Last spring, for Fine Books & Collections Magazine, I wrote about a coming series of young adult novels in which Sherlock Holmes was going to be a teenager. Written by Andrew Lane, the books were authorized by the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Those books are now coming to fruition. Lane, for the Scotsman, highlights his process, a bit of Sherlock Holmes history, and what one can expect with his first novel in the series, Death Cloud. 

From yesterday's Guardian newspaper, an audio slideshow about publishing from Allen Lane to Paul Hamlyn by Iain Stevenson, author of the new book, Book Makers: British Publishing in the 20th Century (British Library). It's about two minutes in length, a fun view.

The Southern Food and Beverage Museum (SoFAB) located in New Orleans lost roughly 900 cookbooks from its collection during Hurricane Katrina. It's now looking to replenish and improve its collection of cookbooks and menus by asking people to dust off their bookshelves and send their cookbooks to NOLA. Hardcover, softcover, spiral-bound cookbooks of any taste or region are needed and will become a fully accessible collection as part of the New Orleans Public Library. SoFAB also hopes to create an archive of Southern menus; this collection is housed at the University of New Orleans, where students catalog them. Chris Smith, director of collections at SoFAB said, "We treat cookbooks and menus as artifacts."

So if you have cookbooks or Southern menus that are under-used in your house, consider donating them to this good cause. Send them directly to Chris Smith at the Southern Food and Beverage Museum, One Poydras Street, #169, New Orleans, LA 70130-1657.

Miles Standish glares at you from a shelf. Nearby, so does Little Orphan Annie. She's on the cover of a book so small you can fit the entire tome in the palm of your hand. It's a (red) hair under $100. Elsewhere, the Shadow is fighting crime on the cover of an old magazine, which is selling for several hundred dollars.

Close by sits a first edition of Stephen King's Carrie. The next aisle over has M.F.K. Fisher's How to Cook a Wolf in its original dust jacket and close to the rafts of old postcards and reams of black and white photographs of people long dead.

Collecting, however, will never die, as evidenced by those shopping, marveling and dickering this past weekend at the Seattle Book and Paper Show that took place at the Seattle Center Exhibition Hall.

In its second year, the fair showcased thousands of used and collectible books, maps, posters, photographs, postcards and ephemera. If you love the printed word, you'd love the show. If you had $10 to spend, or $10,000, you'd find something you'd want to take home. Want books? Whether it's a collectible Oz title or a book about the westward expansion of railroads; a book of poems by Robert Service or a history of the Pacific Theater in WWII, the show showed it. Want prints? Botanicals, animals, scenes of all kinds, they were there. Posters? Photographs? There were piles of them, whether they were promoting Austrian travel or promoting John Steinbeck's journalism in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Postcards? They had tons of them. One could have been a shot of West Seattle's long since forgotten Luna Park amusement park at night. Another might have been of downtown Hong Kong fifty years ago. One might of been of Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. Another might of been of a monkey. Ephemera? Vintage road maps, old menus, and sci-fi magazines could be found, along with vintage comic books, like 1944's Miss America No. 1 (worth oodles more now than the dime cover price).

Dealers, though primarily Seattle-focused, came from as far as Portland, Oregon, and Cheyenne, Wyoming; Mesa, Arizona and Venice, Florida. As wide as their geographic location may be, their interests were even wider. Salem's Rob and Jane Edwards specialty was horror magazines. Leavenworth's Far Fetched Books displayed pop-up books. Seattle's Carolyn Staley Fine Japanese Prints offered beautiful images from a land and time gone by, and Bea and Peter Siegal Books, based in Corvallis, offered culinary Americana.

Books and papers - there were plenty of it to be had at the show, whether it was a first edition of Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls or an old Flash comic book.

First published on City Arts online.

A 1794 silver dollar sells for a record-breaking $7.85 million, and the "world's most valuable stamp" also changes hands for an undisclosed amount. Read the report in yesterday's New York Times. 

