From The Huffington Post:

There is something to be said for reading a good book on a long flight, but what if this book was designed specifically for your journey? You start when the wheels are up and just as you’re wrapping up those final few pages, it’s time to fasten your seat belt and put your tray tables in the upright and locked position.

That odd little fantasy can now be a reality if you’re flying Australia’s Qantas Airlines. They’ve developed a series of novels for their passengers called “Stories For Every Journey.” Each book varies in length and is meant to last only as long as the duration of your flight, based on the average reading speed.

Link to the rest at The Huffington Post and thanks to Camille for the tip.

From The New York Times:

Forty years after being written, an unpublished novel by Pearl S. Buck, the Nobel laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, will be released this fall, her publisher said on Tuesday.

The manuscript was stumbled upon in a storage unit in Texas and returned to the Buck family in December in exchange for a small fee, said Jane Friedman, the chief executive of Open Road Integrated Media, the publisher.

Buck, the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, is believed to have completed the manuscript for the book, “The Eternal Wonder,” shortly before she died of cancer in 1973, said her son Edgar S. Walsh, who manages her literary estate.

The novel is one of dozens that the prolific Buck completed during her lifetime, a tumultuous eight decades that took her as a young child from her birthplace, Hillsboro, W.Va., to China, where her father worked as a Presbyterian missionary. While in her late 30s, she wrote “The Good Earth,” her second and most famous novel, a compassionate portrait of Chinese farmers that was published in 1931 and became the biggest-selling novel in the United States for two successive years.

. . . .

 The recently discovered book was described by the publisher as “the coming-of-age story of Randolph Colfax, an extraordinarily gifted young man whose search for meaning and purpose leads him to New York, England, Paris and on a mission patrolling the DMZ in Korea that will change his life forever — and, ultimately, to love.”

. . . .

 How two copies of the book, a typed version and a photocopied manuscript in Buck’s handwriting, made it to Texas, he said, remains a mystery to the family.

Link to the rest at The New York Times

From Publishers Weekly:

For this list, we didn’t just want book adaptations that were a critical/audience failure or a box office failure–we wanted both. That’s why the films you see below might not be the biggest money losers or the most panned; instead, they’re a combination of the most hated and most wasteful uses of celluloid out there. If none of these movies were made, over $913,000,000 would have been saved and approximately 4 billion viewing hours would have been saved.

. . . .

10. John Carter (2012)

Net Losses (inflation adjusted to 2012): $67,221,900

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 51%

Representative Review Quote: “There’s nothing to see, nothing to think about, nothing to care about, and nothing to feel, just emptiness. The emptiness is never filled over the course of 132 long, barren minutes.” -San Francisco Chronicle

Everyone was excited to call John Carter a flop before it even came out in 2012, and though it did tank, it lost less money than some of the other films on this list and it actually received so-so reviews. It’s hard to justify the $250 million dollar budget, and while it was trying to capture the same adventure feel of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, it ended up being compared to the worst aspects of Prince of Persia, The Phantom Menace, and Cowboys & Aliens. Yeah, I forgot about Cowboys & Aliens, too.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly and thanks to Eric for the tip.

From the Oxford English Dictionary:

historiosophy, n.

The philosophical interpretation of the course of history and historical events; spec. historical interpretation based on a particular, esp. theological or metaphysical, view of the nature of historical knowledge. Also: an instance of this; a philosophy of history of this type.

Link to the rest at The Oxford English Dictionary

From io9:

Nina Katchadourian borrows the words she uses for her unusual poetry from the spines of books. She arranges those spines, book upon book, so that they form brief poems that are often insightful and surprising.

Link to the rest at io9 and thanks to Joshua for the tip. You can buy Nina’s poems on Amazon

From BookRiot:

An old flame of mine (and by that I mean the relationship went down in flames, nahmsayin’?) told me a while back (when I was trying to remain friendly with him, how cute was I?) that he was working on a new book. This was my outward reaction:

But this was how I felt inside:

Link to the rest at BookRiot

From The New Yorker Page-Turner blog:

Consider these two bits of prose:

Her eyes, when they laughed for a moment into one’s own, seemed to promise a wild delight that he has not found in life. “I know where it is,” they seemed to say, “I could show you!”

Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth—but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,” a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.

The first comes from Willa Cather’s “A Lost Lady” (1923), the second from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” (1925). Upon “Gatsby”’s publication Fitzgerald wrote to Cather (whom he did not personally know). “As one of your greatest admirers, I want to write to explain an instance of apparent plagiarism….”

. . . .

But Fitzgerald himself knew that they had more in common than style. His “apparent plagiarism,” to be sure, was trivial. Cather dismissed it without hesitation. But she acknowledged a deeper connection in what Fitzgerald had called his “idea” about a woman’s charm. Cather is modest: “So many people have tried to say that same thing before either you or I tried it, and nobody has said it yet.” But she can’t help herself, she swells with her theme:

I suppose everybody who has ever been swept away by personal charm tries in some way to express his wonder that the effect is so much greater than the cause,—and in the end we all fall back upon an old device and write about the effect and not the lovely creature who produced it. After all, the only thing one can tell about beauty, is just how hard one was hit by it. Isn’t that so?

