Walker Caplan News Today

Educational publisher’s move into non-fungible tokens is intended to claw back some of the income lost to secondhand sales

Though the mentions of Shakespeare writing King Lear in quarantine have mercifully decreased, it’s hard to shake the hustler’s mindset. With this vaccine rollout comes a nagging thought: when the pandemic ends, what will you have to show for it? What projects will you have done? Or—perversely— did you waste this opportunity? Here’s a little antidote for that nagging voice: The New York Times interviewed 75 artists about their experiences creating in a pandemic, and when asked “Wh...

“I have all my life been far from being an admirer,” wrote Thomas Bernhard in his novel Old Masters: A Comedy. “Nothing repels me more than observing people in the act of admiration, people infected with some admiration.” As in art was it in life: the controversial satirical playwright, poet and novelist was never blinded by pomp or formality, even when it was directed toward him. In the posthumously published My Prizes: An Accounting, Bernhard takes stock of his wins: he catalogues t...

very strong literary takes by Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Hillaire Belloc, and 36 other 20 th-century writers. Really and Truly: A Book of Literary Confessions featured handwritten answers to a set of quiz questions like, “Who is the worst living poet?” and “Who is a deceased man of letters whose character you most dislike?” (So, the Literary Twitter version of 36 Questions that Lead to Love.) The volume was originally estimated to sell for £4000-6000, but at auction this week it we...

That was the year Hunca Bubba changed his name. Not a change up, but a change back, since Jefferson Winston Vale was the name in the first place. Which was news to me cause he’d been my Hunca Bubba my whole lifetime, since I couldn’t manage Uncle to save my life. So far as I was concerned it was a change completely to somethin soundin very geographical weatherlike to me, like somethin you’d find in an almanac. Or somethin you’d run across when you sittin in the navigator seat with a wet...

February 1, 2021, 1:02pm In news that makes you say “Why?”: last week, the ACLU of Indiana filed a lawsuit against the Jackson County Public Library, on behalf of a man who was banned for life from the library over an original Trump-critical poem he left at the library. The suit claims that Jackson County Public Library has violated the man’s First Amendment rights, as well as the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Richard England, 68, has attended the Seymour branch of the J...

January 29, 2021, 1:01pm Here’s something wonderful: Karabuk University’s library, in Karabuk, Turkey, is designed to look like a row of large books on a shelf. It’s so cheerful—and there is a pleasure and clarity in something stating what it is. Others have noticed the joy of buildings like this: architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour coined the term “duck architecture” in their 1972 book Venturi, Brown and Izenour personally liked decorated sheds more t...

January 8, 2021, 12:26pm Here’s some surprising end-of-2020 good news: books are doing . . . well? According to NPD BookScan, unit sales of print books in the United States rose 8.2% in 2020. Units hit 750.9 million this year—57.2 million up from last year. This is fairly surprising, given the pandemic was expected to take a huge toll on sales; but online sales and sales through non-bookstore outlets offset the losses suffered by physical retailers. And there’s even happier news from acro...

Talk about a pivot: after philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote his first book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he grew unhappy, abandoned his teaching post at Cambridge, and started teaching elementary school in rural Austria. The dictionary he created for his students during his time in Austria, Wörterbuch für Volksschulen (Dictionary for Elementary Schools), is both a useful tool for students and a document of how Wittgenstein’s philosophy was radically altered through working with chi...

December 11, 2020, 1:52pm For Chanukah this year, we’re looking back—not back to the Maccabees, but still pretty far back. Today we’re “shining a light” (ha ha ha) on some medieval manuscripts that deal with Chanukah. Enjoy! The David Bar Pesah Mahzor, 14 th-century Germany. This 1156-page two-volume text is named after its scribe and decorator, who had a very particular design style: the initial words of many prayers and poems in the Mahzor are rendered in distinctive black-and-red e...