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Barnes & Noble Is Reviving Business By Dropping Something Chains Almost Never Drop: Visual Brand Consistency

Individual stores develop their own looks. "Any design agency would have a heart attack if they could see what we’re doing,” said CEO James Daunt. “We don’t have any architect doing our design at any stage. And certainly the identity people would have a complete crisis.” - The New York Times

The Textual Version Of Junk Food? The Selfie Of Grammar? No! In Defense Of The Exclamation Point

"For hundreds of years, writers enjoyed the punchy power of a well-placed !, wielding its mighty sword of 'here be feelings!' with aplomb and persuasiveness. Here are five ways that literature can recuperate the abused exclamation point." - The Millions

What Do Book Censorship Advocates Actually Know About Libraries?

Weirdly: "People who do not know how librarians select material are much more likely to also believe librarians should be prosecuted for that material." - BookRiot

Art Spiegelman Didn’t Create Maus In Order To Become A Reading Rights Warrior

And yet, such are the times we live in. - Washington Post

Can Book Resumes Prevent Censorship?

This New Jersey librarian thinks that's one tool. (Though the ban-fans usually don't care at all about awards.) - The Mary Sue

Historical Fiction Readers Need To Be Able To See – And Smell – The Olden Days

For instance: "If you describe a character running a discarded leather glove scented with lavender under her nose, the reader can feel the cool-then-warm of the leather against her upper lip, hear the faint creak of the leather, smell that lavender." - LitHub

The National Book Awards Get A Host Practically Synonymous With Reading

Drew Barrymore got the boot after trying to throw her show's writers under the bus - and her replacement is the Reading Rainbow man himself. - NPR

Author Teju Cole Says He’s Avant Garde

But he doesn't want that to mean "unreadable." - The Guardian (UK)

Frankfurt Book Fair Cancels An Award For Book By Palestinian Author

"The novel, by Adania Shibli, is titled “Minor Detail” in English and tells the true story of the 1949 rape and murder of a Palestinian Bedouin girl by Israeli soldiers." - The New York Times

AI Has Helped Read The First Word Deciphered From Ancient Scrolls Carbonized By Mt. Vesuvius

The scrolls, intact but carbonized and impossible to unroll, came from a library in Herculaneum destroyed by the 79 AD eruption that both wiped out and preserved Pompeii. Thousands of 3D X-ray images were released, and computer scientists took up what's called the Vesuvius Challenge to decipher them. - The Guardian

The Gettysburg Review Is Abruptly Shut Down By Gettysburg College

The college's president granted that the Review is "a superb literary journal, does really extraordinary work … (but) its purpose is not the education of students." Many former interns at the Review disagree. Others say the college has done little do leverage the magazine's high reputation. - Inside Higher Ed

This Literary Magazine’s Publisher Is Giving Up Its Online Version To Keep The Print Edition Alive

Amy Mae Baxter, founder of Bad Form: "As costs rise for everyone, it doesn’t feel fair for me not to be paying our contributing writers more, too. So, instead of closing down completely, I have shut down our regular online content, so I can focus on events, community building and print issues." - The Guardian

Hi, My Name Is Paul. I’m An Audiobook Addict

The audiobook’s ascent into full-blown aesthetic autonomy came with the arrival of the iPod and its MP3 file format in 2001, and, as of 2023, more than half the U.S. population has listened to an audiobook (in Sweden, they outsell hardcovers). - The New Yorker

Branding Your Literary Favorites

Is it the ultimate pairing of the lowbrow (baseball cap) and the highbrow (literature)? Or is it wearing books as one might wear cult fashion labels — and the uncanny performance of it all? Does it matter? - The New York Times

“An Aesthetic Of Disobedience” — Oscar Wilde As Critic

As he wrote in "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," "Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion." - The Nation

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