Fitzgerald must have been deeply impressed by these remarks. His heroine, Daisy Buchanan, was a cipher. And after Cather’s letter, he acknowledged it.

. . . .

In other words, as Cather intimated, Gatsby’s obsession with Daisy was unfounded. Such is life, said Cather. But Fitzgerald seems to have taken her letter as a criticism. In that same letter to Mencken he compared “The Great Gatsby” to two of Cather’s masterpieces: “I admit that in comparison to My Antonia and The Lost Lady [sic] it is a failure….”

Link to the rest at The New Yorker

From BookRiot:

The great Sol Stein has this to say about titles in his excellent Stein on Writing:

Venture into any bookstore and look at the titles of new novels on display. Take note of your reaction to the titles of books by authors you don’t know. You’ll see how many book’s don’t tempt you to pick them up because of their titles, and which titles intrigue you enough to want to take them down off the shelf and read the flaps.

However, as good as some of the books are, a few of the books we now call “classics” had awful, awful titles at first, showing.

. . . .

The Great Gatsby was originally supposed to be called… (wait for it)

. . . .

Gone with the Wind was to be called:

Link to the rest at BookRiot

From The BBC:

A sealed letter that arrived at one of Britain’s most historic libraries in February 2011 was to leave its staff stunned.

The letter had been written before his death by a former employee of Lambeth Palace Library. Forwarded shortly after he died by the man’s solicitor, it revealed the whereabouts of many of the library’s precious books.

Staff had known since the mid-1970s that dozens of its valuable books had been stolen. But they had no idea of the true extent of the losses until the letter led them to the man’s house in London.

“We were staggered,” says Declan Kelly, director of libraries and archives for the Church of England. “A couple of my colleagues climbed into the attic. It was piled high to the rafters with boxes full of books. I had a list of 60 to 90 missing books, but more and more boxes kept coming down.”

They contained some 1,000 volumes, made up of 1,400 publications, many from the collections of three 17th century archbishops of Canterbury – John Whitgift, Richard Bancroft and George Abbot.

. . . .

One of the most intriguing aspects of the case is how a member of staff was able to get away with stealing so many valuable and often large books.

During World War II, Lambeth Palace’s Great Hall – which housed much of the library’s early collection – took a direct hit from an incendiary bomb.

It was roughly estimated that up to 10,000 books were destroyed or badly damaged. In the years after, if a book was discovered to be missing it was easy to assume it had been destroyed in the war.

But early in 1975 the then librarian noticed that some of the most important books which were known to have survived, including the Shakespeare, had been taken.

The thief had also removed the index cards of the books, making it even more difficult to work out exactly what had been stolen. It was concluded that it was a matter of just tens of books.

. . . .

He declines to say anything about the identity of the thief. “He was a former low-level employee. I don’t think he was there for that long after the theft was discovered.

“We don’t want to cause any distress to anyone still alive and connected with the thief. We want to look forward, not back.”

But Bryars has another theory. “I can understand why they didn’t reveal his name as there are other people out there who have stolen similar material, who if they saw someone else being named and shamed – even posthumously – that material could be for the bonfire,” he says.

Link to the rest at BBC and thanks to Gary for the tip.

From The Wall Street Journal:

While many book publishers are heavily investing in the digital frontier, Benedikt Taschen is looking to corner the market in oversize collectible books.

His Cologne, Germany-based publishing house, Taschen, collaborated with Sebastião Salgado, a Brazilian photojournalist and Unicef Goodwill Ambassador who spent the past eight years traveling to remote places untouched by deforestation, urbanization and the modern world, to produce “Genesis.” The 704-page two-volume collection of black-and-white photos depicts Mr. Salgado’s trek, which included a 47-day journey tracking 7,000 reindeer across Northern Siberia and a roughly 525-mile hike in the Simien Mountains of Ethiopia.

. . . .

The massive art edition retails for $9,000, weighs a combined 130 pounds—packaging and bookstand included—and stands nearly four feet tall.

. . . .

Mr. Taschen is no stranger to gigantic books. In 1999 his company published “SUMO” by photographer Helmut Newton, which weighed 78 pounds. While the book originally retailed for $1,500, copy number one of “SUMO” sold at a Berlin auction in 2000 for $430,000. Taschen only published 10,000 copies.

The art edition of “Genesis,” of which there are 500 leather-bound copies, will include a signed print (clients can choose from five different photographs) and a custom-made stand from Japanese architect Tadao Ando.

A collector’s edition, with a 2,500 print run, will be bound in leather with a cloth cover and include the stand but not a print, for $3,000.

. . . .

There is also a $70 coffee table edition, which has been translated in Italian, German, French, Spanish and Portuguese. That version has sold roughly 300,000 copies abroad and is on its third print run. It hit U.S. bookshelves on May 1.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Link may expire) and thanks to Eric for the tip.