director] Jürgen Boos admitted that the Bochum situation did not make the atmosphere favourable for Finland. However, he offered us another opportunity to apply for the guest of honour position for 2013-2014″, reported Schwanck.

In a followup story in the Helsinki paper, though, Boos denies it: “The Nokia case had no impact on the choice. None whatsoever.”

When word broke last month that Reed Elsevier is looking to sell its publishing division (which includes the American magazine Publishers Weekly), some wondered how that might affect another division of Reed’s business, its trade shows. After all, Reed runs the BookExpos America and Canada as well as the London Book Fair, and presumably enjoys some synergies with PW when it comes to running those shows.

According to a piece in Expo, though, Reed is so far staying mum on any possible trade show changes.

Although some trade shows may have working relationships with their magazine cousins, says Reed Exhibitions Spokesperson Beth Blake, at this point it’s too early to speculate about how any of those relationships would be affected.

“For us at Reed Exhibitions, it’s business as usual,” says Blake. No jobs are expected to be affected at Reed Exhibitions.

The National Book Critics Circle handed out its annual book awards on Thursday, and among those honoured was Junot Diaz for his debut novel, The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – a tragicomic family saga that New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani compellingly described as “Mario Vargas Llosa meets ‘Star Trek’ meets David Foster Wallace meets Kanye West.” The other winners were Haitian-born Edwidge Danticat for her memoir Brother, I’m Dying; New Yorker music critic Alex Ross for The Rest Is Noise; poet Mary Jo Bang for Elegy; Tim Jeal for his biography Stanley, the Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer; and Harriet Washington’s Medical Apartheid.

Besides their Caribbean origin, Danticat and the Dominican-born Díaz share some striking similarities. Both authors are young (Danicat, at 39, is a year younger than Díaz), and both got their start after completing creative writing MFAs at New York universities (at Brown and Cornell, respectively). Less superficially, both books address the themes of immigration, murky family lineages, and the recent, brutal histories of their respective home countries. And, evidently, they’re friends – or at least friendly colleagues. Here’s Danticat and Díaz in conversation in Bomb, the literary quarterly; here they share the stage at a Lannan Foundation reading in California; and here’s Danticat discussing Díaz’s short story, “How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie),” for a New Yorker podcast.

Jane McGonigal, whom MIT’s Technology Review named one of the top 35 innovators changing the world, is currently traveling around the world using cookies to spell out Albert Camus’ essay The Myth of Sisyphus.

Her plan is to spell out each word of the essay in a different city, using locally-sourced cookies. She will also roll a cookie up an incline of some kind in each city, the idea being to re-imagine Sisyphus as being content with his boulder-rolling life, happy to have something to do, even though the task is repetitive and meaningless.

This is a fascinating project, but would it be churlish to point out that the difference between cookies and boulders is a significant one?

From USA Today:

Former book publishing powerhouse Judith Regan was sued Monday for legal fees by the firm that prepared her lawsuit against HarperCollins LLC after the publishing company fired her.

In court papers, Dreier LLP says Regan reneged on a retainer agreement she signed and then fired the law firm “in a transparent and calculated effort to avoid paying petitioners the agreed upon fee.”

We’re about overdue for some positive Judith Regan-themed headlines, aren’t we?

“Regan frees child from burning house”

“Former HarperCollins publisher to circumnavigate globe for charity”

“Regan lauded by colleagues”

From The Jewish Chronicle:

An international project has been launched to reunite thousands of books looted by Nazis with their owners or their descendants.

The Commission for Looted Art in London and the Nuremberg Municipal Library in Germany have been working together to find the owners of 10,000 volumes that were part of the collection of Julius Streicher, the Nazis’ chief propagandist and creator of the notorious antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer.

The collection was placed in the hands of the Nuremberg Jewish community at the end of the war, which then gave it to the library on permanent loan.

The library published 115 names of the original owners on the website of the commission’s sister organisation, the Central Registry of Information on Looted Cultural Property, a week ago. Already, the commission’s Anne Webber reports that half-a-dozen families have been in contact saying they recognised relatives.

The upcoming biography of the late Chuck Cadman, the independent MP from B.C. who held the deciding vote on the 2005 Liberal government’s budget, contains a political bombshell in the form of accusations that Cadman was offered a $1-million life insurance policy by representatives of the Conservative Party to vote with them.

