The trade group the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America "started a diversity initiative in 2020 to 'encourage and promote the participation of L.G.B.T.Q.+, BIPOC, and underrepresented groups,'" but some Millennials and Gen Zers had started on their own. - The New York Times
"Mary Rambaran-Olm, a literary scholar who focuses on race and early medieval England, accused editors at The Los Angeles Review of Books of 'torpedoing' a strongly negative review ... because of their friendship with the fellow white scholars" who wrote the book she reviewed. - The New York Times
The Rapid City district has decided to destroy books by Eggers, Bechdel, Booker Prize-winning Bernadine Evaristo, Imbolo Mbue, and Stephen Chbosky. Why? Authors and topics are kinda, uh, gay, and the school board is homophobic. Eggers will replace them all. - The Guardian (UK)
Penguin Random House has partnered with a raft of advocacy organizations on a public campaign called "Open Books Open Doors", while the Authors Guild has launched a Banned Books Club on the app Fable, on which users organize social media book groups. - Publishing Perspectives
These toxic books, produced in the 19th century, are bound in vivid cloth colored with a notorious pigment known as emerald green that’s laced with arsenic. - National Geographic
Not only are these teens gathering to obtain, and read together, the books that conservative school boards and politicians are trying to keep out of their schools, they're organizing and lobbying local, state and Federal officeholders to reverse the bans. - The Washington Post
John McWhorter: "The idea that for Black people standard English is something wholly apart is simply inaccurate. For most Black Americans, both Black and standard English are part of who we are; our English is, in this sense, larger than many white people's." - The New York Times
I can imagine the internet hot take: Why punish people who can afford to buy books by making them free to read for everyone? Or: Government giveaways: why we shouldn’t let people who can afford books read them for free. - Chicago Tribune
The United States is facing an unprecedented wave of schoolbook banning. PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for freedom of expression, tallied 1,586 book bans in schools over the past nine months, targeting 1,145 books. - Washington Post
The 1631 printing of the King James Bible gets its nicknames, and its fame, from a typo: the printers omitted the word "not" from the Seventh Commandment, rendering it "Thou shalt commit adultery." Only about 20 copies now remain; this is the first discovered in the Southern Hemisphere. - The Guardian
"Julie Finch, … the former CEO of the Cheltenham Trust, … has been appointed CEO of the Hay festival and will succeed founder and former director Peter Florence, who resigned from his role after a bullying claim was upheld last year." - The Guardian
The hyphen underwent an assault from a different corner in 2007, when Angus Stevenson, an editor of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, removed the hyphens from sixteen thousand words. - The New Yorker
At heart, they just expose our funny, brilliant, quirky humanness. We love riddles because they show how we’re “rationalization machines. We are great at finding patterns where none exist.” And if we don’t find the pattern? That’s our humanness, too. - Washington Post
Suddenly, Kobabe was at the center of a nationwide battle over which books belong in schools — and who gets to make that decision. The debate, raging in school board meetings and town halls, is dividing communities around the country and pushing libraries to the front lines of a simmering culture war. - The New York Times
"One of the things that always frightens me about DVD box sets is when it says how many minutes there are to watch. It’s a good thing our shelves don’t have that functionality, because it would add up to more than our lifetimes." - The Observer (UK)
