By Patton Oswalt, from Silver Screen Fiend, to be published next month by Scribner. In memory of Sherman Torgan, an L.A. theater owner, Oswalt imagined “a month’s worth of titles…
From entries in Comic, Curious and Quirky: News Stories from Centuries Past, by Rona Levin, a collection of British newspaper articles published this month by the British Library.
From Conversations, a collection of dialogues conducted in 1984 and 1985 between Jorge Luis Borges and the Argentine poet Osvaldo Ferrari, out next month from Seagull Books. Translated from the…
By Muriel Spark, from The Informed Air, a collection of essays to be published this month by New Directions. This essay originally appeared in the Observer, as “Eyes and Noses,”…
From annotations written by John Stuart Mill on his personal copies of the first editions of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays, which were published in two volumes, in 1841 and 1844.…
From The Charleston Bulletin Supplements, dictated by Virginia Woolf to her nephew Quentin Bell when he was a child. Between 1923 and 1927, Bell and his brother Julian hand-produced a…
From a letter to Mark Twain, postmarked October 1, 1879, from Carl Jensen, a customs officer in Stubbekøbing, Denmark. Twain’s annotation reads, “Preserve this remarkable letter.” Dear Mark Twain: Letters…
From an 1851 “list of imitation book-backs” sent by Charles Dickens to a London bookbinder, who fabricated mock books with the fake titles. The New York Public Library re-created part…