The New York Times has an article on the closing of Coliseum Books in Manhattan. The liquidation provides an index of the perceived value of books:

The first to fly out the Coliseum doors were the cookbooks, he said. Then crafts books, on subjects like needlework, pottery and knitting. The science section, nearly 1,000 titles, was sold en masse to a philanthropic foundation.

New York Magazine has a snapshot of what riders on a random subway train were reading on a Monday morning.

The publishing industry let its guard down in 2006, earning a swift pop to the proboscis, asserts a piece from National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.

Media Matters has what is certainly one of the better attempts to make a worthwhile retrospective in the form of an ordered list.

No more!

The New York Times is running a story on university fund-raising.

On a hilltop patio with a stunning view of the J. Paul Getty Museum, as guests sipped bubbling guava-pineapple martinis, John Sexton, the president of New York University, was far from home, chatting up the crowd.

The 70 guests assembled in Los Angeles for this event on a beautiful spring evening, had already given $5,000 or more to N.Y.U. The parking area at the top of the private street that led to the mansion, owned by Nancy Moonves, former wife of the television mogul Leslie Moonves (and mother of two N.Y.U. students), was filled with Lexus and Mercedes sedans as well as a sleek Ferrari.

“I thank you,” Dr. Sexton said, “and I ask you to do 10 times as much as you are doing.”

The Washington Post has an article on how the hideous shorthand that makes instant messaging so unbearable is seeping into students’ papers.

Poets & Writers has an article about how the U. S. publishing industry is turning to China for profit.

I well remember the physical card catalogs of the libraries of my youth. I recall having to stand on the discreetly provided milk crates to open the top drawers. As quaint as these memories are, I would not fain return to that time. Modern libraries run on complex software systems that provide an embarrassment of riches to the savvy bibliophile. A group of librarians in Georgia has developed an open integrated library system that shows great promise. A Linux.com article has further details.

The author of a self-published British children’s book wants the title to be removed from the Amazon UK catalog. The Guardian article says that he feels that:

“When a book gets a certain amount of attention, they will attempt to stock it and cut the independents out. Not with my book!”

National Public Radio’s Morning Edition has a story about writers who draw inspiration from Shanghai.

Project Gutenberg is now offering texts in Plucker format, making it very easy for users of Palm OS PDAs and smart phones to download and read some important works for free.

Salon has a best-of list twist: some of their favorite authors weigh in on the best books of 2006. The list so handily transcends the meme that it should be in a separate category entirely.

HarperCollins decided to give everyone who cares about books a solstice present: sleazeball editor Judith Regan’s head on a slightly tarnished silver platter.

Enjoy the longest night of the year!

The Washington Post has a review of William Julius Wilson and Richard P. Taub’s There Goes the Neighborhood: Racial, Ethnic, and Class Tensions in Four Chicago Neighborhoods and Their Meaning for America. The reviewer concludes of the authors’ work that:

Their careful and convincing summary of research carried out in Chicago during the mid-1990s paints a picture of social intolerance and bad faith that makes wasting away on a desert island sound like a pretty reasonable alternative to scraping out a living in today’s contentious American cities and suburbs.

Sandra at Book World blog (not to be confused with The Washington Post’s literary section, which is also called Book World) has a post on the books that she was simply unable to finish this year.

I am not sure how I missed the live webcast of Orhan Pamuk’s Nobel lecture, but I am tuning in now to the archived version to make up for my oversight.

Michael Crichton is not very, you know, talented, so I usually skip his output. A New York Times story about what may be a poisoned barb in his latest thriller, Next, caught my eye.

From The Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages comes a piece explaining why the Japanese establishment remains wary of Haruki Murakami.

The New York Inquirer has an interview with Keith Gessen of n+1. On the topic of his magazine’s rivalry with McSweeney’s he says:

This is where McSweeney’s and the Believer come in. When we launched, it seemed like they were the ideal representatives of a certain kind of literary position, which states that 1) reading, in any form, is good, that writing is good, that literature is good; 2) all these things are imperiled, and therefore 3) that anything done in the service of these things is good. We disagree with all three parts of that, even #2. And we’ve said so a number of times.

National Public Radio’s Day to Day has a segment on the controversy generated by Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, Jimmy Carter’s new book.

The Washington Post is running a review of The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian.

The Toronto Star has a story on vanity publishing. The author notes that there have been a few successful (not necessarily in financial terms but by more important metrics) self-published works since on-demand vanity presses began to proliferate, but the sad truth is that most of these books never should have been published at all. From later in the article:

Many other self-published titles bouncing around the Net leave one with a sinking feeling and a renewed respect for the gate-keeping function of traditional publishers.

The BBC has a piece on what declining newspaper circulation and the practice of news site trawling are doing to journalism.

Slate has a review of Special Topics in Calamity Physics. The reviewer expresses surprise that the book was deemed “Best Of” list material and provides a well-reasoned exploration of why works of “precocious realism” are not suitable for such lists.

Microsoft has released a beta version of its competitor to the controversial Google Book Search.

A Forbes report on publishing asks the question, opening with the pleasing assertion that the Web’s “emphasis on textual snippets, skimming and collaborative creation, seems ill-suited to nurture the sustained, authoritative transmission of complex ideas that has been the historical purview of the printed page.”

No, it’s not tilting for Inuits. It’s all of that “Best Of,” “Year’s Worst,” and “Buy This, Please!” nonsense that gets people talking (well, arguing). The New York Times has started the frenzy a week or so early this season with its “The 10 Best Books of 2006.”

Recommended.

National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition has an interview with Kitty Burns Florey about her book Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences.

New York Magazine has a delightful feature on Beatrice Monti’s Tuscan retreat for writers.