Reading Copy Book Blog

Cornell Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections is going big on hip hop and rap music. The founding materials in Cornell’s hip hop collection were the gift of collector and author Johan Kugelberg. Materials in the collection form the basis for the book Born in the Bronx: a Visual Record of the Early Days [...]

News reports this morning claim that actress Keira Knightley is in negotiations to play the role of Zelda Fitzgerald, the wife of legendary Jazz Age author F. Scott Fitzgerald. The role would be in an upcoming film scheduled to begin shooting next April as a biopic about the life and times of the famous author. [...]

I spotted this NFL story this morning that begins with Bill Belichick’s collection of football books. Bill Belichick’s library is believed to contain the world’s third-largest collection of football books behind only the Library of Congress and the Pro Football Hall of Fame. His collection of more than 800 titles is housed at the U.S. [...]

Three weeks ago, no-one had heard of Wasilla, Alaska, and now it’s the most famous smalltown in the world thanks to Sarah Palin. A single of keyword search on AbeBooks and I was surprised to find a decent number of books that had been written about Wasilla, written in Wasilla, published in Wasilla or inspired [...]

Manchester University’s John Rylands Library will be digitising much of its collection of medieval manuscripts, including parts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales reports The Independent.

Oregon farmers are turning to writing. “Most farmers are pretty innovative and creative and have a lot to say. Farming is an interesting challenge and a creative lifestyle,” says Melissa Matthewson, who is getting several of her farmer-writer colleagues together to teach a “Farmers as Writers” workshop in October at the Oregon State Univesity Research [...]

Do you want to buy the narrowest bookshop in the UK? Only tall, thin people can put in offers? (This shop is six-feet wide.)

Ian Fleming is surely the most written about dead author. Today’s story from The Times is about a just-found manuscript that shows he wanted park-and-ride schemes and electric cars. The article, called If I Were Prime Minister, was written for The Spectator in 1959. It also includes a suggestion to turn the Isle of Wight [...]

We still have more than a week to go but David Foster Wallace is easily September’s bestselling author on AbeBooks. He only wrote two novels – The Broom of the System (1987) and Infinite Jest (1996) – but was regarded as one of America’s brightest writing talents. Time Magazine listed Infinite Jest, a futuristic parody [...]

James Crumley, the hard-boiled crime novelist, has died at the age of 68. He set his gritty stories in the mean streets of….Montana and other Wild West locations. His 1978 novel, The Last Good Kiss, is considered his masterpiece. Here’s a link to his signed books.