In J.K. Rowling backlash news this week, some Harvard students are apparently upset at plans to have Harry Potter’s creator deliver the school’s commencement address next month, according to a Scotsman article.

Adam Goldenberg, a Canadian student who writes for the Harvard Crimson, the daily newspaper at the university, said: “Our commencement speaker tricked parents into letting their kids read books filled with sex, murder, and homosexual role models.

“Harvard seniors have every right to demand a Harvard-calibre speaker. Harry Potter – and JK Rowling – is just a flash in the pan. Writing bedtime stories is lame – just ask Tolkien and CS Lewis. The class of 2008 has been royally screwed by Harvard. A petty pop culture personality of questionable permanence will send us on our merry way, while figures of real substance wait in the wings.”

A real charmer, eh? Doing Canada proud and all that.

Hang on a second, though – that quote is actually from a blog entry in which Goldenberg satirizes the anti-Rowling brigade. That should be clear enough from the Tolkien and Lewis references, but it seems lost on Scotsman writer Tristan Stewart-Robertson.

Goldenberg’s blog post also notes, “Last year’s speaker, Bill Gates, waxed so poetic about ‘appalling disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunity,’ that hundreds of graduates quit the lucrative jobs awaiting them on Wall Street and set off to change the world.” An obvious bit of sarcasm that, again, wasn’t quite obvious enough for the Scotsman’s Stewart-Robertson, who writes, “Last year’s words of wisdom to graduates, from Microsoft boss Bill Gates, reportedly inspired a large number of students to opt for charitable work rather than Wall Street firms.” Sheesh.

Independent bookstores seem to be getting a lot of lovin’ from the media this week, with two different stores receiving full-on profile treatment.

First up is Halifax’s Frog Hollow Books, profiled in The Globe and Mail. Actually, the piece isn’t so much a profile as a letter of advice. (It appears to be part of a regular series of business advice columns.) The author, Stephen Clare, expresses concern about the recent closure of other Atlantic Canadian shops – like The Book Room (also in Halifax) and Bennington Gate in St. John’s – and proceeds to offer up suggestions to Frog Hollow owner Heidi Hallett about how she can stay competitive. Most of the advice he offers is no-brainer stuff, however, and it kind of comes across as if he thinks he can tell Hallett things she doesn’t already know.

The second profile is of Toronto’s This Ain’t the Rosedale Library, in eye weekly. As Q&Q readers already know, the shop is set to close its Church Street doors at the end of this month, but the new incarnation – in the city’s Kensington Market neighbourhood – is set to open within the next week or so. The piece offers up an interesting timeline of the store’s various incarnations, which go all the way back to 1979.

In case you hadn’t heard, tomorrow (May 3) is the seventh annual Free Comic Book Day, and comic book shops across the country will be handing out gratis goodies to all comers. Torontoist has a quick briefing today on some of the highlights you can expect:

This year’s selection of free comics is really fantastic. DC Comics offers a reprint of the first issue of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s All Star Superman, widely regarded as the best Superman story in decades. Marvel Comics, not to be outdone, offers a brand new X-Men comic. Dark Horse offers up a Hellboy anthology, there’s free Archie and free The Simpsons comics, the Transformers, Gyro Gearloose, Gumby, and many, many more. There is a free comic for every taste: if you want cute owls frolicking in all-ages-suitable tales, there is Andy Runton’s Owly and Friends; if you want evil people being stabbed in the eyeball, there is an EC Comics Sampler.

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.

From CBC.ca:

Like Trekkies or Beatles fanatics, James Bond buffs are proud of the factoid retention that comes with their obsessive fandom. Thus, when the Fleming Collection – an art museum originally endowed by Robert Fleming, financier grandfather of Bond creator Ian Fleming – announced the launch of an exhibit celebrating the cover art of James Bond novels, the calls started pouring in.

“We’ve had to deal with the fans every step of the way,” says Selina Skipwith, curator of Bond Bound. “The responses to the literature on our website were like” — and here she affects a drippy tone to mimic a Bond fan — “‘You say Fleming was 43 when he wrote Casino Royale, but in fact he turned 44 before he handed the manuscript to the publisher, Jonathan Cape.’”

Luckily, as keeper of the Fleming Collection, Skipwith is armed with more Bond minutiae than most aficionados. In preparation for the exhibit, which opened April 22, she returned to the Fleming oeuvre, rereading dozens of novels and comparing cover artwork from dozens of countries. Skipwith is the ultimate Bond girl – at least until late June, when the exhibit closes and, in all probability, London will be Bonded out.

