From: Wikipedia; The Canadian Encyclopedia; Postal History Corner

"[John] McCrae was born in McCrae House in Guelph, Ontario [Canada] to Lieutenant-Colonel David McCrae and Janet Simpson Eckford; he was the grandson of Scottish immigrants. He attended the Guelph Collegiate Vocational Institute and became a member of the Guelph militia regiment.[...]
     When the United Kingdom declared war on Germany at the start of World War I, Canada, as a Dominion within the British Empire, declared war as well. McCrae was appointed as a field surgeon in the Canadian artillery and was in charge of a field hospital during the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915.
     McCrea's friend and former student, Lt. Alexis Helmer, was killed in the battle, and his burial inspired the poem, In Flanders Fields, which was written on May 3, 1915 and first published in the magazine Punch.[...]
     From June 1, 1915 McCrae was ordered away from the artillery to set up No. 3 Canadian General Hospital at Dannes-Camiers near Boulogne-sur-Mer, northern France. C.L.C. Allinson reported that McCrae 'most unmilitarily told [me] what he thought of being transferred to the medicals and being pulled away from his beloved guns. His last words to me were: "Allinson, all the goddamn doctors in the world will not win this bloody war: what we need is more and more fighting men." '
     In Flanders Fields appeared anonymously in Punch on December 8, 1915, but in the index to that year McCrae was named as the author. The verses swiftly became one of the most popular poems of the war, used in countless fund-raising campaigns and frequently translated (a Latin version begins In agro belgico...). In Flanders Fields was also extensively printed in the United States, which was contemplating joining the war [...] " —Wikipedia



In Flanders Fields


In Flanders fields, the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; wait and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.


We are the dead, short days ago,
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields!


Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands, we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields!


- John McCrea (May 3, 1915)


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Smoking Jackets

More unfortunate cover choices here...
and here...

Amazon is not just a river. Neither is denial.

From: Wikia Brazil

"The news that Amazon is preparing to release more than 100 books this fall was predictably greeted in doomsday tones. 'Amazon.com has taught readers that they do not need bookstores. Now it is encouraging writers to cast aside their publishers,' lamented the Times. The mood was summed up by Richard Curtis, an agent and e-book publisher who was one of the few publishing professionals willing to speak on the record. 'Everyone’s afraid of Amazon,' he said. 'If you’re a publisher, one day you wake up and Amazon is competing with you too. And if you’re an agent, Amazon may be stealing your lunch because it is offering authors the opportunity to publish directly and cut you out.' The trouble isn’t just that Amazon is stealing some money-making authors. It’s that 'the company is gnawing away at the services that publishers, critics and agents used to provide.'
     Note the past tense. If traditional book publishing is failing to provide services that once were standard, someone will inevitably step in to fill the vacuum. There are three major steps in publishing and selling a book, and in each of them Amazon is offering a service that has been neglected by the mainstream: [...]"
— Ruth Franklin, The New Republic
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Travel Books

From: Reanimation Library

"Tom Corwin clearly recalls the day when, on a whim, he decided to buy and restore a classic bookmobile.
     'The best ideas just happen to you,' says Corwin, a writer and musician whose boyish, intense enthusiasm is highly contagious. 'A friend came to dinner, and showed me the ad. He was hoping to use the bookmobile to extend his home library—into his back yard. When he realized it wouldn’t fit, I had an idea: Get well-known authors behind the wheel of the bookmobile, taking turns on a drive across the country, talking about the books that have touched their lives. What a great way to remind people of our connection to the written word, and how powerful it can be.'
     Corwin, who lives just north of San Francisco, picked up the vehicle in Chicago. Made by Moroney— a family-owned company in Massachusetts, and America’s last hand-builder of bookmobiles— the mobile library had just been retired after 15 years of travel. Its sturdy oak shelves had showcased more than 3,200 books.
     [...] The first bookmobile seems to have appeared in Warrington, England, in 1859. That horse-drawn cart, a 'perambulating library,' lent some 12,000 books during its first year of operation—a century before the sleek vehicle that would visit Arlington, Massachusetts, during my own elementary school years.
     America’s first 'traveling branch library' plied the county roads of Maryland, championed by visionary librarian Mary Titcomb. 'Filled with an attractive collection of books and drawn by two horses,' wrote Titcomb, 'with Mr. Thomas the janitor both holding the reins and dispensing the books, it started on its travels in April 1905.' "— Jeff Greenwald, Smithsonian
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"Penny Dreadfuls" Revisited

