Things you never knew existed: possessed books. (Be sure to watch the video.)

Antique looking books seem perfectly harmless until someone walks by, then the middle book slides out toward the victim as if it will fall from the shelf. Books also emit spooky sounds for a totally haunted effect.

Can I get this in Stephen King?

(Once again, via bb, via BS.)

TankBooks:

As one habit dies hard, another takes hold. The ban on smoking in public places comes into operation in the UK on July 1, 2007. Tank is launching a series of books designed to mimic cigarette packs - the same size, packaged in flip-top cartons with silver foil wrapping and sealed in cellophane.

These are cute, but I’m vaguely troubled by the idea of packaging books the same way as something that’s meant to be set on fire. 

(Via boingboing, via Ben Segedin. Thanks, Ben!)

At Booklist Coffee ™, we often joke about authors whose deaths have done nothing to keep them from publishing new novels. In the New York Times (”The Ludlum Conundrum: A Dead Novelist Provides New Thrills“), Richard Sandomir reports that Robert Ludlum has become even more prolific since he died. And yes, the successful Matt Damon movie franchise plays a role – both in the success of the series and in the timing of the article.

"People expect something from a Robert Ludlum book, and if we can publish Ludlum books for the next 50 years and satisfy readers, we will," said Jeffrey Weiner, the executor of Mr. Ludlum’s estate.

Lends new meaning to the term ghostwriter, don’t you think?

In the New Yorker, in his essay about Meryle Secrest’s Shoot the Widow (Knopf) and Nigel Hamilton’s Biography: A Brief History (”Lives of Others“), Louis Menand offers some useful perspective on the biographer’s art. Briefly put: a fact doesn’t explain its subject better simply because it was previously unreported.

For one thing, it leads biographers to invert the normal rules of evidence, on the Rosebud assumption that the real truth about a person involves the thing that is least known to others. A letter discovered in a trunk, or an entry in a personal notebook, trumps the public testimony of a hundred friends and colleagues. Biographers go into a professional swoon over stories that some famous person has made a bonfire of a portion of his or her correspondence, or that notebooks in an archive are embargoed until the year 2050. That stuff must explain everything! Why should we especially credit a remark made in a diary or a personal letter, though? The penalty for exaggeration and deception in those forms is virtually nonexistent. People lie in letters all the time, and they use diaries to moan and to vent. These are rarely sites for balanced and considered reflection. They are sites for gossip, flattery, and self-deception. But diaries and letters are the materials with which biographies are built, generally in the belief that the "real" person is the private person, and the public person is mostly a performance.

A great passage from Jamie Trecker’s forthcoming book, Love and Blood:

…It’s a weakness of our entertainment culture that there is very little empathy and compassion for loss. Americans prefer to extol great individual performances — say, the swoops of Michael Jordan or the shotgun arm of Satchel Paige — and brush away failure with laughter; think of the oft-mocked Cubs and Browns. This is an attitude hostile to the very nature of soccer. This sport resists easy consumption and disposal; those dead-ass games are often as important as the exciting onces, and the emotional, personal, and patriotic levels on which the sport must be understood bring up scary feelings that often go against what Americans think of as “fun” — one reason, perhaps, soccer has never succeeded on American shores. The rest of the world remembers great soccer losses, and broods upon them. Soccer punctures any sense of invincibility a culture has with alarming frequency, and that cuts against the grain of a nation that still has trouble accepting it lost the Vietnam War. The fact is, soccer — with its maniacal crowds, mad tension, and the stifling importance of a single, two-hour stretch of time — is often not fun.

So why the heck do people love this sport? Because soccer, as has famously been said, is not religion — it is something far, far more important.

In the Baltimore Sun (”Hard facts oust soft chairs at bookstores“), Rob Hiaasen (any relation to Carl?) reports that bookstores are coming to the conclusion that creating a library-like environment doesn’t necessarily translate to better sales:

At the Barnes & Noble at the Power Plant in the Inner Harbor, the comfy chair that once sat across from the picture books is gone. So is the one in the Mystery section. Instead, two people sit forlornly on the carpet, open books in hand. 

