Book News - TheBookGuide's selection of book related news stories from around the world. Book News Archive.

August 2004

30.08.04. Auction record hope for 'time capsule' comics collection. A cheap tinplate whistle handed out as a gift with the Dandy in 1937 may help a rare copy of the first issue become the most expensive British children's comic ever auctioned...more

30.08.04. Arab world program at Frankfurt book fair provokes debate. The Arab World is this year's guest of honor at the world's largest book fair in Frankfurt, Germany. From October 5 to 10, the 22 countries of the Arab League will display their culture - literature, music, films, theatre and art - to a global audience...more

30.08.04. Blissfield library makes a rare find. A few months ago Susan Berryman must have felt a bit like Howard Carter, the intrepid archaeologist who discovered the tomb of King Tut in an oft-ignored triangle of the Valley of the Kings in 1922...more

29.08.04. "Bookstore Tourism" How-to create a travel niche for booklovers. The grassroots Bookstore Tourism effort has spawned a book of its own: "Bookstore Tourism: The Book Addict’s Guide to Planning & Promoting Bookstore Road Trips for Bibliophiles & Other Bookshop Junkies"...more

29.08.04. Revealed: the cruelty of Conan Doyle to his eldest daughter. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the world's most celebrated fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, behaved cruelly towards his first-born daughter, a new biography has revealed...more

28.08.04. Thousands pay tearful homage to writer Azad. The wreath-covered coffin of writer Humayun Azad was borne to a crowd of mourners yesterday, two weeks after he was found dead in Germany to the disbelief of his family...more

27.08.04. The secret lives of children's authors. A new biography of a Canadian-born children's author, The Secret Life Of The Lonely Doll: The Search For Dare Wright, held me captive through summer afternoons and left me both moved and appalled...more

27.08.04. Satire on the eighties shines in an open field. TEarly lead in Booker prize 2004 for Hollinghurst and Mitchell...more

27.08.04. Have e-books turned a page? After more than a decade of false starts and empty promises, publishers may finally be starting to understand what consumers want from electronic books...more

27.08.04. Joyce rescuer takes a stand, makes a seat. James Joyce devotee Brendan Kilty was so outraged when he learned wreckers were to demolished his idol's childhood home in Dublin that he went to the site expecting to join a throng of protesters...more

26.08.04. Booker longlist ignores big names. Little-known authors Nadeem Aslam, Achmat Dangor and John Bemrose are among the 22 authors to make this year's Booker Prize longlist...more

26.08.04. Minister rejects author's wishes on archive. Tessa Jowell has overruled the last wishes of the quintessentially English author Anthony Powell, to enable the British Library rather than Eton College, his old school, to acquire the manuscripts of his novels...more

26.08.04. Woman admits part in $34,000 library books theft. A woman has admitted her part in a book stealing scheme which plundered books worth more than $34,000 from Christchurch city libraries...more

25.08.04. Residents "rescue" books from abandoned library. On the third floor of the old East St. Louis library on Wednesday morning, Mayor Carl E. Officer flipped through a waist-high stacks of books, most of them nearly a century old...more

25.08.04. Potter 'first edition' could fetch £20,000. Online auction firm eBay has said a rare first edition copy of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban could fetch up to £20,000...more

25.08.04. Blowin' the gaff: Dylan to tell all. "Times they are a-changin'": The once famously private 60s legend Bob Dylan, whose music moved a generation, is poised to tell all in a memoir to be published this autumn...more

25.08.04. Welsh classics to return to libraries. Old literary classics from Wales are set to be dusted off and put back on the shelves, with free copies sent to secondary schools and libraries...more

25.08.04. Anti-Kerry books scarce; buyers mad. New York - The nation’s two biggest bookstore chains, Barnes & Noble and Borders, say angry customers are accusing them of political bias as the retailers struggle to keep up with demand for a best seller that questions John Kerry’s military service in Vietnam...more

24.08.04. Powell's prowling Seattle for used books. The bookstore chain will launch a temporary book-buying site in the University District next month to build up its stock of used titles, a spokesman said yesterday...more

