“Roe is important in WA without a doubt, but this archive deals with his life prior to coming to WA, his life in the Eastern States and in England,” she said. “It was a lot of money but it is priceless.” Ms McCormick said she would spend time researching the contents of the letters and would consider publishing some of them, before offering the collection for sale again.

Lord Weidenfeld's 90th birthday - and spies aren't what they used to be!

The Evening Standard's Londoners Diary, reported that "Lord Weidenfeld recently celebrated his 90th birthday and the 60th anniversary of his imprint, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, at Brown’s Hotel in Mayfair. Somewhat peculiarly Lord and Lady Weidenfeld brought an invitation along to their own party - later it was spotted discarded on the floor.

Lady Antonia Fraser led the toast, “I’ve lived a privileged live, so people often tell me, and the greatest privilege has been toasting George’s 50th birthday, 60th birthday, 70th birthday, 80th birthday and now 90th birthday. When one of us fails to be here it won’t be George.”

Lord Weidenfeld himself recalled the launch party for Weidenfeld & Nicolson at Brown’s 60 years ago when they managed to get through 109 bottles of champagne: “We had two spies - Burgess and Blunt - and Driberg, a double agent - very respectable company.” Guests last night included Julian Fellowes, AA Gill, June Whitfield, Roy Hattersley Antony Beevor and Lord Hurd".

Margo Lanagan's 'Tender Morsels' Upsets the Brits

The New Yorker Online reports "Who knew that the Brits were so prudish? Or, conversely, that Americans are so insensitive? The young-adult author Margo Lanagan’s “Tender Morsels” came out on this side of the Atlantic back in October to solid reviews, and not much else. But it just got published in England, and blimey. The book is a reworking of Grimm’s “Snow White and Red Rose,” but with some lurid violent and sexual episodes, including a gang rape and a witch-dwarf tryst. The former British Children’s Laureate Anne Fine commented:

I have to wonder generally whether a children’s publisher does not sometimes have a responsibility to stop and say that although a shocking new book will make money, and even be popular, it does not have what the Americans call “redeeming social importance."

Why do some publishers release some serial mysteries out of order? The unfortunate case of Fred Vargas.

The Los Angeles Times (Sarah Weinman) highlights the irritating habit of English-language publishers bringing out foreign language crime in the wrong order. "Instead of starting at the very beginning of a series - as Pantheon did in bringing out the 10-book "Story of Crime" opus by Swedes Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo in the proper sequence - books appear out of order, in haphazard fashion.

Heads are still being scratched over why "The Man Who Smiled," the fourth outing of Henning Mankell's popular detective, Inspector Kurt Wallander, was the last to be published in America. Because Jo Nesbo's Norwegian sleuth, Harry Hole, first showed up on British soil with "The Devil's Star" -- book five in the series -- it spoiled important plot points in "The Redbreast" (book three) and "The Redeemer" (book four), published in subsequent years. And I can't help but wonder if Stieg Larsson had lived to complete all 10 books he allegedly envisioned for his series characters Lisabeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist, "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" would have been published in English long after some mythical fifth or sixth volume took the entire world by storm.

Publishers choose the nonlinear approach for all sorts of reasons, such as commercial viability and what book in a series may grab reader attention best, so they will seek out earlier installments. "Jar City," for example, was a smart choice to introduce Iceland's undisputed crime-writing star Arnaldur Indridason because it was a major step forward, creatively and sales-wise, from the first two books featuring Inspector Erlendur (which remain untranslated). But readers who want to commit wholesale to a new series character and follow him or her through all manner of delightful and dangerous adventures are understandably frustrated at the disregard for series order.

Nowhere is the lack of linearity more clear than in the publishing history of Fred Vargas, a French architect turned crime writer who has been showered with untold awards around the world for her novels featuring Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, the chief of police of Paris' 7th Arrondissement. Like other detectives before him, Adamsberg is brilliant at his work, even if others disagree with his methods. He's haunted by Camille, a long-ago lover who flits in and out of his life periodically and is more present in his mind when she is furthest away. Americans first met him in "Have Mercy on Us All" (Simon & Schuster: 368 pp., $14 paper) -- book No. 4 -- in which he found a plausible conclusion to what appeared to be a rising body count attributed to the return of the Black Plague. Book No. 3, "Seeking Whom He May Devour" (Simon & Schuster, 289 pp., $14 paper), came next, asking readers to buy into the possibility of werewolves in a remote French village. And the most recent entry, "This Night's Foul Work" (Penguin, 409 pp., $14 paper), includes a policeman prone to talking in rhyming verse and a cat prone to more than a drink or two -- and both are integral to the strange plot at hand."

More here.