Speaking of a library-like environment, I’ve worked in two bookstores. And one of them offered a comfy couch for reading. We were pretty tolerant about letting homeless people sit there – Chicago winters can be rough – but after a fairly short time, even when there weren’t homeless people sleeping on it, it looked like the kind of couch that homeless people slept on. And I don’t recall ever seeing someone sit on it that wasn’t using some random book as a prop.

So I can understand the booksellers’ decision. But still, with major cities ripping out park benches by the truckload — sometimes I think they’re fighting the problem of homelessness by eliminating the places where homeless people might rest — where will we sit? You can walk for miles in Chicago without finding any better place to rest your dogs than a decorative tree planter.

Great cities have great street life, and that means providing comfortable places – public and private — where locals and tourists alike can rest their feet.

(Do you like how I steered the discussion from a simple business item to a personal pet peeve? Furthermore, it should be noted that I have no sourcing for my claim that cities are “ripping out park benches by the truckload” — that’s merely based on my observations as a committed pedestrian. And I’m not saying that bookstores should serve as homeless shelters. But maybe if we took better care of homeless people, we wouldn’t be so terrified of offering public seating.)

Over at book/daddy (”Hosannah in the lowest“), Jerome Weeks reviews a book about book reviewing, Gail Pool’s Faint Praise. They both make some decent points about the blindness of ”objective” reviews – and Weeks offers useful perspective on the financial realities of newspapers’ book sections.

But in the end, American editors and reviewers still supposedly seek objectivity — a kind of above-the-fray neutrality that can suck the life out of a review — when what we need, Ms. Pool writes, is “fairness”: disagreeing with a book but giving the author his due, acknowledging our own biases, not being blinded by them. 

For what it’s worth, this is perhaps the longest single blog entry I’ve ever read. Weeks comes off a bit like a print guy determined to prove that blogs can be substantive — but had he been writing this for print, his editor would have likely asked for some cuts.

In the Guardian (”Downloads cast a spell on the unwary“), Charles Arthur uses Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows as the launching pad for a discussion of something that hasn’t actually been talked to death yet:

The thing about the internet is that it tempts people to spend money in ways that make no sense if you stop and look at them.

He closes with Harry Potter, too. Read it if you don’t believe me.

Although we live in an era of increasingly cordial literary sparring, there are signs that this could change. From Galleycat (”The Ames/Davidson Literary Fight night“):

Last night, around 250 people packed Gleason’s Gym in Dumbo to watch a boxing match. Vegas it may not have been, but the roar that went up in the crowd when Jonathan “The Herring Wonder” Ames’s name was announced in the ring certainly came close to deafening my ears. Ames, previously 1-4 in boxing bouts, had spent the last few weeks training at Gleason’s for the bout against Canadian author Craig “The Crippler” Davidson, who’d fought poet Michael Knox last fall when the Canuck edition of THE FIGHTER was released and had come to New York - fitter and leaner even since BEA - to promote the American edition published by Soho Press.

OK, so this is a manufactured trend piece. And the fight in question took place not to settle a difference of opinions but to promote a book. Still, a bespectacled editor can dream, can’t he?

In the Independent, John Franklin offers “The real reason why publishers miss good books“:

The real reason that publishers miss good books is no secret, and it is nothing to do with literary judgement, knowledge of first lines or acquaintance with the classics. It is the same reason that film companies miss great scripts and record labels fail to sign up the most interesting bands. It is the numbers game - the sheer volumes of paper (and now, worse still, the email attachments), that cross our desk every day. Every year 200,000 books are published. This is far too many, and really the first duty of every publisher should be to publish fewer, rather than more, new titles.

Also, the lightly rewritten Austen manuscripts didn’t come through an agent:

That means the unsolicited fiction is now the leftovers. A terrifying proportion of these manuscripts come from people writing in green ink on scraps of Basildon Bond - surely its only use now. And if they aren’t in green ink, the manuscripts arrive handwritten in capital letters, or from prison, or from a secure mental hospital. Of course there may be lost masterpieces lurking in the mad rantings of the sad, the bad and the dangerous to know (to plagiarise again), but publishers are not social workers.