Inside Jacket

Forget the stock market. With enough expertise, diligence, and patience, book collecting can be a stable, long-term investment.

J. K. Rowling is the first winner of the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Prize, awarded in Andersen’s hometown of Odense, Denmark.

Books on wheels: the Harvard Book Store launches a bicycle delivery service.

At one time, university librarians chose academic journals based on content and quality; nowadays, online vendors make the decisions for them.

“Run, don’t walk” to the bookstore: Junot Díaz on Patrick Chamoiseau’s “Texaco” and other must-reads.

A new fourth-grade history textbook used in Virginia claims that thousands of African Americans fought for the South during the Civil War. Scholars say it isn’t so.

Sticky, greasy, gastronomic chaos: on the perils of editing a cookbook.

The last lonely newsweekly: why Time needs Newsweek.

Which came first: cuneiform or hieroglyphics? A University of Chicago exhibit compares the world’s earliest writing systems.

Philip Roth, John Banville, and Amos Oz are among the nominees for this year’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

Colum McCann, T. J. Stiles, and Keith Waldrop win National Book Awards.

“The Imperial Cruise” argues that Theodore Roosevelt based his foreign policy on odd notions of race.

Junot Diaz failed for five years while writing “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.”

Big event books get their own movie-style trailers.

Karl Rove’s memoir “Courage and Responsibility” will be published in March.

A Minnesota father spoke only Klingon to his child for three years.

Barack Obama is the subject of more than sixty children’s books.