Reading Copy Book Blog

Reading Copy has a sister. AbeBooks has just launched a new blog called Pages & Proofs for our AbeBooks.co.uk site, which serves our British customers. I’m handling most of the blogging on Pages & Proofs and I promise to make it the same but different to Reading Copy. It will be the same in that [...]

Former Newsday columnist Mike McGrady has died of pneumonia. McGrady was most famous as being the leader of a group of 24 prominent journalists (19 men, 5 women), who in 1966 set out to prove that the minds and tastes of the American people, when it came to culture consumption, had become tasteless and vulgar. [...]

In 2008 Orhan Pamuk published The Museum of Innocence, a book about a wealthy businessman , Kemal, who becomes infatuated with a lower class shop girl, Füsun, who is 12 years his junior.  Despite Füsun being the love of his life Kemal refuses to give up his relationship with his fiancée to be with her, [...]

Very sad news from the book world today, American children’s book author and illustrator Maurice Sendak has died at the age of  83. He is best known for Where the Wild Things Are, published in 1963 and a bedtime reading favorite ever since. The BBC reports that the book has sold 19 million copies. The [...]

The Galleycat publishing blog reports that a self-published author called Genevieve Jones has won a book deal from Princeton Architectural Press. Hardly earth shattering news, except that Jones’ book, Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio, was self-published more than 125 years ago. Amateur naturalist Jones died of typhoid at just 32 and [...]

We urge fans of AbeBooks, and books in general, to take a look at the AbeBooks’ Tumblr – Bookorithms. It is devoted to beautiful, notable and rare books. Bookorithms is a very visual journey through our sort of books – famous first editions, memorable dust jackets, beautiful bindings, eye-catching illustration and obscure but interesting books [...]

An elementary school teacher in British Columbia, Canada has been told that her use of a quote from Dr. Seuss’s Yertle the Turtle was too political for her students, and must be kept out of B.C. classrooms. For those of you outside of B.C. the teachers union is currently in the middle of a lengthy [...]

Anyone remember Down a Dark Hall by Lois Duncan from 1974? Stephenie Meyer does. Her movie production company Fickle Fish Films has optioned the rights to this forgotten young adult spine-chiller and and plans to make a movie, reports Variety. The novel concerns a boarding school filled with secrets and mysterious students.

Dick Clark has died at age 8t of a heart attack.

It’s exactly 100 days until the opening of the London Olympics and the event needs poets, according to the BBC. They are short of 20 poets for a cultural event featuring a poet from every nation competing in the 2012 Olympics. Apparently, they still need poets from places like Mali and Liberia. I suspect Mali’s [...]