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Some No-Joke News and a Few Jocular Quotes

July 01, 2021 12:00 AM | Anonymous

This tidbit is a quote from Publishers Weekly:  “In an open letter, more than 250 authors, agents, booksellers, and publishers urged publishers not to sign book deals with members of the Trump administration or anyone who supported the storming of the U, S. Capitol on January 6.”

Publishers Weekly also reported that, “Amazon has been targeted in a class-action lawsuit alleging e-book price fixing.  [It’s] by the same law firm that successfully sued Apple and five major publishers for colluding to fix e-book prices in 2011.”  Meanwhile, The Washington Post points out that, “Amazon is the only major book publisher that refuses to sell downloadable versions of its e-books or audiobooks to libraries. . . .”

Yet more from Publishers Weekly:  In 2020, the children’s picture book that stayed on the bestseller lists longest—52 weeks—was an old favorite, now as a board book, Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar.  Despite impending controversy, a Dr. Seuss picture book, Oh, the Places You’ll Go, hung in there for thirty weeks.

A children’s author who frequently hit the bestselling lists, selling more than 85 million books, was Beverly Cleary, who died in March at age 104.  She was a librarian who saw the need for books about ordinary kids with ordinary kid problems and solutions.   Her stories about fictional heroes—Henry Huggins, Ramona Quimby,  Ralph S. Mouse, and others—contained both comedy and serious topics.  She always wrote from the perspective of her own childhood.  “That little girl prevents me from writing down to children. . . from writing an adult reminiscence about childhood instead of a book to be enjoyed by children.”

And as promised, here are a few good-humored quotes.  

“It was a book to kill time for those who like it better dead.”  Dame Rose Macaulay

“The covers of this book are too far apart.”  Ambrose Bierce

“This paperback is very interesting, but I find it will never replace a hardcover book—it makes a very poor doorstop.”  Alfred Hitchcock

“A bit of trash now and then is good for the severest reader.  It provides the necessary roughage in the literary diet.:  Phyllis McGinley

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