AbeBooks' Reading Copy

Babar the elephant is 80 years old. USA Today interviews Laurent de Brunhoff, whose father, Jean, started the series in 1931. Apparently, Babar’s a symbol of colonial oppression and racism. We’ve got a few Babar books in our household and they seem alright to me. Laurent deleted a few of this father’s drawings of “fat-lipped, [...]

Salon has an interview with Akira Kobayashi. Don’t know who he is, right? Kobayashi is the type director at Linotype – that basically makes him the ‘Czar of Typography.’ (He liked Cooper Black as a kid.) If you want to learn more about typographers, typography and typophiles, then browse these books.

Amy Stewart, cool and interesting author of Wicked Plants now has a follow-up book all about diabolical insects: Wicked Bugs.

An interview with Canadian political satire novelist Terry Fallis.

Artemis Fowl author Eoin Colfer is interviewed at The Independent. He says: “I think what helped me more was that Artemis became the anti-Harry Potter. If J.K. (Rowling) was the Beatles, I was the Rolling Stones or something.” I can’t see him as Mick and he’s not really Keef. Nobody on this Earth would want [...]

The Literary Review has posted a lengthy interview with Nobel and Booker Prize winning author V.S. Naipaul in which he talks about his latest book The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief and his interest in the continent.

Over on AbeBooks’ main Canadian page, we are previewing the inaugural Vancouver International Poetry Festival, which begins on April 18 and goes until April 23. The event celebrates the spoken and written word, and showcases a wide variety of exceptional poets from Canada and beyond. Some of the headline acts include Susan Musgrave, bill bissett, [...]

USA Today reminds us Twilight author Stephenie Meyer is a bookselling superstar this morning. She’s been in our part of the world, Vancouver, and talking about her intentions for the future. Meyer keeps a pretty low profile to avoid be swarmed by the Twi-hordes, so this interview makes interesting reading. •On an as-yet-untitled book she [...]

This writer, famous for Brick Lane, has let herself go.

One of my recent reads was Peter O’Reilly: The Rise of a Reluctant Immigrant by Lynne Stonier-Newman. I enjoyed the book so much that we asked Lynne for an interview. This book is a super example of local history coming alive through a book. Lynne Stonier-Newman makes her home in British Columbia and is devoted [...]