Ink on Paper under Pen

From: Fountain Pens

"Writing with a pen or pencil on a piece of paper is becoming an infrequent activity, even for those who were once taught the rigorous rules of penmanship in grade school and hardly saw a day go by without jotting down a telephone number or a list of food items to buy at the market on the way home, and for that purpose carried with them something to write with and something to write on. In an emergency, lacking pen or notebook, they might even approach a complete stranger to ask for assistance. For instance, on a cold January morning, I once asked a fashionably dressed middle-aged woman, standing outside a building on Madison Avenue smoking a cigarette and shivering, whether she had a pen I could use. She didn’t think this was an odd request and was happy to oblige me. After she extracted a pencil not much bigger than a matchstick from her purse, I took out a little notebook I carried in my pocket, and not trusting the reliability of my memory, wrote down some lines of poetry I had been mulling over for the previous hour, roaming the streets. Today, she’d probably be staring at an iPhone or a blackberry while puffing away on her cigarette and it would not cross my mind to bother her by asking for a pencil."
— Charles Simie, The New York Review of Books
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From: Princeton University Library - Sketch (1963) from the notebooks of the Argentine novelist and short story writer Julio Cortázar (1914-1984)

Sometimes soft is better than hard...

"Publishers say they have a new sense of urgency with the paperback, since the big, simultaneous release of hardcover and electronic editions now garners a book the bulk of the attention it is likely to receive, leaving the paperback relatively far behind. They may also be taking their cues from Hollywood, where movie studios have trimmed marketing costs by steadily closing the gap between the theatrical release of films and their arrival on DVD. [...]
     'It’s definitely making the consumer happy to have the paperback available sooner,' said Peter Aaron, the owner of the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, an independent store. 'If there’s one form of printed book that will survive, if there was only one, it would be the trade paperback.' ”
— Julie Bosman, The New York Times
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"Speaking of Pulp Noir stories, Stephen King wrote a book [...] called The Colorado Kid for Hard Case Crime, a book publisher who embraces the 1950s style pulp crime novel genre. Check out the awesome 1950s cover. Here's a great quote from the press release:
     ' "This is an exciting line of books," Stephen King commented, "and I'm delighted to be a part of it. Hard Case Crime presents good, clean, bare-knuckled storytelling, and even though The Colorado Kid is probably more bleu than outright noir, I think it has some of those old-fashioned kick-ass story-telling virtues. It ought to; this is where I started out, and I'm pleased to be back." '
Unfortunately, while the cheap trashy $5 paperback format fits the style, I always prefer hardback books with clean thick acid free paper. The presentation of a book is a big factor in my enjoyment of the book. [...]'
— Mike Shea
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Get Stephen King books (hard and soft) here...

Summer Book Game

From: YeahWriters

"I think of the paperback game as a summertime entertainment, best played in beach and lake houses and old inns, all of which tend to collect visitors’ random and abandoned books. So the weekend of the Fourth of July seems like a good time to share, review and/or clarify the rules. From here you can bend them to your will and make the game your own.
     Here’s what you’ll need to play: slips of paper (index cards work well), a handful of pencils or pens and a pile of paperback books. Any sort of book will do, from a Dostoyevsky to a Jennifer Egan, and from diet guides to the Kama Sutra."— Dwight Garner, The New York Times
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