Sir Roger Moore has revealed he would have preferred to have played a villain because they had better lines than him in the Bond movies but presumably he wouldn't have been paid as much. Moore was speaking at the recent Cheltenham Literature Festival to launch his autobiography 'My Word is my Bond'. He will be in Sydney and Melbourne in November at literary events. Unfortunately, Canberra again misses out. Once upon a time, the National Press Club used to host celebrity lunches and I can remember successful ones with both Peter Ustinov and Garfield Sobers.Not sure how or why this changed but they used to draw big crowds and would surely go down well on ABC TV.

Moore at Cheltenham discussed his roles from The Saint and The Persuaders to the Bond films. He is reported to have said that "I was worried that when he would come to say the famous line "My name is Bond, James Bond" in his first movie Live and Let Die he would accidentally do a Sean Connery impression.

"I would have loved to have been a villain, they had wonderful speeches like "the end of the world is about to come" and Bond just listens but doesn't really get to say anything." Sir Roger said his favourite of Bond's nemeses was Nick Nack from the Man with the Golden Gun and that Christopher Walken was the best villain actor because he was "off the wall".

In another interview he said that Maud Adams was his favourite Bond girl.

The National Archives of Australia's Find of the Month Portal

Emma Tom in a piece in the Australian last week highlighted this portal which I must admit I had missed over the years. Entries have included

* A 1925 plan for a hi-tech "pneu-tube" network in Parliament House;

* A confidential report on possible flying saucer sightings near Maralinga in 1960;

* A 1964 letter from children's author Enid Blyton to then prime minister Robert Menzies requesting an apology after he described one of her books, Bob the Little Jockey, as both immoral and terrible;

The NAA entry on the latter reads as follows "Enid Blyton is a world-renowned children’s author, estimated to have sold more than 600 million books. That's almost double the sales of the Harry Potter series. Her books, including Noddy and the Famous Five series, have been translated into more than 90 languages and are still sold all over the world.

But back in 1964, not everyone believed Ms Blyton’s fame and fortune were well deserved. In this doozy of a letter sent to then Prime Minister Robert Menzies, Ms Blyton requests an apology for the ‘grave slur on my name as a writer’, after the PM described one of her books as ‘immoral’ and ‘terrible’ in parliament.‘I think it must be a mistake in the author’s name - it could not be mine, because I would never write an immoral or terrible book for children,' Ms Blyton said, referring to the story in question, Bob the Little Jockey.

However, in the newspaper article seen here, the mystery author was revealed - and there is no mistaking that famous signature! So while Menzies may have found her books to be ‘terrible’, sales of more than 600 million might just prove him wrong."

The Book Examiner's ultimate guide to pairing alcohol and literature: read, drink, and be merry

Have a look at a fascinating illustrated piece in the topic above in the US Book Examiner.

"Read, drink, and be merry. There can only be one logical way to truly enjoy a book--with an adult beverage in hand. However, don't think just any old drink can be paired with your tome of choice; sipping the wrong drink while reading is tantamount to serving Chardonnay with nachos or Budweiser with Osso Bucco--an outrage to the drink and to the book. Determining which drinks are appropriate for which works of literature can be a touchy decision, and infinitely harder than figuring what wine to serve with Gorgonzola or pot roast; lucky for you, the Book Examiner has labored long and hard to find the perfect combinations".

Below are two extracts on what to drink with a particular book

Budweiser/Miller/other light lagers: Ideal companions for sports-themed books, most graphic novels, fantasy, and comedy of any type. Recommendations: Try with

- Is Sex Necessary? - James Thurber and E.B. White

- America (the book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction - Jon Stewart

- Any from the Discworld series - Terry Pratchett

- Maynard & Jennica - Rudolph Delson

Recommendations: Ample experience has taught me that Guinness is best served with:

- Ulysses - James Joyce

- All Creatures Great and Small - James Herriot

- intensely detailed biographies of rock bands, such as the 2006 manifesto The Beatles by Bob Spitz.

