National Library Week has been pretty rough, these last two years. It’s typically in April, and in early April of 2020, the country was first starting to realize that this weird new public health emergency, this new virus called COVID-19, was not going to magically go away – that it very well might, in fact, get much, much worse.
Recently there was a ruckus over on Twitter. You may not have heard about it, since Vermonters tend to have, you know, actual stuff to do. And ordinarily I wouldn’t bother you with it, but in this particular case I think it raises some interesting issues.
The Library of America, the black-jacketed best answer that American letters gives to the famous Pléiade editions of canonical French masterpieces, published its first volumes in 1982: a volume of Herman Melville containing his three adventure novels Omoo, Typee, and Mardi, the Tales and Sketches of Nathanial Hawthorne, a collection of the poetry and prose […]
I recently put out a kind of community-all-points call to friends and acquaintances for e-books of all types, and thanks to the generosity of the book community, I was duly inundated. Titles of all types and descriptions started flooding in, formatted for epub or mobi or pdf of what-have-you, and all that was left for […]
Especially now, in the “source material”-hungry 21st century, when there’s scarcely a movie or TV production company that wants to run the risk of actually imagining anything original, we’ve all had that sinking feeling: learning that some book or book series we love has been optioned – that some production company has settled on our […]