Today's previous blog post by L.D. Mitchell sparked the remembrance that today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Margaret Wise Brown. There can't be many readers out there who don't know her children's books -- Goodnight Moon being the most famous, but Big Red Barn and Runaway Bunny have always been favorites in my house. Though Brown was a hugely successful children's writer, her private life was tumultuous. A biography by children's book historian Leonard S. Marcus was published more than ten years ago, and he is still touring and telling her amazing story.

Really cool news from the Northeast Document Conservation Center -- conservators at the Andover facility have finished working on a set of late nineteenth-century circus posters that were found pasted to the boards under the siding of an old house. The posters were affixed to a Colchester, Vermont house in 1883, when the circus came to town.

The house's owner donated the posters to the Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, Vermont. Conservators there found the safest way to remove the posters was to take them, boards and all. In early 2010, the NEDCC treated the posters and found yet another clown in the car, so to speak. Several more advertising posters from other circuses were pasted underneath the top layer.

The posters are now on display as part of the Shelburne Museum's new exhibit, Circus Day in America, through October 24. Through art, artifacts, photographs, and film, Circus Day in America looks at the art and experience of the circus during its heyday from 1870-1950. (The image pictured above was published by the Strobridge Litho. Co. in 1882. Courtesy of Shelburne Museum.) An operating vintage carousel operates daily at the museum too; in other words, families welcome! Plus there's also an Ansel Adams photography exhibit going on at the same time.

To read more about the step-by-step conservation of the posters, visit the NEDCC website, or watch the Flickr slideshow.

The Writers Room at 740 Broadway in New York advertises itself as "the nation's largest and oldest urban writers' colony," a vibrant little oasis of creative energy "located in a bright and airy loft at the crossroads of Greenwich Village and the East Village."  Sounds utterly charming, no? A welcoming haven where kindred spirits driven to commit words to paper--excuse me, words to screen--come to realize their full potential as writers.

That is unless, of course, you happen to do your writing on a typewriter, in which case you will be told to pack your gear and leave--and don't let the door whack you on the backside on the way out, either, heaven forbid it might disturb one of the fragile geniuses toiling away in tortured silence in a little carrel nearby. That's what has happened, at least, to a children's book author by the name of Skye Ferrante, who was told to gather up his 1929 Royal and vacate the premises, his incessant tapping of the keys was bothering the other writers.

Back in the old days--and by the old days, like just a few months ago--there was a sign in the Writers Room advising all members that "in the event there are no desks available, laptop users must make room for typists." When Ferrante showed up recently to work--and the dues are $1,400 a year, by the way, so he wasn't there hat in hand--the sign was gone, and he was told he had to either use a laptop, or get out, and that the remainder of his membership fee would be refunded.

"I was told I was the unintended beneficiary of a policy to placate the elderly members who have all since died off," Ferrante, 37, told the New York Daily News. He refused; like a lot of us, he likes working with paper, and he likes the feel of old typewriters. "Some people like to listen to vinyl," he said. "Some people prefer to drive a stick shift."

Writers Room Executive Director Donna Brodie confirmed the ban, explaining that Ferrante's typing was, indeed, a distraction. Allowing him to type, she said, "would mean that everybody else who wanted to work in that room would have to flee. No one wants to work around the clacking of a typewriter. That's why the room had been established."

Really.

Tell that to Cormac McCarthy, or David McCullough, just two writers I can think of off the top of my head who swear by their typewriters, and I guess that would have dealt out the late Robert B. Parker and George V. Higgins as well. I wonder if any of these abused writers ever spent any time in a newsroom--a real newsroom, where the ever-present clatter of typewriters was intoxicating, like the sound of waves rolling up on a beach. And I wonder what the attitude there would be toward someone who might have the temerity to write with a Number 2 pencil. Might the scratching there be a bit too obtrusive as well?

A bright and airy loft, indeed.