National Public Radio in America has an audio recording 'Robert Redford Fights Global Warming With Poetry'. Redford spoke with Lauren Whitehead, associate director of Youth Speaks, and Simone Crew, slam poet and participant in "Brave New Voices: Youth Speaks" about his latest project and getting young people involved in the fight against global warming.

He says “Words are just words without action. But I think what we're seeing here today with these poets is the beginning of action." Redford is getting his message out in rhyme!

J K Rowling is the worlds richest celebrity reports the Guardian

"The pen may be mightier than the sword, but a magic wand is more powerful than either, or at least according to this year's Forbes' list of the world's richest celebrities. Harry Potter author J K Rowling earned more than any other celebrity, according to the annual Celebrity 100 list, taking home $300m (£150m) last year.

Since Rowling's first story about the boy wizard arrived in bookstores in 1997, 375m copies of her books have been sold worldwide... The British author earned more than US talk show host Oprah Winfrey, who made $275m. However, Oprah can take at least some of the credit for helping Welsh author Ken Follett, who earned $20m after she recommended his 1989 book Pillars Of The Earth on her show last year".

Google Launches Wikipedia Competitor

The Chronicle of Higher Education has, as with others, reported that Google has launched Knol, an online encyclopedia that, in many ways, mimics Wikipedia. As in Wikipedia, anyone can create a page in Knol. But changes to the page become active only after they are approved by the page's author or authors. And unlike Wikipedia, the author's name is featured prominently on Knol articles. Daniel Colman, director and associate dean of Stanford University’s continuing-studies program predicted,however,last December that Knol would have a hard time attracting experts to write articles.

The longlist for the second Man Asian literary prize

The Guardian reports the longlist for the second Man Asian literary prize has been announced It "features an unexpectedly strong showing from Filipino writers. The list, which is chosen from submissions received from all over Asia, comprises 21 works of Asian fiction yet to be published in English from both well established and first-time authors.

Four of the contenders for the $10,000 prize hail from the Philippines. Of these, Alfred A Yuson is by far the most experienced, with 22 books, as well as poetry and essay collections, to his name. His nominated novel, The Music Child, tells of an American journalist who undergoes strange experiences in a southern island in the Philippines".

Ten things you need to know about Haruki Murakami from the London Times

"Haruki Murakami is quite possibly the most successful and influential cult author in the world today. The 59-year-old sells millions of books in Japan. His fifth novel, Norwegian Wood, sold more than 3.5m copies in its first year and his work has been translated into 40 languages, in which he sells almost as well. Last year’s novella, After Dark, shifted more than 100,000 copies in English in its first three months. His books are like Japanese food - a mix of the delicate, the deliberately bland and the curiously exotic. Dreams, memory and reality swap places, all leavened with dry humour...He is a recipient of the Franz Kafka prize, has honorary degrees from Princeton and Liège, and is tipped for the Nobel prize for literature.

1: MURAKAMI DIVIDES PEOPLE

In June 2000, the panel members of German television’s literary review show Das Literarische Quartett disagreed so violently about his writing that one of them quit after 12 years on the programme. Opinion is equally divided in Japan. While younger readers adore him and even choose to study at his alma mater, Waseda University, in the hope of living in the dorm he describes in Norwegian Wood, he is viewed as pop, trashy and overly westernised by Japan’s literary establishment, who prefer the formal writing of Mishima, Tanizaki or Kawabata. Born in Kyoto in 1949, he studied theatre arts at Waseda - although the course didn’t interest him hugely and he spent much of his time reading film scripts in the library. He was hugely influenced by the student rebellions in 1968, which find their way into many of his novels. As a result, he’s a typical baby boomer - openly critical of Japan’s obsession with capitalism. He finds Japanese traditions boring. This doesn’t go down very well.

Thaindian reports on Rushdie's signature wars!

Salman Rushdie,The Best of Booker winner, is currently embroiled in a signature war with famous wine writer Malcolm Gluck, as documented by the Guardian’s Books section.

