LISNews: Librarian News

In Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books (Yale, $20), a new collection of photographs and interviews, editor Leah Price asks 13 authors, including three couples, about the books and bookcases in their homes.

Author Philip Pullman says that when moving into a new house eight years ago, "we thought that at last we'd have room for all our books. No chance!"

Rebecca Goldstein (Properties of Light: A Novel) and Stephen Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined) share floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that consist of a matrix of white tubes.

"They make it easy to categorize and find books," Pinker says, "and they do away with the need for those awful things called bookends."

Stephen Carter (The Emperor of Ocean Park) says he's not troubled that his books are not, for the most part, arranged as in a library. ("How dull to have everything at one's fingertips!" he says.)

Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn) says he's constantly arranging and rearranging his books — sometimes by "alphabetical absolution" and, at times, according to the "imperatives of genre, subject, size, color." On his shelves, Beckett stands next to Bellow, but The Phantom Tollboth, the children's classic by Norton Juster, illustrated by Jules Feiffer, is next to Kafka.

Each writer featured in Unpacking My Library was asked to list the top 10 books on his or her bookshelves. -- Read More

Writers and Their Books: Inside Famous Authors' Personal Libraries
Alongside the formidable collections—featuring Alison Bechdel, Stephen Carter, Junot Díaz, Rebecca Goldstein and Steven Pinker, Lev Grossman and Sophie Gee, Jonathan Lethem, Claire Messud and James Wood, Philip Pullman, Gary Shteyngart, and Edmund Whit—are short interviews with the authors about the books most important to them (including their top 10), their style of organization, and their thoughts on what the future of books might hold. (Cue in writers on the future of books.) The interviews are prefaced by Leah Price's fascinating brief history of bookshelves, from the rise of the vertical book on a horizontal shelf to how social bookmarking services are changing our relationship with tagging and indexing information.

Canadian authors: Really big ... just not in Canada
Such pleasant surprises for Canadian authors are less common than they once were, despite what may seem to be impressive sales of foreign rights. Foreign publishers can acquire those rights cheaply enough that postponing or even cancelling a book’s publication is always feasible – and increasingly likely today, according to Bukowksi.

From Penguin via GalleyCat:

Stick around for the final commentary from author Heather Brewer about how a librarian changed her life.