There are 100,000 volunteers assisting Wikimedia globally, while Wikipedia is amongst the five leading search sites in the world. For those wanting a bigger picture of the 'Wikipedia Revolution', seek out Andrew Lih's recent book of that title, which I will hopefully be reviewing for the Canberra Times in the near future.

How Orwellian was Orwell asks The UK Times Literary Supplement

"Every schoolchild who gets as far as GCSE English will have read at least one Orwell novel . . . . This means that most people read Orwell before they have any sense of the period in which he wrote". A volume of his writings for Tribune from the years before Nineteen Eighty-Four and a new study, about Orwell and Marxism, put Orwell rewardingly back in his historical era." More here.

The UK Times choses the best 60 books of the past 60 years

Its team has compiled its favourites to celebrate the Cheltenham Literary Festival anniversary. Do you agree? They also provide links to read the original Times reviews.

1949

Nineteen Eighty-Four

George Orwell

1950

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

C. S. Lewis

1951

The Catcher in the Rye

J. D. Salinger

More here.

UK supermarkets now sell one in five books

The UK Bookseller says that supermarkets now sell one in every five books bought in the UK, according to market share data. This situation is not repeated in Australia and has direct cause and effect on the number and status of independent bookstores.

"Figures for volume share in 2009, provided by the three leading supermarket booksellers, Asda, Sainsbury's and Tesco, and based on Nielsen BookScan data, show that the supermarket sector has more than trebled its share of the books market in the past five years. The combined market share of the three supermarkets is now estimated at just under 20%, compared with the 6.4% share of the market they were estimated to have by TNS in 2004, reported by the Competition Commission's investigation into Woolworth's takeover of Bertrams.

Tesco's volume market share this year is 9.24%. Category manager David Cooke said this figure was more than half a percent behind last year because of continuing fallout following the collapse of its supplier EUK in late 2008. Asda's market share is 7.61%, up from just under 7% in 2008. Sainsbury's average market share in 2009 is approximately 2.72%. The figures do not take into account book sales from Morrisons, Waitrose or Costco.

Nick Bubb, retail analyst at Pali International, said the convenience and pricing of the supermarkets' offer has led to their rising book sales. He said: "If you are in a mind to buy the latest bestseller and it's 50% off, why would you head to Waterstone's or W H Smith? This reason is why someone like Smiths has worked hard to replicate that value offer. Supermarkets' ranges have also got better and it's not just about the top 20 hardbacks any more."

PYNCHON GUIDE TO L.A.

With the new Thomas Pynchon novel just out, "LA Observed alerts us to this map of Pynchon-related locations around town.

Wired magazine's Mark Horowitz has created a Zee Maps-assisted guide to the Los Angeles locations in Thomas Pynchon's novels and real life, based on the presumption that "Pynchon, the paranoid poet of the information age, is LA's greatest writer.

To be sure, Los Angeles-whose aerial view he likened to a printed circuit board-has always been central to the elusive writer's weird weltanschauung, his hallucinogenic stir-fry of Cold War hysteria, high tech anxiety, and low-brow pop-culture references. But did you know he actually lived there in the '60s and early '70s, while writing Gravity's Rainbow, the Moby-Dick of rocket-science novels? His latest effort, Inherent Vice, is an homage to those bygone days, plus something no one expected from the notoriously private author: a semiautobiographical romp.

Among the locations mapped I see the Topanga Canyon, Manhattan Beach, the Bradbury Building, Original Tommy's and Bel-Air: "Pynchon paid a well-documented visit to Beach Boys founder Brian Wilson, who resided here in the late '60s. The writer was a fan of the Pet Sounds album, but once they started smoking dope, he had very little to say."

The Cheltenham Literature Festival’s hits and misses according to the UK Times

Many of the most-admired writers of the past six decades have made it to Cheltenham: from Seamus Heaney, Joseph Heller and Allen Ginsberg - who asked for soft pillows and a four-hour event to incorporate meditation and “sitting practice” - to Ted Hughes, Doris Lessing and Kurt Vonnegut, who sent the shortest acceptance note in the Festival’s history: "OK. K.V." ...

