AbeBooks' Reading Copy

Courtesy of the BBC, an article about what your bookshelf says about you. “Books somehow reflect an aspect of our personality that people don’t easily see. I have a friend who has a reputation for being an ice queen, but when I went to her place, I noticed all these cheesy romantic novels in her [...]

The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary was finally published yesterday after more than 40 years of research. From The Times The editors have organised approximately 800,000 meanings into conceptual fields, which show the chronological development of themes and ideas. The three fundamental categories are the External World, the Mind, and Society. These are [...]

The Bookseller reports on the sudden death of Cornwall-based fantasy author Louise Cooper from a brain haemorrhage at the age of 57. She created the Seahorses and The Mermaids Curse series and wrote more than 80 books. Her own website describes how she hit the big time….. My ‘big break’ came in 1984, when my [...]

The New Yorker’s excellent Book Bench blog informed me about a book called 50 Things to Do with a Book: (Now That Reading Is Dead) by Bruce McCall. Beautiful irony!

Because he just didn’t have his fingers in enough pies, Stephen King simultaneously jumps on the comic book bandwagon wit and the vampire-lit bandwagon, with his upcoming comic American Vampire, and hangs on tight.

Ghostwriters! The hired guns of the publishing world – they are paid to produce and then remain in the shadows. Words for cash – no questions asked. There is plenty of work – there are the high profile politicians who have not picked up a book since kindergarten but now need a memoir and the [...]

A last book in Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Green Gable series, “The Blythes are Quoted” is due out October 27th. The last instalment, discovered three decades after the publication of the most recent, takes a much darker tone.

On October 29, Asterix will be 50 years old. The BBC reports.

Bookslut has an interview with Ron Charles from the Washington Post. Ron is Deputy Editor of the Post’s Book World and you’ll also find him on Twitter, but his daughter doesn’t like the idea of her father tweeting. (We follow Ron on Twitter.) My wife finds it really distracting! My daughter has refused to become [...]

Book signings in the UK are not dull at the moment. Earlier this month pop star Leona Lewis was punched at a signing and now fans have ‘rioted’ at a Jordan signing event, according to