Only in the U.K. would the curator of a major exhibit openly mock that exhibit’s target audience.

Vanity Fair has an interview with A Million Little Pieces author James Frey – his first major one since his notorious appearance on Oprah’s show in 2006, and his last for a while, at least according to Vanity Fair. The magazine – as is its right – pumps up the “butterfly broken on the wheel” aspect of the story and comes on like a 1930s noir tell-all:

The story of what really happened with A Million Little Pieces has not been told in its full complexity. Owing to a non-disclosure agreement between Frey and Random House (which owns Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, the imprint that published it), neither he nor the publishing house can speak about what happened. But an investigation by Vanity Fair suggests that the story is significantly more complicated than Man Cons World. There were no fake Web sites, no wigs worn, no relatives pretending to be spokesmen for nonexistent corporations. It is the story, first, of a literary genre in which publishers thought they had found the surefire recipe for success, but one with such dangerously combustible ingredients that it could explode at any moment. On the one hand, memoirs have often been afforded a certain poetic license to stray from absolute truth in the interest of storytelling. On the other, they have the appeal of the real. Over the years, the marketplace hungered for more of both. Give us more drama! And tell us it’s all true! The publishing world responded, pumping up both. It was inevitable that one day the mixture would blow up in someone’s face. Frey had the right story to tell, the talent to get heard, the soaring ambition, and the right professional champions hungry for a hit.

Freshest on Q&Q’s Job Board:

• Developmental Editor, ESL Department - Oxford University Press (Don Mills, ON)
• Part-time Editorial Assistant - Canadian Tax Foundation (595 Bay Street, Suite 1200)
• Publisher - Social Studies & Humanities - McGraw-Hill Ryerson (300 Water Street, Whitby, ON)
• Digital Asset Coordinator - Scholastic Canada Ltd.  (Toronto, ON)
• Production Coordinator - The University of Toronto Press  (Toronto, ON / Guelph, ON)

Employers! List your job with Q&Q today.

From a piece in the North Shore News by Friend of Q&Q Caroline Skelton:

If only literary awards could be more like the Grammys.

The organizers of that famed event don’t seem to give a hoot that each year their audience twitches fitfully through 90 per cent of the evening, en route to album of the year. Tuning in to see whether Amy Winehouse would trounce Rihanna this year, for instance, you were first apprised of Jimmy Sturr and His Orchestra’s big win in Field 17 — Polka.

At the B.C. Book Prizes, announced tomorrow, there’s but seven little categories. And out of all the B.C. fiction published this year, there’s just one Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.

Reading through the five books on the shortlist, it struck me as unfair that one should go home with all the proverbial marbles.

What about the many charms and peccadillos of the other four? Not one little ode for all those finely realized characters, lushly painted scenes and hold-onto-your-socks-lest-you-get-blown-away metaphors?

Click through to read the author’s suggestions for new awards, including the “I can smell the cobblestones!” award, the bad sex award, and the madwoman/madman in the attic award.

In recent weeks, the font nerds over at Hoefler & Frere-Jones have taken readers on an exciting adventure in kerning and answered their burning questions about the origins of the pilcrow.

This week, they recount the history of the ampersand, which stretches at least as far back as Pompeiian grafitti in 79 A.D.:

As both its function and form suggest, the ampersand is a written contraction of “et,” the Latin word for “and.” Its shape has evolved continuously since its introduction, and while some ampersands are still manifestly e-t ligatures, others merely hint at this origin, sometimes in very oblique ways. The many forms that a font’s ampersand can follow are generally informed by its historical context, the whims of its designer, and the demands of the type family that contains it.

…

As for the word “ampersand,” folk etymologies abound. The likeliest account, offered by the OED, is explained by early alphabet primers in which the symbol was listed after X, Y, Z as “&: per se, and.” Meaning “&: in itself, ‘and’”, and inevitably pronounced as “and per se and”, it’s a quick corruption to “ampersand,” and the rest is history. Though I do like one competing explanation offered by a retired signpainter I once met, who insisted that the symbol got its name from its inventor, and was henceforth known to the trade as Amper’s And. This Mr. Amper has never surfaced, nor have any of his contemporaries who lent their names to competing models; I would have liked to see Quick’s And, on which this tale is surely built.