Inside Jacket

I hate to write an obit for a bookstore (as I did recently for Daedalus), and it’s even more painful for an entire chain such as Borders, which announced today that it is headed for a liquidation sale. The chain said it has 399 stores and employs approximately 10,700 employees.

"Following the best efforts of all parties, we are saddened by this development," Borders Group President Mike Edwards said in a prepared statement. "We were all working hard towards a different outcome, but the headwinds we have been facing for quite some time, including the rapidly changing book industry, eReader revolution, and turbulent economy, have brought us to where we are now."

Borders said that subject to the bankruptcy court’s approval, liquidation is expected to start for some stores as soon as July 22, and conclude by the end of September.

I have fond memories of the Towson Borders, which played a big part in helping to revive the town. My kids spent a lot of time there — before it moved a few miles north, ceding Towson to Barnes & Noble. Even in its new location in Lutherville, the store provided a welcoming spot for readers, and was the place I bought my first (and last) book from Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series. I guess I could go back for the liquidation sale to get some bargains, but those events depress me, so I’m likely to pass.

Bye-bye, Borders.

As a fan of Google Doodles, the changing logos used periodically to enhance the usually dull search page, I was happy to see a drawing that marks the 450th anniversary of St. Basil’s Cathedral along Red Square in Moscow.

According to a brief history in Fodor’s, the church was commissioned by Ivan the Terrible to celebrate his conquest of the Tatar city of Kazan, and each chapel is topped by an onion dome carved with its own distinct pattern and dedicated to a saint on whose day the Russian army won battles against the Tatars. The cathedral was built between 1555 and 1560 on the site of the earlier Trinity Church, where the Holy Fool Vasily (Basil) had been buried in 1552.

It’s a stunning sight from Red Square, though I recall from a visit years ago that the interior was rather dull — and had nothing like the colors and patterns on the domes. (If you’re into kitsch, you can own a mini version with these SBC bookends.)

For more Doodles, check out this compilation – including the recent Les Paul digital guitar — from PC magazine.

Today’s launch of the Space Shuttle Atlantis, had an other-worldly feel. For those of us old enough to recall the Mercury and Gemini flights, not to mention the Challenger disaster, it’s hard to imagine that our manned space program is winding down.

The space race has provided some great reading. My favorite remains "The Right Stuff," Tom Wolfe’s account of the Americans who became space pioneers. As you can imagine, they were a daring, colorful bunch, and some of the macho test pilots rebelled at being strapped onto a rocket over which they had little control. It’s an entertaining, irreverent look at the beginnings of our space program. May be time to re-read it.

Grammarians have been twisting themselves up in recent days, due to a report that the Oxford comma, also known as the serial comma, is being scrapped. Seems it was a mistake, an error, and a miscommunication. The distinctive comma, which precedes the word "and," is sometimes used to help clarify the meaning of a sentence. At The Baltimore Sun, which uses AP style, the serial comma is not favored. But having an Oxford pedigree has helped the special comma endure.

As Linda Holmes of NPR noted about the controversy, the folks at the University of Oxford "haven’t changed their authoritative style guide, but they’ve changed their internal PR department procedures that they use for press releases. The PR department and the editorial department are two different things, so this doesn’t necessarily mean much of anything, except that it’s maybe a little embarrassing to have your own PR department abandoning your style guide."

I’m not one to get excited over punctuation, though it is often the topic of dinner conversation with my wife, a Strict Constructionist Grammarian who often spots tyops and other problems on Read Street. (That one’s for you.) I did invent a significant punctuation mark — the Fini — but it has not caught on. Neither has Patrick’s Tentative Hyphen. So relax, folks. The Oxford comma endures — and probably will as long as there is an England.

If Tina Brown knows one thing, it’s how to generate buzz, so no one should be surprised that she brought Princess Diana back from the dead. Newsweek’s cover imagines Di as she would be at age 50. And the story, richly imagined by Brown herself, carries a sense of the inner circle (not to mention breathless modifiers like uber- and schadenfreude).

A sampling: "Gliding sleekly into her 40s, her romantic taste would have moved to men of power over boys of play. She’d have tired of the hedge-fund guy and drifted into undercover trysts with someone more exciting—a high-mindedly horny late-night talk-show host, or a globe-trotting French finance wizard destined for the Élysée Palace. I suspect she would have retained a weakness for men in uniform, and a yen for dashing Muslim men. (A two-year fling with a Pakistani general, rumored to have links to the ISI, would have been a particular headache to the Foreign Office and the State Department.)"

Some see the story — and the digitally enhanced photo of Di with Kate — as a brazen attempt to cash in on Brtitish royalty. To others, the reimit will be fun to read. (And not so far from the theme of Monica Ali’s new novel, "Untold Story," which imagines Di faking her death and moving to America’s midwest.) You make the call: crass or a blast?