The English Press has had a field day with the comment from Gordon Brown, made in an interview with the New Statesman magazine. He said he had an affinity with Emily Bronte's famous character Heathcliff. When asked to confirm this later, Brown said "Well, maybe an older Heathcliff and a wiser Heathcliff."

His comment was leapt upon by opposition politicians and literary experts. The Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman Vince Cable said: "Heathcliff may be dark and brooding but he is also ruthless and vindictive. He ended his life a broken and tormented man haunted by a ghost. Tony Blair perhaps?"

Brown also revealed, in the interview, that the first record he bought was 'Please Please Me' by the Beatles, and his favourite reading material to relax with are the books of crime writer Ian Rankin

The Guardian blog wondered if Brown was not thinking of the book but rather, as those who voted for Wuthering Heights in a Good Read poll, were "actually thinking of the 1939 film adaptation, with Laurence Olivier playing Heathcliff in best matinee idol style... The closest this Heathcliff ever got to violence was squeezing Merle Oberon, playing opposite him as Cathy, just a wee bit tightly to his manly chest.

Surely this must be the Heathcliff ... The Heathcliff who returns halfway through the book is even nastier than before, intent on wreaking revenge on absolutely everyone who previously crossed him, more Arnold Schwarzenegger than Laurence Olivier. Perhaps it's just too much to ask that a politician should pay attention to anything between hard covers"

What happens when the Internet crashes?

The citizens of Queensland found out recently when the Optus network crashed as did their backup, leaving hospitals and airports in chaos. E M Forster's famous short story 'The Machine Stops' is a sobering reminder of our increasing reliance on technological infrastructure for normal, everyday life.

Some US sites have been pondering the issues recently.

"The problem is that this ideal [having information more accessible online than it is in the real world] requires Web services to be available around the clock - and even the Internet’s biggest companies sometimes have trouble making that happen. Last holiday season, Yahoo’s system for Internet retailers, Yahoo Merchant Solutions, went dark for 14 hours, taking down thousands of e-commerce companies on one of the busiest shopping days of the year. In February, certain Amazon services that power the sites of many Web start-up companies had a day of intermittent failures, knocking many of those companies offline.

The causes of these problems range widely: it might be system upgrades with unintended consequences, human error (oops, wrong button) or even just old-fashioned electrical failures. Last month, an electrical explosion in a Houston data center of the Planet, a Web hosting company, knocked thousands of Web businesses off the Internet for up to five days.

The US Chronicle of Higher Education also commented:

"The current global computer network, born at colleges and at corporate and military research laboratories, was never intended to grow as large and last as long as it has. Some think it's already heading for collapse, threatened by the growing problems of spam and electronic attacks...

Those innovations are likely to be years in the making, however. Until then, "we'll have to keep patching the Internet," says Andrew Odlyzko, of the University of Minnesota. "On bad days, with chewing gum and baling wire."

Worst-ever movie endings

Following last week's blog entry, the London Times has now continued with what its critics think are the the worst movie endings ever, from Grease to Blade Runner.

Socially awkward? Hit the books!

The traditional image of book readers, until perhaps book groups arose, was that it was a reclusive, individual activity, but now a group of Toronto researchers have compiled a body of evidence "showing that bookworms have exceptionally strong people skills. Their years of research - summed up in the current issue of New Scientist magazine - has shown readers of narrative fiction scored higher on tests of empathy and social acumen than those who read non-fiction texts. And follow-up research showed that reading fiction may help fine-tune these skills: People assigned to read a New Yorker short story did better on social reasoning tests than those who read an essay from the same magazine.

Those benefits, researchers say, may be because fiction acts as a type of simulator. Reading about make-believe people having make-believe adventures or whirlwind romances may actually help people navigate those trials in real life".

The budget foe 1869-plus ca change!

"The Budget is passed; and it only remains for those whom it is designed to rob, to use every means in their power to resist the gross injustice...and the fraudulent cruelty, that this political juggleris inflicting on the poor."

