Inside Jacket

Apparently Victor Hugo, Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, James Whitcomb Riley, Edmond Rostand, Benjamin Franklin, and Agatha Christie all did at least some of their writing in the buff.

The woman whoes hands posed with an apple on the front cover of Twilight apparently thought fame and fortune were on the way when Meyer’s book took off. Now she’s accosting people that she finds reading the book:

“I see people reading it on the subway, and I say, ‘Those are my hands! I’m a hand model!’ ” she explained. “I’m sure they think I’m crazy — a crazy lady on the subway.”

Apparently she also hangs out at Twilight conventions trying to sell apples… yikes.

Let’s all do the Page 99 Test – coined by Ford Madox Ford – to see if a book is worth reading. Just open to page 99, have a gander and if it sounds interesting head to the beginning. If it sounds not so good, then…..

I’ve just opened The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews, which is supposed to be pretty good, and scanned page 99. There appears to be two people talking about yoga, which is an instant turn-off for me. One paragraph gives me hope – someone called Logan explains his hero is a person who cut off their own arm with a penknife after being pinned under a huge rock.

I smiled after hearing about how a lorry (the North American translation is truck) tipped over and spilled boxes containing 15 tonnes of Andrew Marr’s book, The Making of Modern Britain, on to the road side. The Making of Modern Britain is a portrait of life in Britain during the first half of the 20th century and the publisher can now add an extra blurb to the cover – “Caused a traffic jam.”

There were no reports of drivers skidding to a halt and running over to pick up copies. A free modern history book, even a rather populist one by a famous bloke off the telly, doesn’t have much appeal. Imagine if the boxes had contained copies of a new Harry Potter in the days prior to publication – that would have been a nasty scene with people fighting each other for a book.

I never thought I’d say this but I miss Harry Potter. The arrival of each new novel caused a massive buzz and there is no other author capable to producing such a reaction in the general public.

A 94-year-old typewriter repairman tells the Yale Daily News that typewriters are better than computers. (Well, he would wouldn’t he? Otherwise he’d be out a job.)

In some ways, he is right because there certainly seems to be a growing interest in typewriters by a generation who have never seen them in action. Also they are becoming more and more collectible. George Bernard Shaw’s typewriter sold for $7,979 on AbeBooks in 2008 and last year Cormac McCarthy’s typewriter was sold at auction for more than $250,000.