"Gluck set the ball rolling recently by claiming a record of sorts for having signed 1,001 copies of his book, set at a wine warehouse in London in 1998. Gluck achieved this with the help of a team of three men, one fetching the copies, one opening them at the blank page, and another whisking the signed copies away.

Rushdie lost no time countering. He said he had signed 1,000 copies, on his most recent tour promoting the Enchantress of Florence, in a books warehouse in Nashville in the USA in 57 minutes.The wine specialist then launched the controversy, questioning whether Rushdie could possibly have signed as many books as he had claimed, or whether he had just scribbled his initials.

Rushdie insisted in the letter to Guardian books: “Let me be clear: I did not initial the books, but signed my full name. I did have the support of experienced staff at Ingrams book distributors in Nashville, (and at many other US bookstores), who will confirm that among the fastest present-day signers of books are President Jimmy Carter, the novelist Amy Tan, and myself.”

“Well, if that’s true, I’m humbled,” Gluck said yesterday. “I’m delighted to learn of Salman’s achievement. I think it’s very funny actually, it’s like men boasting about the size of their sexual equipment, it’s got nothing to do with any other aspect of their personality. I doubt there will be any women going for this record, this is just such a male thing.”

Children’s author Jacqueline Wilson is also touted as a record-holder, not just for quantity but for how long she keeps going: she is famous for signing for as long as the queue lasts. At her most recent Hay book festival signing her queue caused chaos, forming hours before she arrived and snaking in and around all the other tents and lines. She had to be helped to stand up after one eight-hour session.

Thriller writer Ken Follett signed 2,050 copies in three-and-a-half hours at a book fair in Madrid earlier this year, beating his own record of 1,600 last year at a fair in Italy.

Clearly, the only way to settle the matter is a sign-off, possibly when Gluck’s new book - The Great Wine Swindle which may be his last, he believes, as it will insult absolutely everyone in the wine trade - is published this autumn"

Terry Pratchett has been in some marathon signing sessions too -up to six hours in some places. His ANU signing was over 2 hours at his last visit.

A Google map for your library?

Professor John Sutherland has praised indexers in a Guardian higher education article:

"Individual, human, indexers are as necessary to the university world of the future as index fingers are to our bodies. Far from being superseded, indexers are the future pilots of scholarship. At the moment they are the exploited Bob Cratchits of the academic enterprise.

Bookride blog provides a guide to antiquarian and secondhand bookseller buying habits

"People bring them in to the shop--in boxes, bags and suitcases, by hand and by car, sometimes they send them in by taxi and call for a price. We don't let them down. For some shops esp in America this is about the only way. Normally they reject a lot and either return them or donate them to charity. Some shops have a guy who takes these unwanted books away for a small consideration. They end up at flea markets, boot fairs ebay or on the web at puny (or punitive) prices. Some shops offer money for the books they want, some exchange or offer a choice between the two with exchange being distinctly higher. We pay with a cheque or cash and occasionally give a credit note to those who specify that they want it. This is not the greatest source of books but has been useful.

My old friend John Thornton who recently made retirement money on a theological library (God bless him) had the fortune to have a lorry turn up one morning at his King's Road shop with the valuable remains of the library of Peggy Guggenheim from Venice. Presumably they had been loaded on to a boat from her Venice villa and on to a lorry on the mainland. He paid the driver off and dealers descended from all over London--loads of 'published in Paris' books Beckett, Joyce, signed art books (Ernst, Man Ray, Breton, Eluard) Americana, antiquarian European books, rare pamphlets etc., Better than almost any house call most dealers will see in a lifetime. Even in 2007 when he hung up his pricing pencil he never used the internet, Google to him was a method of spin bowling. Because of this it was a favourite place for the trade and my first stop whenever I found myself in the wastes of Fulham.

Auctions. Both terrestrial and internet. Less of a good source because dealers are buying books to sell on the net and hard won knowledge is quickly surpassed by the hardworking viewer who checks everything up on the net. There are less bargains, less fast asleep sales and books are sold in smaller lots than of yore. Tea chests are seldom seen anymore.