This is the response to the budget of 1869 from the satirical weekly Tomahawk. This, and other periodicals from the British Library's collections are now available online from Nineteenth Century Serials Edition (ncse) The beta version was launched in May, and this easily accessible, fully searchable resource is available for free worldwide.

In terms of cross-blogging! I sent this on to Peter Martin, the economics editor of the Canberra Times and he has already used the database cited above in his own blog.

Oxford University dances to Astaire!

Film scholars, English professors, dance and music historians, performers and plain enthusiasts gathered at Oriel College, Oxford, last month to pay homage to Fred Astaire's achievement with semiotic analysis and singalongs. The Fred Astaire Conference was conceived by Kathleen Riley, a post-doctoral Fellow at Corpus Christi College, and her American collaborator Chris Bamberger rather in the way that young people in old Hollywood musicals decide to "put on a show".

Full Set of Chapters of Oldest Surviving Full-Length Novel Discovered in Tokyo Home

A full set of chapters of "The Tale of Genji," the world's oldest surviving full-length novel, believed to have been transcribed in the Muromachi period (1333-1568) has been discovered at the residence of a family in Tokyo. It is rare for a complete set of manuscripts from the 11th-century novel to be found in one place. The volumes are expected to be a major source for scholars of the novel, which marked its 1,000th anniversary this year.

Is it curtains for critics?

The Observer in Britain has wondered whether the advent of on-line bloggers has affected the trade of traditional print reviewers in areas such as the arts and cooking/restaurant reviews.

"An army of arts bloggers is posting internet reviews on subjects from grand opera to soap opera - instant, global and free. US newspapers have begun to ditch their reviewers as digital alternatives flourish...The British critical tradition is long and rich and deep: from the pamphleteering of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in the early 18th century, through the literary criticism of Oscar Wilde in the 19th to Graham Greene's film reviews and Kenneth Tynan's first-night theatre notices in the 20th, we have never been short of confident people to tell us what is good and what is not and why.

'We have a wonderful tradition of criticism in this country,' says Brian Sewell, art critic of the Evening Standard for nearly 25 years, 'and it would be a tragedy if we lost it. The onlooker sees most. We are the skilled onlookers. But in a globalised world where something posted on the net in Chicago one minute is read in London the next, no trend is ever localised. So how web-savvy are Britain's crew of professional opinion-peddlers?".

The Observer comments on a cache of letters from Vita Sackville-West

"Funny, revealing and downright bitchy pen-portraits of the leading figures of the Bloomsbury Group, the key British literary stars of the 1920s and 1930s, have come to light in unpublished correspondence between the poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West and an aspiring young writer.

The letters, to novelist Margaret Howard, which went up up for sale at the auction house Sotheby's on 17 July and were expected to fetch around £22,000, show the depth of Sackville-West's feeling for Virginia Woolf, with whom she had a long lesbian affair, Sackville-West,who was the model for Woolf's androgynous, time-travelling heroine Orlando,

cruelly describes Woolf's close friend, the biographer Lytton Strachey, as 'lank and dank and depressing', adding: 'It gave me great pleasure to hear Virginia say to him once: "Lytton, you are like a dead slug in a well.""

She judged the literary hostess Ottoline Morrell: 'a very queer personality ... with masses of purple hair, a deep voice, teeth like a piano keyboard and the most extraordinary assortment of clothes, hung with barbaric necklaces ... a born bohemian by nature."

Japan's Poetry Boxers Get Ready to Grumble

The US Chronicle of Higher Education has commented on a curious amalgam of poetry and boxing in Japan.

"In a crowded Yokohama hall, boxers file into a ring watched by cheering students and a panel of university professors. Nobody is predicting a winner, but precedent favors the bookish, the verbally gifted, and the female.

When Katsunori Kusunoki, a professor of communications at Tokyo's Kanto Gakuin University, suggested "poetry boxing" as a competitive sport, he was greeted with raised eyebrows. But 10 years later, the annual tournament is still going strong, pitting opponents against each other armed with motormouths instead of fists.

