The tale of how Flannery O’Connor’s purloined letters – purloined by one David Breithaupt from the Kenyon College library – were pinched and fenced is an example of just how easy it can be for us to lose crucial pieces of the historical record.

“In the late 1990s, you couldn’t hunt for a snack in an American home without coming across a magnetic poem or two. But in the decades since the product first stuck itself to the collective consciousness, fridges nationwide have slowly begun shedding their words. The history of the form itself, though, goes back much farther than Kapell’s sneeze – and the increasingly digital future will likely only widen its reach.”

Elvish, Klingon, Na’vi, Dothraki – they’re all “conlangs” (constructed languages), and there are many, many more. “The story of conlanging is, as with so many other bodies of knowledge, the story of old-fashioned research inflated to surreal proportions by the internet’s bellows. Yes, you can be a professional conlanger, but the competition is stiff.”

Editor Lillian Swanson: “But what I regret most is that Philly will be left without a real alternative voice, one that speaks truth to power and tells stories others have overlooked. Who will focus on writing the first serious ink about artists and singers who are on the way up? How will those who open independent theaters get the press they need to become viable? Who but CP will review more than 40 Fringe shows? Where else will you find a full-page comic?”

“It is time for writers to come up with books that address what matters to them most as they enter into their ‘Second Adulthood’.”

Listening to the people who lived through some of the greatest political tragedies of the 20th century, she seeks to “chase the catastrophe into the framework of the everyday and try to tell a story”.

Roger McGough: ”People in other countries get very jealous that there is so much interest in poetry in this country. We should pat ourselves on the backs. In my day, poetry was seen as intellectual or dull.” He says in the past, “if people wrote poetry, they generally kept it to themselves. But these days, the profile of poetry is bigger.”

Svetlana Alexievich’s works often blend literature and journalism. She is best known for giving voice to women and men who lived through World War II, the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan that lasted from 1979 to 1989, and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986.

“Super Thursday is the day when publishers release many of the big titles expected to greet eager readers, and elderly relatives, on 25 December. In 2015 there are 404 of them: that, remarkably, represents something of a record, last year we counted 315. In other words: it is a big moment for a book business still highly reliant on gift purchases, and a time of extreme activity for booksellers. And excitement, too, of course. This is fun.”

“We publish here for the first time T.S. Eliot’s review of two books by the English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead … Foxy Grandpa was the title character of a popular American newspaper comic strip (1900-1918), in which Grandpa consistently outwitted his two trickster grandsons.”