Auctions are a good source and a place of learning. You see what books sell for, what sort of books sell best and who is buying them. Amazingly, despite the incursions of the behemoth Ebay there are still as many sales as before. Online auctions are a dodgier source and authenticity and ambitious descriptions are a problem. One can keep a weather eye on top flight sales at Ebay at Rare Book Finder - where I note that the loony with the upside down Harry Potter now has it as a 'Buy it Now' at $19000, about a thousand times its true value. Do not click that button.

Bookshops. Second hand bookshops, although an endangered species, still exist and can be found in side streets of many sizable towns. People still sell their books to the owners in house calls or by bringing them into the shop. Most shops have too much stock to look everything up, so bargains can be found--also they are anxious to shift the stuff in a lousy economy - so deals can be made. Bookshops are a great source. We have punters who come in three times a day, so it must be true.

House calls. These are mostly only available to dealers. Occasionally collectors sell to other collectors in the mistaken idea that they are paying less to one another than from a dealer -sometimes large collections. This is a parallel market and one hears of collectors paying one another mind boggling sums. Occasionally collectors buy or are given large collections. They usually devolve down to the trade in the end. Conversely one of the mysteries of the trade is that a dealer will often buy a book for more than a collector. In our shop we say 'if a dealer won't buy it the public certainly won't.' In a house in Barnes we bought a large collection of books that had been left (along with the mansion) to a local librarian. So keen as collectors were they that there was evidence that they had bought three substantial collections of books from other collectors. The librarian retired and proceeded to lead his life according to Riley.

Garage sales. Yard sales. Less common in the UK but a great source for our American cohorts. A friend in California scans the local paper and presents himself at selected sales at crack of dawn Saturdays and Sundays 51 weeks a year. He has made incredible finds including many boxes of superb pulps (Black Mask etc.,) also the tail end of the library of Robert Heinlein. He goes to the flea market before the yard sales open sometimes with a torch. These sales are also the source of an incredible amount of utter crap - some days he returns empty handed or has to make money on non book items such as records, art, posters and vintage Levi's.

Plenty of these, especially in the UK, and a great source of books for collectors. Resellers are less well catered for although a good deal of cross trading always goes on before fairs start. It was at a book fair in London that someone found Melville's 'The Whale" (UK first 3 vols 1851) for £5, about a thousandth of its true value. Bargains known.

Boot Fairs, flea markets, jumble sales, library sales. Plenty of these for the active punter. Often disappointing but as before - 'bargains known.' The general idea is that books for sale should be devastatingly cheap and those charging ambitious prices should be ignored, unless their prices are not ambitious enough. Library sales are more common in America and are the main source of stock for many dealers. Some sales have as many as 500,000 books and dealers come in from surrounding states and fight to the death for the best stuff, a sort of clash of the tight ones.

They are also populated with a new kind of dealer, mostly listing on Amazon, who check their prices with handheld devices such as Neatoscan, ScoutPal and SellerFusion. Fascinating stuff, so far tied to ISBN books but watch that space. These devices work very fast, some old geezer checking ABE on his Blackberry would be left way behind. One good tip with these sales is to watch out for the books that dealers decide to put back on the tables in their final cull- many a bargain there".

Star Trek captain leads the graduates!

Huddersfield University Chancellor actor Patrick Stewart recently led graduates in a procession through Huddersfield with the town brass band! Apparently Otago University does this too, with the procession through the main street of Dunedin to the Town Hall accompanied by a pipe band.

Maybe ANU's Vice Chancellor could call on the School of Music jazz band and lead graduates through the centre of Canberra in future graduations!

The 10 greatest science fiction films never made

Wordsworth association property hits the heights

According to the Newcastle Sunday Sun, the Eusemere Estate, in Cumbria, which inspired William Wordsworth to his poem “Daffodils,” is on the market for three million pounds. Rumour has it that the listing (five bedrooms, four living rooms, gardens, cottages, a boathouse, a dock, and “a host of golden daffodils” ) has attracted interest from celebrities.

The US Slate website advises what to read when a bully joins your book-discussion group.