The aim, says Mr. Kusunoki, who is president of the Japan Reading Boxing Association, is to smash inhibitions and pummel shyness into submission. "Japanese people are self-conscious and don't like to speak out, so we try to encourage them to express their opinions and feelings here," he says between bouts.

Mr. Kusunoki is worried by what he sees as a growing lack of human communication in Japan. "People sit alone on the Internet, blogging or posting messages to bulletins," he says. "We need to create something more interactive."

Poetry boxing, he explains, is face-to-face communication in its rawest form, before a live audience.

The rules are simple: In a ring with a blue corner and a red corner, 16 boxers face off in pairs in intense, three-minute competitions of stand-up verse. Winners must negotiate a series of challenges that include a timed presentation and a nerve-racking round of improvised jousting, prompted by shouts from the panel of judges. A tuxedoed MC keeps the crowd amused with nicknames for the deliberately mismatched competitors. Occasional low blows are part of the fun.

Anything is fair game, as long as it stays within the time limit. Competitors come armed with haiku, comics, fairy tales, minidramas, dance, and hip-hop set to monologues on topics as diverse as politics and natto, the famously smelly fermented-bean paste. Verbal gladiators come from across the nation and from most layers of Japanese society: university students, housewives, the disabled, teachers, salarymen, pensioners. The youngest so far was 15; the oldest was 93, although he never got past a local preliminary.

"It's very unusual for Japanese people to speak this way in front of others," says Shota Umehara, a student at Kanto Gakuin. "That's what makes it so interesting."

The bouts climax in November, when the Japan champion is crowned and handed a trophy designed by the cult artist Kenji Yanobe".

Why Research is Fun

Professor Mary Beard Of Cambridge Universiy comments in her latest blog entry in the Times Literary Supplement, on the serendipity of browsing in the Cambridge University Library stacks and Google.

"Well, OK, it isn’t always. I don’t know what longueurs and anxieties go hand in hand with splitting the atom or curing cancer - or any of the equally worthy but less glamorous forms of science research. But anyone who does the library rather than the lab version of pushing back the frontiers of knowledge can tell you about the tedious days of reading pretty unappealing material (just try reading an ancient dictionary) looking for some particular gem that isn’t there. Even worse is the low level panic that the clever idea that set you on this particular month of reading is going to turn out to be a blind alley.

No academic autobiography that I know ever discusses this. In published recollection and authorised versions research tends to go right. But actually, “going right” is itself a bit more complicated than it seems. Because the best days are not when you find what you’re looking for, but when you come across something completely unexpected.

In the Cambridge University Library there’s one predictable route to the unpredictable. It was the library’s nineteenth-century practice to bind up short books and pamphlets together, perhaps as many as ten or twenty in a single volume. So you order up the thing you’re wanting, and you get a load of what you weren’t expecting too. The chances are that it’s one of the other things that takes your fancy.

At least that’s what happened to me the other day. I was on the hunt of a short book called The Comic History of Rome, and the Rumuns, published in about 1847. When I do my lectures on laughter in the autumn, I’m wanting to explore not just why the Romans laughed, but also at why we laugh at the Romans. So this was obvious material.

But when the book arrived, it came bound up with nine others, two of which were just as interesting. One was a book I’m sure I ought to have known already, but didn’t. It was called Facetiae Cantabrigienses, an 1820s collection of jokes and bons mots about Cambridge...

The other was a satiric Lancashire dialect account of a visit to the Great Exhibition…O Full True un Pertikler Okeawnt o wat me un maw mistris un yerd wi’ gooin to th’Greyte Eggshibishun e’ Lundun. Satiric it may have been, but still a way of thinking differently about that extraordinary mid-Victorian spectacular

Now if you’ve clicked on the links, you’ll have seen another joke here. Both these rare books are available on Google books, which is why I’ve been able to share them with you.