24.08.04. Harry Potter books don't impress women. Single men are being warned to bin their Harry Potter books if they want to attract the opposite sex while on holiday...more

23.08.04. Michigan professor wins Literature Olympics. A Western Michigan University professor is the winner of the international Eleven-Minutes-Sports-Novel Contest held in connection with the Blankenese Games in Hamburg, Germany...more

23.08.04. 'We can always touch the hem of the great one's skirt later'. Dame Muriel Spark, mistress of ambivalent irony, thrilled her fans with a rare public appearance at the book festival in Edinburgh, the city she still calls home, despite having lived in Italy for years...more

23.08.04. Enid Blyton - the grown-ups' favourite . "Yippee!" cried George, knocking back lashings of ginger beer as she threw off her gym slip and climbed into her shorts. "Lots and lots of nice people aged 25 to 54 say the stories about us were the books they most enjoyed when they were children like us"...more

22.08.04. Miniature Book Society Conclave. The Miniature Book Society is planning their annual Conclave at the Hilton Hotel in Bath, England starting on Friday, September 3 and running through Monday, September 6, 2004...more

21.08.04. End of an era for Montreal's bibliophiles. At 94, noted antiquarian Reg Russell has finally decided to retire from the used book business and is selling Diamond Books in Westmount...more

21.08.04. Things I never knew about my father. Would the discovery of a novel that had been lost for years help Hanif Kureishi piece together his dad's history, and his own place in it...more

21.08.04. Louis de Bernières loses the plot in summerhouse raid. Louis de Bernières, the author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin, has had a computer containing the first four chapters of his third novel stolen from his garden shed...more

20.08.04. Italian novelist's love letters turn political. The publication this month of nearly 50-year-old letters by the novelist Italo Calvino to his former lover, the actress Elsa de' Giorgi, has sparked an acrimonious cultural debate with a deeply rooted political subtext...more

20.08.04. Sam Weller's Celebrates 75 Years. Rare books that can be found in the Salt Lake City store include: A Book of Mormon from 1830; a hand-painted illustrated 1800's book on Ornothology, and Volume of Living philosophy autographed by Albert Einstein...more

20.08.04. A detour to the soul. Among the millions of books, manuscripts, maps and even junk mail housed in the National Library of Australia, a young researcher believes she may have found an earthly link to the soul. Sarah Olive suspects it exists in the form of the menu...more

19.08.04. Burns' 'Braveheart' Books Fail to Sell. Three volumes of an influential poem owned by Scotland’s most famous poet Robert Burns failed to sell at auction today, despite auctioneers having had high hopes of achieving a good four-figure sum for the lot...more

19.08.04. Author admits fabrication. The author of a bestselling Australian book about the honour killing of a Jordanian woman has admitted she fabricated parts of her supposed true-life story...more

19.08.04. 'Lost' Beatles Trove Is Fake. It sounded too good to be true. Turns out it probably was. A long-sought trove of rare Beatles material that reportedly was found last month by a lucky British tourist remains lost, a leading Beatles expert says...more

18.08.04. Innovators: Café Gutenberg. Café Gutenberg is one of Greater Richmond’s most fascinating places - a combination bookstore, coffee and wine lounge in historic Shockoe Bottom....more

17.08.04. Literature title is 'worth £2m to city'. Winning the first "world city of literature" title would be worth millions of pounds to Edinburgh, economics experts have predicted....more

17.08.04. Famed Life magazine photographer dead. Carl Mydans, who photographed 20th century events from the Great Depression to wars and politics and was a charter member of the Life magazine staff that pioneered magazine photojournalism, has died. He was 97....more

17.08.04. Cobain card sells for $16,200. A Christmas card made by late grunge rocker Kurt Cobain when he was six years old sold at auction for $16,200 ....more

16.08.04. Rowling hints at Harry's future. JK Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books, teased young fans yesterday about the future of the young wizard during a reading at the Edinburgh book festival....more

16.08.04. The Million Book Project. The project is set to digitise one million public domain books and make them available in scanned format for anybody for free by next year....more

15.08.04. State Library seeks release of money to preserve fading history. A collection of rare books, including law books likely used to write the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, is slowly deteriorating at the State Library in the Forum Building in Harrisburg....more