"Dear Prudence,

A few years ago some friends and I started a book club. It now has about 30 women on the e-mail list, and anywhere from four to 15 coming to each month's meeting. It's been wonderful, and the value of it goes far beyond the literary merits of our choices. About a year ago, a woman joined through one of her friends. She likes to, as she says, "play devil's advocate" and argue for argument's sake. A few new members haven't returned, and the scuttlebutt is it's because she's made them feel unwelcome. Whenever we begin to select the book for the next month, the bully sighs loudly and makes faces at the suggestions other members make. Then, when we select the book, she will say things like "Well, that's not the book I would have chosen." I ran into a beloved member who has been absent for a few months, and she mentioned that she wasn't going back because she and the bully had gotten into a "strange argument" and she wants to avoid her. I can't imagine kicking someone out of the book club, but it kills me to see people not return because of one member, or to see the meetings becoming less enjoyable due to her behavior. Help! -The Browbeaten Book Clubber

Dear Browbeaten,

You could try a literary approach and suggest reading Memoirs of a Geisha. Then focus the discussion on the despicable bully Hatsumomo. But surely your Hatsumomo wouldn't get the reference. I'm afraid if you can't start imagining how to kick out your bully, be prepared for your book club to become a monthly version of the play Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You. Get together with the founding members to discuss this problem. If they agree that something has to be done, then a couple of you should have coffee with the bully. Tell her that you should have discussed at the beginning that there are unwritten rules of civility governing how members of the group treat one another, and you want to lay these out for her now. Explain that lively discussion is one thing, but argument is another, and she needs to tone it down. Ask her to please stop the sighing and face-making; it's alienating longtime members. Maybe that will be enough to propel her out. If she continues to come and contains herself, all is fine. But if she comes and can't, then politely but firmly tell her you're sure she'd be happier if she found a more freewheeling book club.

-Prudie

The New Yorker has a fascinating piece on what happened when a book signing ran out of books. "At the Shambhala Center of New York, Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, a young, pony-tailed lama in a sharp grey suit, signed copies of his new book, “Light Comes Through: Buddhist Teachings on Awakening Our Natural Intelligence... But the center ran out of books, so many people came up to the lama empty-handed. By way of blessing, Rinpoche picked up a little brass Buddha and bonked the bookless on the top of the head with it"!

Authors who earn big money on speaking tours

The New York Times reports: "The most lucrative public speaking tends to be motivational. Doris Kearns Goodwin, whose presidential histories include “Team of Rivals,” about Lincoln’s cabinet, charges as much as $40,000 an appearance and some seasons averages a lecture a week. She said she often uses Lincoln to teach businesses that “there are lessons to be learned from his skills in dealing with people, putting rivals into his cabinet, that have implications for people in managerial terms.” Novelists, take note! Enough with those finely wrought stories in which conflicted characters come to slow realizations about their fates; there’s clearly more money to be made in the advice business.

While publishers’ bureaus may charge lower fees for author appearances, most outside agencies start their authors at $10,000 and take a 20 to 35 percent cut. They’re constantly adding new clients and dropping others according to a brutal “hot or not” calculus. In the ’80s, the Royce Carlton agency represented Donald Woods, the South African journalist and author of “Biko” - but dropped him after the end of apartheid. “When Nelson Mandela was released, I said: ‘You won. You’re done,’” said Carlton Sedgeley, the agency’s president. Even though “A Beautiful Mind,” Sylvia Nasar’s 1998 book on the Princeton mathematician John Nash, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Sedgeley said the agency signed Nasar only after it learned there would soon be a movie starring Russell Crowe.

For some writers, encounters with readers can be awkward. “People want to know personal things,” Richard Russo said in a telephone interview. “Because I write a lot about bad marriages, they’re disappointed to learn I’ve been married to the same woman for 36 years.” After “Empire Falls,” Russo said he started getting a lot of requests from ailing towns asking him to figure out how to fix their problems. Russo said he’d gone “in two decades from $500 and happy to get it to something closer to $20,000.” But he said he was concerned about the next generation of writers.