So I could have got them on my screen all along, without bothering to arm myself with a pencil (no pens in the Rare Books Room) and hoof off to the University Library.But the fact is that I wouldn’t have known about this if I hadn’t ordered up the Comic History and flipped through the rest of the volume. That’s where the UL and its funny nineteenth-century habits is always likely to score over Google books.

Will Computer Programs Replace Reviewers?

Tim Martin in the UK Telegraph wonders if he will be replaced by a computer program? Likelihood 9, Worry 4.

"It's getting harder and harder to open the books pages of a newspaper without encountering sob stories from critics complaining that rumours of their death, irrelevancy and coming replacement by bloggers/Tesco/Amazon have been greatly exaggerated. Further howls of protest are no doubt in the works, then, with news that the latest threat to your fish-and-chip wrappers and my main income may well come not from people behind computers but from the computers themselves.

According to booklamp.org, one possible review of Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park runs" pacing 7, density 3, action 9, description 3, dialogue 9". If you enjoyed it, then you'd 100 per cent like The Year of the Warrior by Lars Walker and you'd 57 per cent appreciate Michael Moorcock's The Hollow Lands. Meanwhile, L Ron Hubbard's little-known A Very Strange Trip comes up as "pacing 6, density 5, action 3, description 2, dialogue 3" and urges 53 per cent of the interested reader towards Forward the Foundation by Isaac Asimov.

No doubt Asimov would be spinning in his grave at that news, but he might have been amused by the way it came about. Inspired by Pandora, a website that analyses generic traits in music and provides users with a playlist of similar songs, Booklamp runs its algorithms on a corpus of novels and breaks them down into graphs. Matching the data lets it generate a list of books reflecting the reader's preferences: or such, at least, is the theory.

Booklamp is a young technology, so James Wood can breathe easy for now. Its most glaring drawbacks are the tiny database, presently restricted to a fraction of the low end of the pulp science fiction spectrum (with honourable appearances from Moorcock and JG Ballard), and the basic matching tools: at the moment it can tell you whether another book matches your bedside read in adjectival density or incidences of the first-person pronoun, but not on things such as genre and subject matter. It's only really good if you happen to be a computer yourself.

Even in its infancy, however, one can imagine uses for Booklamp's Rain Man approach to Eng lit. The shortlist for the Best of the Booker was picked, thanks to who knows what dark alchemy, by a shortlist of three judges: why not dispense with the public vote on the winner and decide it with the literary equivalent of Top Trumps? "Rushdie, description 9," whispers Mariella wickedly, looking up from her cards. John Mullan winces. "Pat Barker, description 7." Victoria Glendinning throws in her hand, disgusted: "Coetzee, description 3." Has there ever been a better antidote to literary listmania? It could go through the 50 Best Summer Reads like a combine harvester.

Things don't stop there, however. Another technology snapping at the heels of book hacks is Pluribo, theoretically a godsend to everyone who has sifted through reviews on Amazon trying to average out the ill-natured J Bloggs from Northampton and the suspiciously enthusiastic A Reader from California.

No one's machine-breaking just yet, and large sections of the journalistic population would be thrilled at the thought of an internet that does even more of the research for them. (A Wikipedia that reads itself doesn't yet appear to be on the horizon.) But something about all this does suggest the possibility, alternately amusing and chilling, of boiling down the entire Saturday books supplement into something barely sufficient to see the reader through the first bite of toast.

New Martin Amis 3, biography of dead literary figure 2, difficult debut novelist 5, chicklit of the week 7, Endpaper 1. Well, at least we'll all get to go home early".

Heath Ledger New Biography to be Released

In line with the release of the new Batman movie, Brian J. Robb's Hollywood's Dark Star will be published this October by Hardie Grant Books in Australia.