But we’re also aware of the ones who got away - Winston Churchill was too busy, Edith Sitwell was stuck in Hollywood (“We are having a heatwave here, and an outbreak of rabies. Yours sincerely, Edith Sitwell”) and Philip Larkin felt that he’d rather not get into a situation when he might have to speak “quite bluntly” about whether “this or that living writer is in my opinion no good”. An invitation to Jean-Paul Sartre was considered, but the directors felt that although “Sartre might have got a moderate audience, largely out of curiosity . . . I rather feel his fame is on the decline”.

The UK Telegraph choses its top ten gangster films

Beginning with James Cagney in The Public Enemy (William Wellman, 1931)

"Edward G Robinson’s Little Caesar is great; Cagney’s twitchily restless Tom Powers, profiting from Prohibition, is even greater. Killing a fence and instantly turning away to discuss with his partner where they’ll dine, or shoving a grapefruit into Mae Clarke’s face, Cagney is magnificently amoral. See him also in The Roaring Twenties (1939) and the extraordinary White Heat (1949), both directed by Raoul Walsh." More here.

'Hid e thy life': the key to Shakespeare

Professor Jonathan Bate argues in the Times Higher Education Supplement that, "the many scholars attracted by the mystery of the Bard's life have overlooked a vital Greek link. More here

New Chief for the New Library of Alexandria, Egypt

An interview with Dr. Sohair Wastawy, the new chief librarian, is to be found in Documentation Magazine here.

John Banville in the UK Guardian, deplores the apartheid in fiction for crime novels (and one could add science fiction)

"A sheep should not venture into a pen of wolves. Not the least of the reasons I agreed to attend the Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Writing festival 2009 in Harrogate was that the name charmed me. Also it was a chance to revisit Yorkshire, a part of the world I greatly like, if only for the rough poetry of the common speech there - for instance, on the train from Leeds to Harrogate a woman in the seat behind me was speaking of a fickle friend and said: "She coomes on lak a dyin' swan and then puffs oop."

My event was a public interview with Mark Lawson, an expert conductor of the third degree; also on stage was that fine writer Reginald Hill. We had a large and attentive audience, consisting mostly of fans of Reg, I suspect. During the hour-long conversation I described my differing work methods as John Banville and Benjamin Black, saying how the former writes painfully slowly while the latter is fluent and fast. I am told that many in the audience took offence at this, imagining, I presume, that I was making a disparaging comparison between my "literary" books and my crime fiction. I also made a joke - limp, I admit - to the effect that I fully expected Black to win the Nobel prize; this has been blogged as my saying that I expected to win it. Imagine a weary sigh.

Another blogger did a survey among attendees. One of them, Ruth Dudley Edwards, a good writer who should have known better, allowed herself to be quoted as saying that I was slumming it as Benjamin Black. The inevitable implication of this is that Dudley Edwards considers crime writers to be slum dwellers. I prefer to think of Benjamin B. as lording it among aristocrats such as Georges Simenon, James M Cain, and my much-missed friend, the lavishly talented, late Donald Westlake, aka Richard Stark.

I deplore the apartheid that has been imposed on fiction writing, so that in shops the "crime books" are segregated from the "proper" novels. Of course, there are bad crime novels, many of which seem to have been written with the blunt end of a burnt stick, but the same is true of so-called literary fiction. The distinction between good writing and bad is the only one worth making. I revel in the challenge of crafting my crime books, trying to make something new in an old convention - for is that not what any artist does? Baa."

The UK Literary Review has the following articles on line, from the August issue.

Genius Loci

Were the Lygons and their life at Madresfield the inspiration for Brideshead Revisited? Alexander Waugh explores the deep and long-lasting bond between his grandfather and the family.

Neither Saint nor Sinner

Juliet Barker sees Joan of Arc as neither the heretic of the English nor the saint of the French. She was a headstrong, ambitious woman, ultimately expendable in the cause of unifying France.

Just Deserts

John Gray praises Amartya Sen for debunking the idea that justice requires the acceptance of universal principles - but disagrees that rationality will always find the right course.