Of course, some writers find book tours exhausting. “What finished me off several years ago was a 19-city tour in 30 days that I did for my novel ‘True North,’” said the novelist Jim Harrison. “It was ruinous to my health and sanity, what with airports being a cross between dog pounds and immense toilets.” These days, “I go out in public as little as possible,” he said. But he does agree to three appearances a year, “to pay for my fishing obsession,” and charges $5,000 to $10,000 a pop, “depending on how difficult it looks to be.”

Then there are the truly ego-destroying experiences. The novelist David Leavitt recounted an event at an arts festival last month in Milan where he and several other writers discovered they had been booked to appear along with Jethro Tull. The paying audience came expecting to hear the rock band, not the writers - and made their opinions clear.“Opening for Jethro Tull made me realize how ersatz the whole enterprise can be,” Leavitt said. “After all, there’s nothing like a genuine performer ... to make you feel your own inadequacy.”

How to get library books back - employ seminarians. Honest to God!

'The Bucks County Library System in Philadelphia has hired an unusual collection agency to help them retrieve their lost and stolen materials - the Unique Management Services Inc. Unique hires people, often seminarians, who use a more gentle touch to get people to return their materials and pay their fines. A quote from the Philadelphia Inquirer's article puts it well, "Who better than a future pastor to politely argue the moral probity of giving back what doesn't belong to you?"

Librarians don't like to use the word stolen, but in the last three years, nearly $350,000 worth of goods has disappeared.

The Daily Princetonian wondered recently if students read anymore?

In the last month, how many of you have read four books or more for your own pleasure?" I asked the students in my NES 201: Introduction to the Middle East precept. Bewildered eyes stared at me, but nobody raised a hand. "OK, so how about three books?" I persisted, but silence prevailed. When I got down to one, a student hesitantly admitted to have read something. That was one student in a class of 13 bright and promising undergraduates. The other classes I taught responded to this question similarly.

The results of these anecdotal experiments represent one source of great frustration for preceptors at Princeton. They suggest that too many students do not read outside of class. Of course, some of the comments by grad students on recent Daily Princetonian articles about teaching reflected the impression that students don't read for class, either: "Many undergraduates don't tend to do the reading or display much curiosity;" "It's very hard to lead a discussion when students haven't read;" "Sometimes making uninterested students who haven't done reading talk ... is like pulling teeth."

But the problem lies not only with a few students who come to class unprepared. It would probably not be an overstatement to argue that many of today's graduate students skipped classes as undergraduates, showed up without doing the readings and looked for shortcuts that would let them spend more time outside the lab or library. But as graduate students, their experiences of reading reputable literature are usually not limited to that required for their coursework or research. In this, graduate students are unique. In the television and internet age, more people all over the world prefer a cursory look at a screen than browsing through an 800-page book, and for many, research no longer entails going to a library.

Literary Review of Canada

The Literary Review of Canada has a number of interesting articles available online in its latest issue. One unusual item in the current issue (July/August 2008) is an essay on 'Friction over Fan Fiction' by Grace Westcott, who is a practicing copyright lawyer, Vice Chair of the Canadian Copyright Institute, and a fan of fiction. An extract below:

"Last October, J.K. Rowling startled the world with the revelation that Albus Dumbledore was gay. This was widely reported. Less reported was the remark she made following that revelation: “Oh my God, the fan fiction now, eh?”

Social scientist Camille Bacon-Smith, in her book Enterprising Women, identifies a number of sub-genres beyond slash which give a good sense of fan fiction’s diversity. Sub-genres include mpreg (where a man gets pregnant), deathfic (where a major character dies), curtainfic (where the characters, typically a gay male pairing, go domestic and engage in such comfortably bourgeois exercises as shopping for curtains together), and AU (alternative universe, where the characters are displaced into an entirely new fantasy setting)

....Mr. Spock has every bit as much validity as a cultural reference within the fan context as has Ulysses, or King Arthur, within the context of the poetry of Tennyson: whether you are reworking stories of Homer, or of Homer Simpson, you are doing much the same thing

Unusual and odd book titles

'The Do It Yourself Lobotomy. Open your mind to greater creative thinking'. By Tom Mopnahan, Wiley, 2002.

Quote of the Week

"When she speaks without thinking, she says what she thinks."

Lord St John of Fawsley on Margaret Thatcher