There are also numerous quotations such as "In 1969 I gave up women and alcohol and it was the worst 20 minutes of my life." - The late George Best

Historians break armistice

Academics are well known for their rivalries when so much can hinge on publications and tenure. The UK Telegraph recently commented on the spat between "Rival Third Reich historians Michael Burleigh and Richard J Evans are at it again. Reviewing Evans's latest, The Third Reich at War: How the Nazis led Germany from Conquest to Disaster, Burleigh mounts a full aerial bombardment on the doorstopper. "Evans uneasily combines the wartime climax and denouement of Nazi Germany between September 1939 and 1945-46 with a selected highlights tour of the Second World War in Europe," he writes in the Sunday Telegraph.

"This results in a series of potted histories of occupied European countries, merged with highlights of the military contest, mostly derived from a patchy Oxford Companion to that subject... The choice of episodes from the war seems random......The result is a pudding without a binding theme."

In the first volume of Evans's three volume history of the Nazis - which the present book concludes - the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge used a 19-page preface to have a pop at historians such as Burleigh who leap to make their own moral judgements and do not allow readers to make up their own minds on the Third Reich. Is Burleigh exacting revenge for these comments five years on? "Mere size, as the architecture of Albert Speer demonstrates, is not everything," concludes Burleigh. Ouch."

I played soccer with Richard Evans for St Antony's College in Oxford in the early 1970s. I had previously shared a flat in Liverpool with another now eminent historian of Nazi Germany, Ian Kershaw- himself a great Rugby League fan. Tempus Fugit.

THE TOP 10 BEST-WRITTEN BLOGS

John Brandon in Computerworld has a useful compilation of his top ten "well-written, well-edited and exceptionally literate blogs."

Frankfurt Bookfair survey says Digital Will Take Over Print Books by 2018

The US Library Journal reports that the Fair, recently held in Germany, which is the biggest book fair in the world drawing nearly 300,000 attendees this year, including more than 7000 exhibitors from over 100 countries is a fertile fertile ground for drawing opinions on the industry. A survey held there noted

* 70 percent say bring on the digital future

* Only seven percent say publishers "driving" digitization efforts

* 50 percent say users will pay for online content

That finding was one of many to reveal a divide over how-and how quickly-digitisation will affect the book industry. Another apparent disconnect: some 70 percent of respondents said they felt they were ready for the digital future, but almost 60 percent of respondents said they do not currently use ebooks and e-readers at all. Some 66 percent of industry professionals, meanwhile, said they expect traditional books to dominate the market for the next decade.

Another interesting finding of the survey. meanwhile, suggested that the fate of the book was out of publishers’ hands. When asked who was “driving the move towards digitization in the book industry," only seven percent felt that publishers were leading the way. Some 22 percent said consumers were in charge, followed closely by e-retailer Amazon.com (21%), Google (20%), and the telecommunications sector (13%). Only two percent felt that authors were driving this aspect of the industry. More at

Colombia's brilliant successors to García Márquez

The Guardian reports that the long-awaited authorised biography of Gabriel García Márquez, A Life by Gerald Martin, is now out in the UK, but more particularly focusses on the new generation of Colombian writers.

Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk looks back on his days with the booksellers of Beyazit market

"My library has its seeds in my father's library. When I was 17 or 18 and began to devote most of my time to reading, I devoured the volumes my father kept in our sitting room. If I read a book from my father's library and liked it, I would take it into my room and place it among my own books. My father was pleased to see his son reading, and whenever he saw one of his books on my bookshelf, he would tease me by saying: "Aha, I see this volume has been promoted to the upper echelons!"

While browsing through these books I would feel myself part of a culture, a history, and I would think about the books I myself would write one day, and feel happy. But in my darkest days I felt like Faruk, the hero of my second novel, The Silent House, who'd studied documents dating back many centuries in the Ottoman archives, and carried them around in his head, never forgetting the facts they contained, but failed to connect with a single one of them: I would wonder about the "importance" of having successfully preserved details of an entire culture. How important, for example, was it to know who started the great Izmir fire?

Those times when I reflected on the facts I had learned from the books I had brought into my house, when I considered how little they mattered to the rest of the world, I would feel empty and useless. But though I was plagued, through my 20s, by the idea that I lived far from the centre, this did not stop me from loving my library dearly. When I was a little older, and went to America and saw other libraries and came face to face with the richness of world culture, it grieved me to see how little was known about Turkish culture, Turkish letters".

US NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALISTS

The National Book Award Finalists have been announced. The fiction nominees are:

Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project (Riverhead)

Rachel Kushner, Telex from Cuba (Scribner)

Peter Matthiessen, Shadow Country (Modern Library)

Marilynne Robinson, Home (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Salvatore Scibona, The End (Graywolf Press)

Bloomsbury Academic launches new commercial publishing model

Bloomsbury Academic has caused significant ripples in the academic publishing world with its intention of releasing works for free online through a Creative Commons or other open license, and then offering print-on-demand (POD) copies at reasonable prices. The University of Michigan’s Espresso Book Machine adheres to this model at $10 per public domain book, as does Flatworld Knowledge and Lulu.com.

This model is one which the new University e-presses such as the Anu e-press adopted some years ago but this is significant because Bloomsbury are one of the leading Uk commercial publishers with works such as Harry Potter. Bloomsbury will publish works in the Humanities and Social Sciences exclusively under non-commercial CC licenses. Their first title, Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy, will be available for download soon, and is authored by our very own Lawrence Lessig, board member and former CEO of Creative Commons.

Frabnces Pinter says

"Our business model is simple. We may lose some print sales because of free access, but we will gain other sales because more people will want the print edition. Librarians know that most people do not want to read a 300 page book on screen and that once you have more than two or three people printing out a book in a university, it is cheaper to just buy a copy for the library - and it is much more environmentally friendly. We will also have flexibility on how we produce the printed copies - whether through traditional printing methods or print on demand (POD). We hope to show that digital and print [copies] can co-exist for certain types of publications for some time to come, and be financially sustainable."

Australian University signs MOU for installation of Espresso Book Machine

In previous blogs I've mentioned the Espresso Book Machine ( POD) - see reference above also - and its launch in various bookshops around the world. I also expressed the wish that ANU might trial the Espresso but now ANU has been beaten to the print punch by Melbourne University working with DA Information Services.Their press release states

"The education sector's access to the printed book took a giant leap forward with the recent Australian launch of the Espresso Book Machine, the most revolutionary technology since Gutenberg invented the printing press. The Espresso Book Machine (EBM) is a patented fully-integrated book-making machine that automatically and affordably produces a library-quality paperback book in mere minutes. Last year it was named by Time magazine as one of the “Best Inventions of the Year”.

The University of Melbourne has entered into a Memorandum of Understanding with DA to be the first University in Australia to implement the Espresso Book Machine on campus. It offers the University a decentralised distribution solution, allowing economical one-at-a-time production of faculty-created materials, library publications such as facsimiles of rare books, printings of digital collections, doctoral and research dissertations, custom anthologies, public domain books, conference proceedings and user manuals. The Espresso Book Machine delivers this content in perfect-bound, library-quality book form affordably and reliably.

Melbourne library supplier DA Information Services is working with the EBM creators, On Demand Books Inc. to position this technology in major libraries around Australia, one of several innovations by DA to improve the delivery of content for libraries. DA has already initiated the first EBM installation outside America and launched it in September at the Angus & Robertson bookstore in Bourke Street, Melbourne.

Speaking at the launch, DA Executive Chairman, Richard Siegersma highlighted the Espresso Book Machine as the perfect solution for Australian libraries and bookshops who want to reduce their carbon footprint - and get books more quickly. “Shipping books from the other side of the world is becoming undesirable”, says Siegersma".

Climb every Montaigne?

In 2008 Cambridge University Library received the Montaigne Library of Gilbert de Botton (1935-2000), a remarkable collection of books connected with Montaigne, his life and times, and his library, including ten of Montaigne’s personal copies. 'MY BOOKE AND MY SELFE': MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE 1533-1592 is the resulting exhibition.

I particularly liked this quote ...

"In 1570 Montaigne resigned from the Parlement and went to Paris to publish La Boétie’s works. The following year, on his thirty-eighth birthday, he retired from public life. He spent most of his days in his library, a circular room on the third floor of a tower at the château, where he had inscribed on the rafters quotations from his favourite works. Around him were some thousand diverse volumes, of both ancient and modern writers. ‘There without order, without methode, and by piece-meales I turne-over and ransacke, now one booke and now another. Sometimes I muse and rave; and walking up and downe I endite and enregister these my humours, these my conceits’. It was here that the that the Essais took shape".

