News & Notes is a weekly Saturday post featuring book- and publishing-related news, links to interesting articles and opinion pieces, and other cool stuff
Book News
- Candlewick Press will donate 275,000 books to FirstBook, a charity which distributes books to underserved classrooms and communities. (Children’s Book Council)
- JK Rowling wins PEN award for work ‘to create a more just world’. (The Guardian)
- Tween launches campaign to collect 1000 books featuring black girls to donate to the parish in Jamaica where her mother grew up. (GalleyCat)
- Amazon’s sales topped $10 billion in 2015. (Publishers Weekly)
- At Authors United Event, a Call to Bust Amazon ‘Monopoly’ (Publishers Weekly)
- The National Book Foundation will host free conference on ‘Why Reading Matters’ in New York on Feb. 11, 2016. (GalleyCat)
Worth Reading
- Where is the Diversity in Publishing? The 2015 Diversity Baseline Survey Results (Lee & Low Books) No surprise that professionals in publishing and reviewing are overwhelmingly white, but I was surprised to realize that the publishing world is also dominated by women, since I’ve certainly seen data indicating the opposite when it comes to reviewers. I shouldn’t have been surprised, though; my own experience in the field, as a freelance indexer, is that both indexing and editing attract more women than men… which makes sense when you realize that publishing jobs, whether in-house or freelance, are rarely well-paid except at the upper levels.
- Why do books have blank pages? If you’ve ever wondered about this, or wondered how books are made, here’s a handy explanation of ‘signatures’ that explains it. (Incidentally, sometimes publishers will limit the space available for the index based on how many blank pages are left in the signature, so if you’ve ever felt an index was a little sparse, that may be why.)
For Writers & Bloggers
- 9 Books That Will Make You a Better Writer Just By Reading Them (Mary Ribas, for Bustle)
- A Crash Course in Bookish Acronyms (BookRiot) Most of us know what a TBR pile is, but what’s an LCS?
Book & Movie Announcements
Single illustration for Kitty in Boots by Beatrix Potter (Courtesy Frederick Warne Co. the VA Museum via Penguin)
- 100 Years Later, Beatrix Potter’s Tale Of A Fanciful Feline To Be Published. (NPR) Penguin UK will publish The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots with Potter’s text and Quentin Blake’s illustrations. (Potter only finished one illustration for the original manuscript, which was never published.)
Illustration by Quentin Blake for Kitty-in-Boots
(Quentin Blake/Courtesy of Penguin)
- Paramount working on Little House on the Prairie movie (Variety; first reported by The Hollywood Reporter)
- Hopes for a posthumous David Bowie memoir dashed by Newsweek – but there may be other Bowie works in the vaults.
Awesome Lists
- The Myers-Briggs Types of 202 Fictional Characters (BookRiot). Especially interesting if you already know your M-B type. (I’m an INFP — I guess it’s not a coincidence that Anne of Green Gables, Lucy Pevensie, and Frodo Baggins are among my favorite characters.)
- 11 Books Set in Our Favorite Place — Bookstores! (HuffPost Books) They left out The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend, but it’s an excellent list.
- 19 Ways To Make A Next-Level Reading Nook (BookRiot). OK, so this is really more about accessorizing and using your reading nook, rather than building/creating one, but it’s still fun.
Thinking Ahead to Valentine’s Day
Shakespeare Valentine’s Day Card by Literary Emporium
- 19 Bookish Valentine’s Day Gifts Every Literature Lover Will Appreciate (BuzzFeed)
- Bookish Threads for Plus-Size Ladies. (BookRiot) Be still, my beating heart! There are a few here I’ll be checking out for myself.
- 20 Literary Valentines For Bookish Hearts (BookRiot), including buy links. Some are printable, and a few double as bookmarks.
- Grammar Nerd Valentines For Perfectly Punctuated Love (BookRiot)
- You could also give your Valentine a NovelTea tin: The Picture of Earl Grey, Don Quixotea, or War and Peach.
Tea tins from NovelTeas
Bookish Quote
That’s it for this week!
Rita @ View From My Home
Love this post today, as always! The diversity link, the 9 books to a better writer, the Beatrix Potter news (I just lover her illustration shown)..
Have a relaxing and peaceful week if possible, Lark 🙂
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Lark_Bookwyrm
Thanks, Rita – glad you liked it!
Heather @ Random Redheaded Ramblings
The bookish quote is great, if only this was the case!
Heather @ Random Redheaded Ramblings recently posted…BEYOND THE BOOKS – #Winning or my lack off #Winning
Lark_Bookwyrm
I agree!
Stephanie
I love your quote this week because, really! I’m intrigued by a Little House on the Prairie movie and was also excited to hear this week (though I’m likely behind) that CBC is going to do another Anne of Green Gables mini-series!
Lark_Bookwyrm
Ooh, I hadn’t heard that! It will be hard to top the Megan Followes miniseries (and really hard to top Gilbert!) but I hope they’ll stick closer to the original books than the Followes sequels did.