15.08.04. How small-timers keep the Woolf from the door. It's every literary enthusiast's dream to stumble across a lost work by an author whose canon is thought to be complete, and this seems to have been a good season for such discoveries....more

14.08.04. Author joins fight to save historic boatyard. In Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, it is where the boat dwelling "Gyptians" live and work, and where the heroine, Lyra, is rescued. But in real life...more

14.08.04. Wave of magic pen could make Potter fans rich. Global publishing phenomenon JK Rowling could make tens of thousands of pounds for some of her most ardent fans tomorrow with just a scratch of her pen....more

12.08.04. Blue plaque ends 60 years in the cold for Ezra Pound. English Heritage recognises poets' poet whose pivotal role in 20th century literature was overshadowed by his anti-semitic views....more

12.08.04. Poet city's £60,000 book prize. One of the world's biggest literary prizes is being launched in Swansea this autumn....more

12.08.04. Robotic arm facilitates access to library books. The public got its first look at a $33 million library at Valparaiso University that includes a robotic arm that retrieves books...more

12.08.04. Porn a measure of freedom, says Rushdie. The writer, who was put under a death sentence for insulting Prophet Muhammad in The Satanic Verses, has raised the stakes with an essay praising pornography, according to a report in The Sunday Times...more

11.08.04. A publishing milestone. Nollaig Ó Muraile, a native of Knock, has spent more than thirty years editing ‘Leabhar Mór na nGenealach, The Great Book of Irish Genealogies’, one of the largest books ever written in the Irish Language...more

11.08.04. Books ponder legacy of 'Walden' at 150. Henry David Thoreau's Walden was published 150 years ago this week. Commemorative books are celebrating this American classic and the writer who took to the woods...more

11.08.04. Museum battles to buy medieval book. The battle for Raphael's Madonna of the Pinks is be replayed over an exquisite tiny medieval book which the government has barred from export to give British museums a chance to match the bid of the Getty Museum in California...more

TheBookGuide is away for a few days but he and the news will return on 11.08.04

05.08.04. Legendary photographer dead. Henri Cartier -Bresson, who died on Monday aged 95, was the prime mover in the revolution that in the 20th century transformed photography from a scientific curiosity into a modern art form...more

04.08.04. Pinter awarded Wilfred Owen prize. Harold Pinter's verses against the invasion of Iraq - described as doggerel by some who agree with him and as worse by those who do not - have helped earn him one of the highest accolades for a modern writer on war...more

04.08.04. Gotham Book Mart finds new home. The Gotham Book Mart, for 58 years a Manhattan cultural landmark at 41 West 47th Street, has found a new home. Andreas Brown, owner of the Gotham, announced yesterday that he had taken a long-term lease on the H. P. Kraus antiquarian bookstore, at 16 East 46th Street...more

04.08.04. Gays flee mob attack at book fair. Zimbabwe's gays and lesbians partially aborted their exhibition at the Zimbabwe International Book Fair (ZIBF) on Monday after they were attacked by people opposed to their cause...more

03.08.04. End of the road for Fort's booksellers? Mumbai: They've sat here for more than four decades, selling everything from Barbara Cartland to Baudelaire. Now, the pavement booksellers of Flora Fountain will soon be out in the cold, thanks to the new restrictions on hawking in the city...more

02.08.04. The art of not writing books. Imaginary novels and incredible stories are being collected for posterity in an unconventional UK arts project, the Library of Unwritten Books...more

02.08.04. The art of being a good collector. As an observer of alternative investments for years, I have found you quickly learn how subject the art and collectible markets are to fashion...more

01.08.04. Comic book collection sells on Ebay for $250.000. In an unassuming apartment complex, in Adam Perlman's messy upstairs bedroom, there sat the comic-book equivalents of the Gutenberg Bible. Atop a pile here, Incredible Hulk No. 1. In a cardboard box over there, Fantastic Four Nos. 1 and 5 (the first appearance of Doctor Doom). Encased in a hard plastic display case, a copy of 1939's Superman No. 1...more