Inside Jacket

A lost fragment of a Leonardo da Vinci manuscript has been rediscovered in a French public library.

“An adventure in cultural history”: James Gleick on the O.E.D.’s new nine-thousand-four-hundred-word definition of “Information.”

A Chinese publisher recalls an edition of Grimm’s fairy tales after translating a Japanese erotic version of the book by mistake.

“I put a tip jar on my signing table and I made over $4,000″: David Sedaris explains how to make book tours fun.

Heaving bosoms, discretely: why the romance e-book market is thriving.

Amazon will make Nielsen BookScan’s nationwide sales data available to authors on its site.

Why do we always say the butler did it? In mystery writing, he never actually did?

Rebecca Skloot’s “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” tops Amazon’s list of the hundred “Best Books of 2010.”

The U.K. author Alan Shadrake faces jail time in Singapore over a book on the city-state’s death penalty.

“Good writing should be able to stand on its own, not on the literary strength of a country, and therein lies the challenge”: Kelvin Odoobo on how to be a writer in Africa.

With the departure of Irina Aleksander, the Observer loses its last female staff reporter.

Don’t write about me! The particular challenge of the unauthorized biographer.

The book-reader of Kabul: a reading list from General David Petraeus.

Furious fans protest Amazon’s price increases by giving books one-star reviews.

A Dutch court has ruled that “Hello Kitty”’s Cathy infringes the copyright of the “Miffy” children’s book series.

“More people have thought ‘Hamlet’ a work of art because they found it interesting, than have found it interesting because it is a work of art”: who else but T.S. Eliot could question the artistic integrity of “Hamlet”?

Better yet, DON’T write that novel: Laura Miller speaks out against National Novel Writing Month.

William Blake wrote “London” in 1794, but his description fits New York or Washington in 2010.

Twelve philosophers on what drew them to philosophy.

Emma Donoghue’s “Room” wins the $25,000 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.

Ronald and Bryan Williams, the founders of the rap music label Cash Money Records, plan to launch a book imprint called Cash Money Content.

How to get an author to sign your e-book.

Is Harry Potter responsible for the depletion of India’s wild owl population?

Ten art-book publishers to check out at the New York Art Book Fair this weekend.

On the A.C.L.U.’s legal battle to keep Amazon book sales private.

Stamp out hackneyed phrases with an online cliché finder.

The Israel Antiquities Authority will team up with Google to put the Dead Sea Scrolls online.

“If you’re a citizen, you do stuff for your block, for your neighbors”: Toni Morrison on living through tough times.

Amazon will allow Kindle users to lend books to each other.

Did Jane Austen rely on her editor to insert the “exquisitely placed semicolon”?

Alice Walker on her new poetry collection, “Hard Times Require Furious Dancing.”

Naif al-Mutawa’s Islamic superheroes join forces with Batman and Superman in six new issues from DC comics.

Watermelons: fruit or vegetable? Bits of “inessential knowledge” from longtime NPR librarian Kee Malesky.

Who doesn’t love an underdog? Three absorbing début novels by unheralded authors.

Commuter’s secret: the New York Public Library’s second-smallest branch is underground, next to the 6 train.

Is it wrong to use “countless” to describe things that can actually be counted?

National Book Award Finalists announced: view the full list here.

Bartleby had Asperger’s; Tiny Tim suffered from distal renal tubular acidosis: on undiagnosed maladies in literature.

Hope or satisfaction? In honor of Snow White’s two hundredth birthday, a look at the different types of fairy-tale endings.

Watch a novel being written live by thirty-six authors.

Bloomsbury will reprint fifty-thousand copies of Howard Jacobson’s “The Finkler Question,” the winner of the Man Booker Prize.

Sample six of the one hundred digested twentieth-century classics from John Crace’s Brideshead Abbreviated.

The Washington Post reviews three books about UFOs.

Why Thomas Jefferson would want us to build a National Digital Library.

“White people had all the power and blacks had none”: read an excerpt from Condoleezza Rice’s memoir about growing up in segregated Birmingham.