Book News, In Brief

It's this week's winner of The Last Book I'll Ever Read award: An American made, Gossip Girl 'manga.'


The NYTimes investigates the curative powers of the brown bag book cover, linking aesthetics with acceptance in When Bad Covers Happen to Good Books.


The Guardian UK puts sell-out sonnetists in the hot-seat, asking some of today's most successful poets, What's with all of the poetry-prostituting in crap-culture advertising?


A top Australian design firm was recently hired by the State Library of New South Wales to create an ad campaign that would make the 100-year-old Mitchell Library "sexy." They came up with a font. As to whether it's an EPIC FAIL or visual Viagra, you decide.


CNN exhumes a pile of bones and bodices, dares to ask, What Really Killed Jane Austen? (As an aside: Could classics crossed with crime fic be the next big genre mash-up? Is CSI: Meryton the next Pride & Prejudice & Zombies? If so, I call copyright.)


A first edition of Anne of Green Gables is slated for sale at a Sotheby's auction this Friday. While pundits predict it could fetch up to $25,000, the fact that an original copy of Edgar Allan Poe's Tamerlane and Other Poems sold for $662,500 last Friday makes me think that you and I are waaay too poor to bother bidding.