- A blog birth announcement, first: Bookshop Blog, "to help you be a better bookseller." I've added a link to the sidebar.
- In the NYTimes, Bruce Barcott reviews Eric Jay Dolin's Leviathan, a history of whaling in America. I'm looking forward to this one too.
- Scott at Fine Books Blog posts a short video featuring interviews with some major book dealers on why they joined the ABAA.
- Walter Bowne has an op/ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer about some unacceptable behavior by book dealers at a recent library book sale. A good "outsider looking in" piece that ought to be read by all the rabid bookhunters out there.
- Over at Mutterings, an early Kellogg's Corn Flakes ad. Colonel comments "Tony the Tiger? This woman would eat Tony for lunch and use his rib bone for a toothpick ..."
- In the Times, A.N. Wilson reviews Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (spoiler warning). I like his concluding paragraphs, and include them here:
"What these books ultimately hinge upon, however, is an unshakeable belief that love is stronger than death, and that while the pursuit of power is illusory, the pursuit of love will always in some way be rewarded.
It would be easy to write a sermon that spelt out such familiar ideas. But there are not many writers who have JK’s Dickensian ability to make us turn the pages, to weep – openly, with tears splashing – and a few pages later to laugh, at invariably good jokes. The sneerers who hate Harry Potter, or consider themselves superior to these books often seem to be hating their harmlessness – the fact that they celebrate happy middle-class family life, and the adventures of children privileged enough to attend a boarding school. But, as WH Auden said in another context, why spit on your luck? We have lived through a decade in which we have followed the publication of the liveliest, funniest, scariest and most moving children’s stories ever written. Thank you, JK Rowling."