From The Globe and Mail:

The widow of former B.C. MP Chuck Cadman says two Conservative Party officials offered her husband a million-dollar life insurance policy in exchange for his vote to bring down the Liberal government in May of 2005.

The offer, which was summarily rejected by the dying man, is outlined in a biography of Mr. Cadman by Vancouver journalist Tom Zytaruk that is due to be released on March 14. A copy of the manuscript, including an introduction by former Liberal prime minister Paul Martin, has been obtained by The Globe and Mail.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is quoted in the book, Like a Rock: The Chuck Cadman Story, as confirming that a visit took place, and that officials were “legitimately” representing the Conservative Party. But he says any offer to Mr. Cadman was only to defray losses he might incur in an election.

Like a Rock: The Chuck Cadman Story is published by Harbour Publishing.

From The New York Times:

Imagine the Book of All Species: a single volume made up of one-page descriptions of every species known to science. On one page is the blue-footed booby. On another, the Douglas fir. Another, the oyster mushroom. If you owned the Book of All Species, you would need quite a bookshelf to hold it. Just to cover the 1.8 million known species, the book would have to be more than 300 feet long. And you’d have to be ready to expand the bookshelf strikingly, because scientists estimate there are 10 times more species waiting to be discovered.

It sounds surreal, and yet scientists are writing the Book of All Species. Or to be more precise, they are building a Web site called the Encyclopedia of Life. On Thursday its authors, an international team of scientists, will introduce the first 30,000 pages, and within a decade, they predict, they will have the other 1.77 million.

It sounds impressive, but perhaps less so when put up against other ambitious, web-only projects – like, say, deleting Garfield from Garfield cartoons.

From CBC.ca:

A surge of bilingualism in Quebec has one of the province’s most popular writers threatening to burn his entire body of work if something isn’t done to stop it.

Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, the author of some 70 works of fiction, non-fiction, drama and poetry, is giving the province two months to correct what he considers its errant linguistic ways, or the books will burn.

Beaulieu, 62, started making good on his symbolic ultimatum earlier this week by tossing a copy of his most recent novel, La Grande Tribu (The Big Tribe), into the wood stove at his remote cottage northeast of Quebec City.

Tabarnac - il lui manque des bardeaux!

The 2006 Survey of Household Spending in Canada says that, despite an overall increase in consumption, “spending on reading materials decreased 5% to $260 per household.”

It seems that no one can stop the grim march of these stories about the death of reading. But there’s a silver lining: Canadians are now spending more on reading materials than on games of chance. Way to go, spending-on-reading!

One province is still reading, though. Thanks to the booming resource economy in the West, Alberta households are spending more than anyone else on entertainment. Mostly of the sporting and televisual variety, but spending on reading materials is up a healthy 8%. Seems like a good time to start marketing some books to Albertans.

The March issue of Quill & Quire is now in stores and in subscribers’ hands. Our cover story: The CanLit 30, Q&Q’s list of 30 people in the book industry who most influence what gets published, bought or read. Also up are looks at Mary Swan, duelling Mordecai Richler bios, the mystery of Inger Wolfe, and more. Plus: a small publisher’s first-person account of what Canada Reads meant to his company, the Spring Announcements (listing biblio info for 900 new titles), and reviews of 40 new titles by André Alexis, Jack Todd, Carrie Mac, Pamela Porter, Erna Paris, and more. The full table of contents is after the jump.

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The other day Quillblog noticed that The New Yorker’s website lists “keywords” for its archived articles, including fiction. Quillblog also noticed that in many cases the keywords (a) tell a little story of their own, and/or (b) are often pretty entertaining.

So here’s a challenge for fans of CanLit giant (and New Yorker regular) Alice Munro: match the keyword collections with the story they refer to.

The stories are “Dimension” (June 2006); “Wenlock Edge” (December 2005); “The View from Castle Rock” (August 2005); and “Passion” (March 2004).

The keywords:

A. College Students; Second Cousins; Dinners; Roommates; Love Affairs; Kept Women; “A Shropshire Lad”

B. Boyfriends; Love; Dates; Houses; Ottowa [sic] Valley; Sabot Lake; Canada

C. Murder; Children; Marriage; Mental Illness; Buses; Ontario, Canada; Social Workers

D. Ocean Voyages; Immigrants, Immigration; Atlantic Ocean; Edinburgh, Scotland; Quebec, Canada; Pregnant, Pregnancy; Children

Answers after the jump!

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