Andrew Sullivan in 'Why I blog' in The Atlantic magazine includes the following Montaigne reference

"But perhaps the quintessential blogger avant la lettre was Montaigne. His essays were published in three major editions, each one longer and more complex than the previous. A passionate skeptic, Montaigne amended, added to, and amplified the essays for each edition, making them three-dimensional through time. In the best modern translations, each essay is annotated, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, by small letters (A, B, and C) for each major edition, helping the reader see how each rewrite added to or subverted, emphasized or ironized, the version before. Montaigne was living his skepticism, daring to show how a writer evolves, changes his mind, learns new things, shifts perspectives, grows older-and that this, far from being something that needs to be hidden behind a veneer of unchanging authority, can become a virtue, a new way of looking at the pretensions of authorship and text and truth. Montaigne, for good measure, also peppered his essays with myriads of what bloggers would call external links. His own thoughts are strewn with and complicated by the aphorisms and anecdotes of others. Scholars of the sources note that many of these “money quotes” were deliberately taken out of context, adding layers of irony to writing that was already saturated in empirical doubt.

For centuries, writers have experimented with forms that evoke the imperfection of thought, the inconstancy of human affairs, and the chastening passage of time. But as blogging evolves as a literary form, it is generating a new and quintessentially postmodern idiom that’s enabling writers to express themselves in ways that have never been seen or understood before. Its truths are provisional, and its ethos collective and messy. Yet the interaction it enables between writer and reader is unprecedented, visceral, and sometimes brutal. And make no mistake: it heralds a golden era for journalism".

Cinema of the Depression -The grapes of complacency

Some great films reflect the Depression, but for this crisis we no longer have the required talent argues David Thomson in the UK Guardian:

"Once upon a time you could go to the theater and see your economic circumstances taken seriously. There was Chaplin’s City Lights, The Grapes of Wrath, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. The “talent in American pictures was from literature, the theatre and journalism, with educated backgrounds and a shared sense of the moral identity in being American.” In other words, they got what was happening. Today, facing what might be our next depression, our auteurs leave much to be desired. “Today's talent consists of absurdly rich young people who have made the hits of the past dozen years,” “They know very little about life, except what they have to lose."

Do You Dream in Colour?

The UK Daily Telegraph says "At the beginning of the 20th century, most people dreamt in black and white, but by the 1960s the dreamscape had shifted, with the majority of sleepers reporting color dreams. A new study by Eva Murzyn, a British psychology student, has found that while almost all people under the age of 25 now dream in color, many over the age of 55 still report dreaming in black and white. "It suggests there could be a critical period in our childhood when watching films has a big impact on the way dreams are formed," said Murzyn. Sharing your love of classic cinema with your children, in other words, could color the way they dream for life".

Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams, Gertrude Stein, and Arthur Conan Doyle speak to us again

The British Library recently released CDs contain recordings of 30 British writers and 27 from the US, most of whom are being heard for the first time since they were in front of the microphone. They include the only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf, "the sole recording of Arthur Conan Doyle, battily explaining the importance of spiritualism and the existence of telepathy, and Gertrude Stein incomprehensibly explaining how she writes.Raymond Chandler wins the prize for "drunkest interviewee," while Vladimir Nabokov sounds like "a ham actor reciting poetry." Nabokov describes the drudgery of writing thusly: "Harrowing irritation when strolling with my tools and viscera, the pencil that needs resharpening, the bladder that has to be drained, the word that I always mis-spell and always have to look up'.

One of the most poignant recordings is Joe Orton, a week before he was murdered by his lover Kenneth Halliwell. He explains he has done well out of Loot but wants to save his money "because I shan't always be young and I don't want to do anything grand with it, because there's nothing I particularly want to do, but I would like to sort of put it away so that when I'm not writing any more ... I shall be able to go away and do something else."

The Sultan's Battery

An exclusive short story by Aravind Adiga, who recently won the Booker prize with his first novel 'The White Tiger'is published in the UK Guardian.