From: Wikipedia

"Self-publishing: it's exploding in popularity, we all know that, with self-published authors selling millions via Amazon's Kindle, pushing traditionally published authors out of the top spots on new ebook charts, etc etc. But did you know that self-publishing websites are attracting more than 40% of all China's internet users every month? I didn't, and I am reeling, a little, from the statistic.
     These aren't Authonomy-esque, publish-and-be-encouraged-by-fellow-writers sorts of sites, though, or even collections of self-published novels. The websites host what is being dubbed 'freemium' publishing. Publishing Perspectives has more details: a growing number of self-publishing websites host thousands of free-to-read web serials – anything from historical epics to sci-fi – posted by their authors. As a serial gathers critical mass, the author is invited to become a 'VIP', and readers have to pay for the new instalments – only a few yuan, but these micropayments from readers can number in the millions: China Daily reports that one author, the 26-year-old Huang Wei, makes more than more than Y1m a year (£100,000).
     'It's pure entertainment, written, downloaded, read and deleted all at top speed,' says Beijing-based literary translator and publishing consultant Eric Abrahamsen, who also writes for the Chinese publishing industry newsletter Paper Republic. 'Basically all of this writing is genre fiction. It is produced by young writers and aimed at young readers.' " — Alison Flood, Guardian
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The Birth of Bertha

Painting of the Brontë sisters by their brother
Branwell Brontë (circa 1834)
from: Wikimedia Commons

"A newly-discovered manuscript reveals the author [Chalotte Brontë] imagined the creepy character [Bertha] 17 years earlier, when she was just a teenager. The hand-written story, penned by the author at the age of 14, has laid hidden in a private collection and has never been seen before by scholars. [...] Experts have drawn attention to passages with echo the chapter in Jane Eyre where Mr Rochester’s insane wife, Bertha, sets fire to his house. [...] In another passage, she gives a vivid description of the attic similar to the one which becomes the home of the mentally-ill Mrs Rochester. [...]
     With hand-cut pages, she replicated the format of printed periodicals of the day, complete with table of contents, articles, poetry and classified advertisements, one of which reads: ‘Six young men wish to let themselves all a hire for the purpose of cleaning out pockets they are in reduced CIRCUMSTANCES [sic].’
     Inspired by Blackwood’s Magazine, to which her father subscribed, she called hers The Young Men’s Magazine, Number 2, and dated it August 1830. It is the missing second volume of a series of six.
     Most of her manuscripts are now in public institutions in Britain and America, and the anonymous owners of this one had no idea of its significance when they approached Sotheby’s in London about selling it. [...] It is expected to sell for £300,000 when it goes on sale at Sotheby’s in London next month." — Dalya Alberge, Daily Mail
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"This autumn sees two new film adaptations of novels by the Brontë sisters: one, directed by Andrea Arnold, of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and the other of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, directed by Cary Fukunaga. Making a film adaptation of a classic novel is an ambitious and risky business—both of these books have been read, studied, loved and debated for over 150 years. The destructive passion of Catherine and Heathcliff and the stoic, enduring love of Jane and Rochester have seeped into the common consciousness.
     There are already several film adaptations of both novels, such as Robert Stevenson’s gothic 1943 interpretation of Jane Eyre and Robert Fuest’s unconventional 1970 take on Wuthering Heights. So why make any more? The preoccupations of Victorian ladies, such as status, marriage and inheritance, aren’t as potent as they once were. Yet the darker forces of these books, including their undertones of feminism and concerns with inequities and feelings of alienation, are as relevant as ever."— More Intelligent Life
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Merci, Wiki...

"Ever the deadpan comedian, Michel Houellebecq includes in the acknowledgments of the British edition [translated by Gavin Bowd] of his new novel, a brief but perfectly straight thank-you to Wikipedia. Following the publication of The Map and the Territory in France last year, he was somewhat half-heartedly accused of plagiarising the information website, co-opting material on houseflies, a French town and a hunting activist. At the time – which was before the novel had won the Prix Goncourt – Houellebecq was rather persuasively dismissive about the allegations, retorting that his detractors understood very little about either literature or his writing methods. [...]
     His fifth novel is a wonderfully strange and subversive enterprise, in which a semi-satirical examination of the art world gives way to a gory police procedural, realistic fictional characters mingle with utterly improbable figures who are in fact taken from real life, the author himself makes a low-key entrance and a thoroughly dramatic exit, and subjects under discussion range from the changing nature of the French countryside to the possibility of accurate artistic representations of art and the probability of writing a compelling thriller about radiators." — Alex Clark, Guardian
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