One of the Sailors

Kaiser Wilhelm II was a truly incompetent leader. He may have enjoyed dressing up as an admiral but Norman Stone finds him all at sea when it came to guiding Germany through the First World War.

Gluttons for Punishment

Alex Renton climbs the mountain of wasted food we produce each year and finds the prospect terrifying. But a new manifesto for thrift offers solutions to 'the effluence of affluence'.

I Fought the Law...

'If Britain has a reputation for political stability,' writes Leslie Mitchell, reviewing two new books on the subject of English rebellions, 'it is a reputation of very recent origin. European travellers visiting this country in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were appalled by the disorder they witnessed...'

Zero-Sum Games

Elaine Showalter revels in the challenging, exhilarating prose that won Alice Munro the Man Booker International Fiction Prize for 2009 and which characterises her latest collection of stories, Too Much Happiness.

An implosion of knowledge by Humphrey McQueen in Meanjin magazine aroused, when first published, a degree of an explosion of dissent in library sectors. Now his full article is on line.

"This articles argues that the privileging of access to data above its application means that the debate over whether libraries are in the book business or the information business is diverting us from the thought that they should be in the knowledge business, ‘business’ having become apposite once neo-liberals set the agenda. Knowledge is being redefined by the access that computer clusters offer to ever more bits. In the digital domain, ‘new’ is more often about devices than depth of comprehension...

To avoid the outcry from shutting down a specialist facility, neo-liberals impose death by a thousand cuts. The Petherick Room in the National Library provides researchers with conditions which are splendid by comparison to those elsewhere, but are less so when contrasted with those I appreciated on taking up residence in 1970. Stack service stops at 5 p.m., when the newspaper reading room shuts, and there is no access to manuscripts on Sundays. These contractions increase pressure on resources when they are available. Should the shrinking of services discourage demand, that decline is used to justify further reductions.

Free public libraries are in the front line because, no matter how much they cut costs, their existence affronts the neo-liberals for whom individuals have an inalienable right to spend their incomes on themselves. Most of us find in free public libraries a convincing argument for the obverse view since they offer access to a range of materials that few rate-payers could afford-an exemplar of taxes buying civilisation." More here.

Yes to Spain at the National Gallery of Scotland, but no to Edinburgh

A review of The Discovery of Spain at the NGS begins as follows:

"I hate Edinburgh. Loathe it. Whatever the time of year, no city centre in Europe - not even Amsterdam’s - is anything like as sordid, but during the festival, which starts this week, it turns into my idea of hell-on-earth. From the instant you step off the train at Waverley station, the awfulness of the place hits you between the eyes: the teeth-clenching whine of bagpipes played for a surging tide of moronic tourists; the aggressive young beggars and organised gangs of down-and-outs assailing you at every corner; the no-talent street performers, the grubby outdoor cafes, the noise, the dirt, the bad hotels, and the awful food.

This year, a month-long strike by sanitation workers has added yet another reason to avoid Edinburgh at all costs: garbage. There are mounds of it piled up in the streets and silting up the gutters, blowing in your face and whipping at your heels. Everywhere you look you see plastic bin bags gnawed by rats or split open by seagulls, their foul contents spilling out over pavements and onto streets already rendered impassable by the ubiquitous road works. How the Daily Telegraph’s music, dance and theatre critics can hold out for three weeks in this mini-Srebrenica I can’t imagine.

But if you must go, can’t keep away from the Festival or have the misfortune to live there, you can find temporary refuge from the rat population in the National Gallery of Scotland’s intermittently terrific summer exhibition, The Discovery of Spain. Though it suffers - even more than most shows at the NGS - from the difficult layout of the temporary exhibition galleries, the quality and ambition of some of the loans override its shortcomings." More here.

An exclusive interview with David Peace in the UK Times

Despite the plaudits for Red Riding and The Damned United, the novelist proves to be a troubled soul.

Odd Book Title

Electricity as a Cause of Cholera. Sir James Murray. Dublin. 1849.

Libraries Australia report the most widely held copy is here. Scholarly Information Strategies (2002-2003)