Read on... it's good for the soul

At a time when bibliophiles are an endangered species, books about books tell us why it's reading that makes us human says Aussie expat Peter Conrad in the UK The Observer,

"The title of Margaret Willes's book about bibliophiles, Reading Matters (Yale £19.99), is both a slick pun and a stern admonition: reading matters because it is in danger of becoming a lost art, like calligraphy or stenography. We live, as Henry Hitchings says in How To Really Talk About Books You Haven't Read (John Murray £12.99), a book which he ironically addresses to non-readers, in a period not so much of illiteracy as of alliteracy. We surf, browse, scavenge information from cybernetic sources and gut words to send curt txt msgs, but we lack the time and patience to retire into books, adjusting to their steady, sedentary tempo and burying ourselves in the remembered experience they store and guard...

Willes extols this imperilled activity in a study of the book trade that begins in the benighted medieval days when only one book existed - the so-called 'good book', with its store of commandments and pre-emptive parables. Luckily, later readers and collectors refused to accept the Bible's monopoly of truth, and treasured books for defiantly secular reasons. Samuel Pepys loitered in bookshops to flirt with nubile fellow-customers; Jane Austen's heroines joined libraries to acquire and assert an intellectual freedom that was otherwise forbidden.

For Willes's most obsessive collectors, books do more than furnish rooms: they change the nature of those rooms, turning a house into a multi-cameral head....The grand consummation of Willes's narrative arrives in the 1930s, when Penguin democratised ownership of books. Consumerism, which ended by glutting the world with pulp fiction, began with high, idealistic hopes. Allen Lane shocked stuffy booksellers by dispensing paperbacks from a 'Penguincubator', a slot-machine which disgorged volumes by Shaw or HG Wells when you fed it a sixpence...

In their books of what used to be known as bookchat, Henry Hitchings and John Sutherland deal with less noble uses of literature. Hitchings treats it as a social accessory, a bluffer's currency that can help you win the competitive games that yuppies play at dinner parties...Hitchings, of course, has read all the books that his anti-intellectual cronies can't be bothered with. He is an efficient crammer, who even teaches his dopey pupils how to pronounce the tricky names of foreign fellows like Proust and Flaubert. But the irony of Hitchings' enterprise misfires. Why does a serious scholar, the author of a superb account of Samuel Johnson's compilation of his dictionary, bother pretending to be as much of a philistine as his oafish, affluent friends? Because no publisher these days would pay for a book in praise of great books, Hitchings is compelled to adopt a subtler, sneakier tactic, mocking what he actually holds dear...In England, Hitchings says, it's not done to talk about feelings, and it's equally poor form to have feelings about books....

As paper becomes obsolete and printed words disappear into digits flickering on a screen, literature needs such cultists. Báez quotes a grateful tribute to the profession they shared by his fellow librarian Borges, who described the book as the most astonishing of all the instruments invented by man. Other technologies augment our limbs or organs: the plough fortifies our arm, the microscope and telephone extend our eyes and ears. But the book is a tool that allows us to exercise the imagination. As Firmin discovers when he hops across oceans and abridges centuries, reading multiplies life".

Why Libraries Are Back in Style -a contrast to the piece above!

"Libraries have become so fashionable that this month, talk-show host Oprah Winfrey featured the one in her Santa Barbara, Calif., home on the cover of her magazine; it contains first editions collected for her by a rare-book dealer.

In the latest annual National Association of Home Builders consumer survey, 63% of home buyers said they wanted a library or considered one essential, a percentage that has been edging up for the past few years. Many mass-market home builders are including libraries in their house plans, sometimes with retro touches like rolling ladders and circular stairs....

Tucson, Ariz., interior designer Terri Taylor says she spends a lot of time scouring flea markets and bookstores for books with fancy bindings for her clients' bookshelves. She selects books to match color schemes rather than for their content. She once was ecstatic to find a stash of beautiful, leather-bound books at the bargain price of $20 apiece -- never mind that they were written in German, a language her clients didn't read. "I bought cases of them," she says"

ODD BOOK TITLE

The Book of Marmalade...Its role in the world today. By C Anne Wilson Pennsylvania press 1999

Libraries Australia report no holdings of this edition, but there is an earlier one with holdings, including the act library service here.

QUOT E OF THE WEEK

Lord Chesterfield on sex "The expense is damnable, the pleasure momentary, and the position ludicrous".

Keira Knightley, has apparently opted for a more down to-earth role than a Duchess for her next film, 'Last Night', which is "a modern love story featuring a married couple faced with temptations when they are parted for one night". Lord Chesterfield is clearly not an influence here!