“The poems in Brontë’s Book of Rhymes were written in tiny script to fit on scraps of paper no larger than playing cards that were hand-stitched together with a carefully written contents page.” Now, everyone can read them. - The New York Times
Might it be time to reread The Masses? "2025 isn’t the first time our neighbors have delighted in violence against a minority, it’s not the first time censors have told us what we can and cannot read.” - LitHub
Zero humans believe that claim, of course. One bookstore owner: “I just rolled my eyes and thought, Of course they did. We can’t even have one day where it’s just us — Amazon has to swoop in.” - Vulture
No, she wasn’t “the first great woman novelist.” There were so many great ones before her - but somehow they’re missing in our general knowledge base. Hm, wonder why! - Happy Dancing
London printer John Dunton created the Athenian Gazette, or Casuistical Mercury as a broadsheet answering questions and providing topics for patrons to discuss at coffeehouses. The questions submitted were initially about science, law, or philosophy, but it took only a few weeks for readers to start asking about personal relationships. - Literary Hub
“Random House announced that it would publish a hardcover book in July combining the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, followed in November by a hardcover edition of the Federalist Papers. Both books include introductions by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jon Meacham.” - AP
“According to the report, nearly half (46%) of U.K. adults say they struggle to focus on reading due to distractions around them. That figure rises to 55% among respondents ages 16-24 and 35-44, and to 52% for respondents ages 25-34. One in three adults revealed that they multitask while reading.” - Publishers Weekly
Beyond the masthead and issue date, no set typography has ever been allowed, maintaining a unique wordless space in magazine publishing where only an image connotes the idea. The absence of copy is arresting, the silent core of what the solely visual can communicate. - The Conversation
“What was until the 14th century the primary language of Scotland was, in the 2022 census, spoken by 2.5% of the population (up from 1.7% in 2011). Ever-greater numbers of people are learning the language in school or through apps …, but the shift to English is at an advanced stage.” - History Today
While the International Booker might have heralded a rise in the status of literary translators, is there a commensurate deepening of appreciation for, and understanding of, translation itself? While translators are being made more visible, is translation being made more invisible? - Sydney Review of Books
By thinking of language as a mathematical category, Tai-Danae Bradley's been able to apply established tools to study it and glean new insights. Linguists hope her model can help them to prove certain theories about how grammar and meaning emerge from strings of words, and to identify how AI-generated text differs from human language. - Quanta
As the English degree craters, and the idea of the university itself is under assault in the United States and elsewhere, those of us who remain interested in literate culture are sensing in its decline some correlation with the current apoplexy, if not direct causation. - 3 Quarks Daily
Meta cited an expert witness who downplayed the books' individual importance, averring that a single book adjusted its LLM's performance "by less than 0.06 percent on industry standard benchmarks, a meaningless change no different from noise." Thus there's no market in paying authors to use their copyrighted works, Meta says. - Futurism
"Earlier this month, a group of protesters gathered outside the London headquarters of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. They were demonstrating over the company’s use of millions of pirated books and research papers to feed their family of generative AI models.” - The Guardian (UK)
