Boston Based Book News, In Brief

What's the Craiglist killer reading? Not Gray's Anatomy, apparently.


Bostonist reports, "Walden Pond is good for transcendentalism. And fishing!"


Anne Bromer is a Boston bookseller who specializes in miniature books. Among her many tiny tomes is a first edition of the Emancipation Proclamation and the first book on birth control -- which doubled as a sponge! (Ewww!) (Kidding.) (Still: Ewww!)


In an effort to 'cull its vast holdings,' the Boston Public Library is preparing to sell a number of items from its extensive special collection. So far, the library's collections committee has discussed parting with three items: a Crehore piano, a series of large-scale Audubon prints, and a collection of Tichnor glass printing plates that were once used to make postcards. In contrast to this, whenever the Falmouth Public Library holds a sale, all they offer are tear-stained Harlequin Romance novels, crumpled copies of The Cape Cod Times, and Harry Potter books with poorly drawn penises in the margins.


While we're on the subject of romance novels, newspapers, and disturbing genitalia, allow me to excerpt this TOTALLY AUTHENTIC BOOK REVIEW from The Fairfield County Weekly:
You know what romance novels did for me? They taught me about oral sex before I knew what a clitoris was. That scared the shit out of me. I was, like, 9. And so I may have missed my chance at being the kind of romance-novel reader a lot of women are. The sameness of the stories and their boring predictability grew old fast for me once the sex-ed was out of the way. I was done with them after I'd basically learned everything to expect from sex before ever even seeing an R-rated movie. There have been reports lately that romance-novel sales are up in a time when the economy's kept book sales down. People — mainly women — are still picking up their paperbacks and taking comfort in the drama and erotica of the contemporary romance novel. But now it turns out there's a whole genre of romance where you don't even need to know what a clitoris is. Women all over are starting to dig into the still-small but fast-growing world of gay romantic fiction. And this month a screw-up at Amazon.com got more people than ever paying attention.
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