Murder tale wins Samuel Johnson

Robert Willson featured Kate Summerscale's 'The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: Or the Murder at Road Hill House '(Bloomsbury)in the Canberra Times's Panorama of July 19th. It has just won the 10th BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize which, according to Rosie Boycott, Chair of the judges, "knocked us sideways”. The book, a look at an 1860 murder case, is "a dramatic, page-turning detective yarn of a real-life murder that inspired the birth of modern detective fiction”.

Can your Flamingo do the Flamenco?

To mark the latest revised edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary Oxford University Press have published a free booklet called 'Can your Flamingo do the Flamenco?' It tells the stories of some everyday words and phrases such as, for example, 'steal your thunder'...John Dennis (1657-1734) invented a new method of creating the sound of thunder for his theatrical flop Appius and Virginia. After its disappointingly short run he heard the exact same stage effect at a performance of Macbeth. 'Damn them,' raged the dramatist, 'they will not let my play run, but they steal my thunder!'

Could Google Monopolize Human Knowledge?

ABC News in the USA reported on the implications of Microsoft's withdrawal from digitizing old texts. "If we assume that a healthy, diverse, and accessible body of information is essential to science, politics, creativity, literature then we really have to step back and say, 'Do we really want to put this one company in the position of being the filter for the world's information?"

The 50 outstanding literary translations from the last 50 years

The Translators Association of the Society of Authors celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. To mark the occasion they

have compiled a list of 50 outstanding translations of the last half century.

Dartington Literary Festival

Sam Leith writing in the UK Telegraph, documents his experiences at the Dartington Literary Festival, where he chaired Kate Mosse who will also be at the Melbourne Writers' Festival in late August ... "Labyrinth is the one that caught the same wave as Dan Brown, appeared on Richard and Judy, and has sold (at the last properly audited count) a gazillion copies. Her new book Sepulchre is just out in paperback. It's the sort of thing you read like gobbling marshmallows - full of abandoned crypts, mysterious tarot cards, rattling bones, feisty heroines with cascading copper-colour hair and demons smelling of four-day-old haddock. I loved it, personally. If Northanger Abbey were set today, this is indubitably what Catherine would be reading. Kate's charming, clear-eyed and unpompous about what she does, and - which is nice when you're a faintly awkward chair - could talk the doors off a crypt.

This being a writing festival, I should note. Best writing implement spotted so far: pen belonging to Martin Bell. It's made of two AK-47 shells welded end-to-end. Every war corr should have one. Available at knock-down price from Turkish market in Sarajevo".

AbeBooks CEO interview

Many readers undoubtedly use Abe to buy second hand books from around the world. The Book Patrol blog has an interview with AbeBooks CEO Hannes Blum.

William Shakespeare's First Folio

When I worked in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, one of the favourite stories of staff was that the library had got rid of Shakespeare's First Folio when the second one came out! The library staff at the time, in the first half of the seventeenth century, clearly thought the second edition made the first redundant. It took them until 1910 to buy another copy, which actually turned out to be the copy they had disposed of nearly four centuries earlier!

This story came to mind as news broke of the recovery of Durham University Library's First Folio which had been stolen in December 1998. "As one of 228 surviving from the 1000 originally printed, the First Folio fetches an impressive £15 million as compared to the buying price of just £1 in 1623.

It was recovered last month when a Raymond Scott, 51, purporting to have bought the document in Cuba took the folio for verification in an American library. The librarians there, recognizing it as stolen, contacted the FBI, which in turn contacted the British Embassy in Washington DC. Durham police then staged a raid on Mr Scott’s house in Washington, Tyne and Wear in England. There they found numerous other rare books including what a Durham police spokesman described as “a unique and irreplaceable part of the region’s heritage”, such as an 1815 edition of Beowulf and a 14th - 15th century English translation of the New Testament.

The Chancellor of Durham University Bill Bryson remarked of the Folio’s recovery that “[It] is not only wonderful news for Durham University but for all Shakespeare scholars and fans around the world, of which I am most definitely one".

Is Bertie Wooster the only fish-faced hero?