The UK Guardian chooses the 50 best summer reads ever

"Choosing holiday reading doesn't have to be about stuffing the latest blockbuster into your suitcase. From Renaissance Florence to the shores of Madagascar, we select the timeless novels that will turn the most restful holiday into an exotic adventure. Choices include,

The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell

This quartet of novels - Justine (1957), Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958), and Clea (1960) - presents four perspectives on events in Alexandria in the 1940s. The scenery is luxuriant and the behaviour bohemian.

Amours de Voyage - Arthur Hugh Clough

This unconventional novella, which Clough completed in Rome during the revolutionary year of 1849, takes the form of letters in verse, mostly written by a bored Englishman named Claude who falls in love with a fellow tourist.

Atonement - Ian McEwan

There have been few better evocations of an English summer than the first section of McEwan's novel, set on a sweltering day in a country house."

More here.

A reading experiment: reading Little Dorrit in new and old formats

How do you read your books? As an audiobook, paperback or in a digital form?

Ann Kirschner on The Book Show, ABC Radio National decided to read the almost thousand-page Charles Dickens classic Little Dorrit in four ways: the traditional hardcopy, as an audiobook, using a Kindle and with an iPhone. She compares the reading experience and there's really only one loser. Guess which one it is.

Listen to this presentation.

Vikram Seth to receive a suitable fee for follow-up novel

The Evening Standard reports "it is over fifteen years since Vikram Seth took the literary world by storm with A Suitable Boy, and now it seems the fêted Indian-born novelist is set to command a suitable fee for a follow-up. Word reaches me that Penguin has snapped up the rights to a new Seth novel, A Suitable Girl. Speculation amongst bigwigs of the publishing world suggests that the deal could be as mammoth as £1.7m for worldwide rights - which is an impressive sum for a literary novel (eclipsing the £1.4m he was paid for his memoir Two Lives).

Seth’s agent David Godwin won’t comment and refers me to Penguin.“Where did you hear this?” Joanna Prior, Publicity Director of Penguin, demanded when I called her this morning. Asked whether she could confirm Penguin’s coup she said, “Not at the moment. I may have something to tell you later in the week.”A Suitable Boy, published in 1993, was an epic slice of Indian life which won the WH Smith Literary Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize."

Oldest Christian Bible - Now Online

The Codex Sinaiticus is the oldest surviving Christian Bible, dating from around 1,600 years ago. For all but 100 of those years, it sat in a monastery in Sinai. 800 pages of the book, written in Greek on parchment, are now available online.

And Islamic resources also online for the first time

The UK Joint Information Systems Committee reports that "two of the oldest known copies of the Qur’an are available to researchers and scholars across the world - as part of a major project to digitise one of the richest collections of Eastern manuscripts.

The two Qur'ans, one of which may date from the 7th century A.D, are part of the priceless Mingana Collection, which is housed by the University of Birmingham.The University's Special Collections department has painstakingly digitised more than 10,000 pages from the collection. As well as the Qur'ans the documents now online include unique illustrated manuscripts from the 16th century and early Arabic poetry. The project has been generously supported by JISC and The Edward Cadbury Charitable Trust.

Dr Peter Robinson from the Department of Theology, who has led the project, comments: “We’re delighted that for the first time some of the oldest and rarest Arabic manuscripts will be available for the public and scholars to view and enjoy.“The Qur'ans are astonishing: one (number 1572) may date from within a century of the death of the prophet Mohammed. This would make it one of the oldest copies of the Qur'an in existence. However, the collection also includes poetry, illustrated texts and even coins covering nearly 1000 years.“The process of digitising these fragile manuscripts can be painstaking, but the result is something that is a beautiful reproduction of the original."

The virtual manuscript room can be viewed

here.

Hist ory of Britain’s changing places and lives is put online

UK JISC have also funded 'A Vision of Britain Through Time' website launches, giving access, often for the first time, to over two centuries’ worth of facts, figures, surveys, maps, election results and travel writing showing how 15,000 UK places have changed. Its launch provides an e-portal to over 12 million facts about places and lives in Britain, including new-to-view historic boundary maps, a land use survey that helped to defeat Hitler, unemployment and wage records, farm surveys from 1866, the biggest e-library of historic British travel writing and - with pointers for Gordon Brown and his rivals - the results of every Parliamentary election since 1833."

A Vision of Britain Through Time is an initiative of the Great Britain Historical GIS (GBH-GIS), based at the University of Portsmouth.

Ferdinand Mount on what makes politics work in literature in the UK Guardian. "There are some events that are simply too overwhelming and terrible to confront immediately. How should fiction tackle subjects as immediate as the expenses scandal or Bernard Madoff's fraud? Which novels and plays - from Dickens to David Hare - have best captured current events?"

ODD BOOK TITLE

Recollections of Squatting in Victoria. Edward Curr. Melbourne. 1883.

The National Library reports this is widely held in Libraries Australia.