The Times archive is now online and it recently selected from that online archive the following gem.

P. G. Wodehouse wrote in 1937 “A fishlike face has always been hereditary in the Wooster family. Froissart, speaking of Sieur de Wooster who did so well in the Crusades - his record of 11 Paynim with 12 whacks of the battleaxe still stands, I believe - mentions that, if he had not had the forethought to conceal himself behind a beard like a burst horse-hair sofa, more than one of King Richard’s men - who, like all of us, were fond of a good laugh - would have offered him an ant’s egg.”

C. K. Allen had the last word on behalf of the opisthognathous. On December 3, he, or she, wrote: “Mr Wodehouse may not have meant to wound, but his references … are liable to give pain. There is nothing necessarily derogatory in resembling a fish; it all depends on the fish. For example, while a fried whiting may lack dignity, a boiled salmon has natural grace and repose.”

Stemming flow of literary heritage across the pond - Is the US less than Cracious?

The Guardian recently reported on the continuing outflow of literary manuscripts from the UK to the US. This report was inspired by the sale by British novelist Jim Crace of his literary archive.

The Guardian noted that Crace had received a six-figure sum (in pounds, not dollars) from the University of Texas for the manuscripts of all his works plus research notes, watercolours, teenage poetry and letters exchanged with his father and with fellow Birmingham-based novelist David Lodge.

"There's more, much more, including a cushion from his study chair and photographs of long-ago CND marches. "There were 25 big boxes altogether and I didn't pick up on the emotional effect on the day they all went off in a large van," Crace recalls. "I should at least have taken a photo."

He did have another offer from what he will only call a "university in the Midlands", but the money was "a tenth" of what Texas offered. "This'll be my pension," he says. "But there's a serious issue here. Stuff is bleeding out of this country. I'm obviously flattered to have this interest from America, but I'm hardly the only British writer there.

"When I was at the Ransom Centre [the Texas university archive], I held Blake paintings and Coleridge notebooks in my hand. I couldn't help thinking that they didn't belong there." Many a British university archivist would say amen to that. "Two things are inevitable: death and Texas," one of them was heard to sigh.

Judy Berg, archivist at the University of Hull, remembers overhearing this witty misquotation of Benjamin Franklin at a recent conference. Her archive has the immense advantage of being based in the library that was once the responsibility of one of the great poets of the 20th century. Most of Philip Larkin's literary papers have finished up at his former place of employment. Not all, however.

The letters that he exchanged with his long-term lover, Monica Jones, went to the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and the first of his eight notebooks has been at the British Library since the 1960s. "The threat from America was already there then," says Berg, "and this was Larkin's gesture towards a campaign to keep literary manuscripts on this side of the Atlantic. He didn't like travel."

Texas is not the only university luring British archives across the Atlantic - Emory, in Georgia, has recently secured collections from Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy and Salman Rushdie - but its Ransom Centre appears to have endless space and bottomless pockets".

Graham Joyce on what is undoubtedly an extremely strange Canberra literary dinner

The British novelist Graham Joyce was the guest of honour at the Conflux convention held at Rydges Lakeside last September. I only recently caught up with his blog about the event and his experiences in Australia. A selection below.

"Anyway I was better behaved when I went to Oz! My first visit to the land down under and it was thrilling and rather full of Australians. Great people, who call a spade a shit-shoveller. I was guest at the Conflux convention in Canberra and I got to meet dozens of Australian writers over the course of the long week-end. The banquet was particularly fun.

I found myself seated next to a delightful and clever individual who half way through the dinner announced that he was out of prison on license where he’d be spent the last eighteen years for the crime of murder. On the other side of the table was a man who had been trained in a seminary. He wasn’t actually a clergyman, but he had been theologically trained.

What was odd was that the seminary-trained chap seemed to aggressively want me to apologise for a) the bombing of Dresden b) the Dardanelles campaign c) Winston Churchill d) the English national anthem and e) the odd looking pudding we were served up for dessert. All this while the convicted homicide - it’s not for me to name him - regaled me and other members at my table with intelligent, literary, sophisticated and charming discussion.

It was the first intimation of many feelings to come about Australia. That it is somehow a more shockingly primal place even than Africa; that its flora and fauna are more primal; and that it’s aboriginal people (only recently officially re-categorised as people rather than fauna for goodness sake) are still in touch with that thing they call the dreaming than are human beings anywhere else, even though you instinctively feel it’s a shared memory. And part of the heady Ozmosphere is the notion that the land and the people and the fauna and flora are infinitely old while “Western civilisation” is no more than this super-thin sheet of steel and concrete rolled out over only small pockets of the land. The Ozmosphere made me feel, as an outsider, that visiting Australia is the closest experience we can have to the science-fictional notion of terra-forming, or visiting a colonised planet.

Perhaps I’m in danger of romanticising. But another thing I liked very much about Australians is the absence of those social-class codes and values that sometimes cripple and sabotage British or European culture. Of course there are economic classes and divisions, but something felt lighter, and I quickly realised that what was gone was the barrage of elaborate secret language, nuances, hints and insinuations that exist only just within the visible and acoustic social spectrum".

Black magazine launch

A new Australian magazine has been launched which "exposes Australia's attraction to the 'dark side'". BLACK managing editor and political reporter Shane Jiraiya Cummings views the magazine as a vehicle to explore the darker side of the human spirit, as well as pop culture and entertainment. "Almost everyone loves the villain, and BLACK caters for that, but

dark culture is more than just scary movies and brooding anti-heroes. BLACK addresses serious social issues that many consider taboo like alternative lifestyles, euthanasia, and political censorship - such as China's ban on supernatural movies and literature in the lead-up to the Olympics, which we're covering in our launch issue," he said.

Click here for more information about BLACK magazine (including subscription information).

Penguin Collectors Society

Those who love Penguin paperbacks might not be aware that there is a Penguin Collectors Society which was founded in 1974 by a small group of enthusiasts meeting in Richmond, Surrey; today there are over 500 members worldwide.

Charity begins at home?

In the latest issue of the Book and Magazine Collector (August 2008) there is a report of the auction prices reached for books handed in to the various Oxfam shops in the UK. These include Conan Doyle's 'A Study in Scarlet' contained in Beeton's Christmas Annual for 1887, which despite its bad physical state, sold for £18,600 pounds. The sale included a number of first editions of Iris Murdoch which went for £3,840 pounds and H. G. Well's 'Time Machine', 1895 which went for £3,480.

Charity shops which run often on volunteer labour and certainly on volunteer books have proliferated in the UK and certainly their bookstock is far superior to the Op shops in Australia. The two downsides are that the best items are usually creamed off, as above, so that they never get on the shelves in the first place and their "success" has usually led to the demise of secondhand bookstores, other than book exchanges, in most British towns.

An older reference, but still a good one!

David Baddiel has a regular book column in the Saturday UK Times. His entry for March 14 this year, 'The ghost in the writer's marital bed' surveys the literary creations of great writers, in relation to marriage and divorce.

"The truth is that, however negatively they describe marriage, great writers are no more able to restrain themselves than the rest of us from thinking that this time it might just work. I'm hoping for Salman's sake, though, that should his hooded eye alight on a new Post-Colonial-Literature-Loving-L ovely, he pauses long enough to perhaps reread Fury. Either that or the fifth Mrs Rushdie invests in a padlock for the cutlery drawer."

Salman Rushdie will be a guest at the first weekend of August's Melbourne Writers' Festival.

Unusual and odd book titles

Glory Remembered: Wooden Headgear of Alaska Sea Hunters (Alaska State Museum)

Quote of the Week for the new Senate?

"Nothing in all the known world of politics is so intractable as a band of zealots, conscious that they are in a minority, yet armed by accident with the powers of a majority". Samuel Morley.