Bookstore Bits

Shakespeare and Company 
  This storied bookshop is in Paris, not England, and Shakespeare never visited it. There are lineups to get in, however, and it has been around for a long time. A recent article in The Economist wondered why it is so popular: "What the World’s Most Famous Bookshop Reveals About Culture: Shakespeare and Company in Paris is Turning 75. Is its Success Replicable?", Aug. 27, 2026
   Probably not, to answer the question posed in that title. Many people  show up because it is on the left bank of the Seine. Myth has something to do with it since there was an earlier Shakespeare and Company and the American owner of that shop had many famous friends, like Hemingway. It also helps that the shop has "hundreds of thousands of social-media followers," some of whom may actually read books. It also does not hurt that many have seen films in which the bookshop has a role, Midnight in Paris and Before Sunset, for example. Even those who stay at home may have watched Emily in Paris, the TV series.

  While Shakespeare and Company may have been seen by many, those who enter are not allowed to take "selfies", or photos inside the store, which is said to enhance the store's mystique. If you buy a book, it is stamped with the shop's name and logo, which proves one was there. Authors also visit and sign books which "can triple sales" and "higher-margin merchandise, including tote bags and notebooks, accounts for around 30% of total sales." I suppose that what this "Bookshop Reveals About Culture" is that the success of Shakespeare and Company cannot be attributed solely to books or a great desire to read them.

The Bulk Buying of Books
   Back in Canada, very large numbers of used books are being purchased. This is not necessarily good news. They are not bought to be read, but to be scanned. The books are pulled apart and used for training for large language models like Claude.

  "Physical books, particularly those published before OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022, are in demand for AI companies. That's partly because some experts say the language models degrade when repeatedly trained on their own output, so they need to be fed with content that is guaranteed to be free of AI-generated text."

That is from: "Used Bookstores Navigate 'Suspicious Bulk Orders Amid AI Book-Shredding Fears," Kevin Maimann, CBC News, Sept 1, 2026.

A Beautiful Bookshop
  In the article in The Economist there is mention of Livraria Lello in Porto which looks like "a cross between a cathedral and a robber baron's mansion." You have to buy a ticket to get in.

London's Bicentennial (Snippet 44)

A Transatlantic Flight From London to London in 1927
  In my last snippet, to mark London's 200th birthday, I wrote about a London brewer who was kidnapped in 1934. In this one a London brewery (Carling) offered in 1927, $25,000 to any aviator who successfully crossed the Atlantic. There are many accounts in the news about these London stories and samples about this one are found below.
  Also provided are some sources for those who would like to read more about this aviation adventure, which was not a successful one. The Sir John Carling was able to make it to Newfoundland after a couple of delays, but the plane did not go much farther and was never found, nor were the pilot and aviator.
   

 "Flying From the Heart of the Empire to the Soul of the Empire" - 1927

From the Evening Star (Washington) Aug. 11, 1927.

Sources:
  The picture of the postcard is found at Miller & Miller Auctions where a good account is provided by Tess Malloy: "Brewing With Ambition: The Ill-fated Carling's Brewery London-to-London Challenge: A Daring Transatlantic Journey Ends in Tragedy and Mystery," Oct. 9, 2023.
  The "Empire quotation" is in this article by Larry Cornies: "A Plane Was Lost, and So Was a Story of London's Aviation History," London Free Press, May 21, 2022. Here is a portion:

  "Mere months after Charles Lindbergh's gruelling 33½-hour flight from New York to Paris in May 1927, London entrepreneurs decided the coming age of aeronautics was too exciting to pass up. And Lindbergh's achievement sparked what local historian Alice Gibb has called "the ultimate public relations campaign in London's history."

   That campaign was put together by Arthur Carty, a former London Free Press reporter who had built a news and publicity service with his uncle Edmund Carty, and Charles Burns, president of Carling Breweries.

   The ad they posted in The Free Press on June 29, 1927, only 38 days after Lindbergh's flight, was for a "Canadian aviator to fly from London, Ont., to London, Eng." The $25,000 prize - the same amount paid to Lindbergh - would be equivalent to about $400,000 today. The funds were held in trust by London businessperson Ray Lawson, with the support of mayor John M. Moore and London Chamber of Commerce president A.J. Grant.

  A flood of applications poured in from pilots willing to risk the 6,200-kilometre trip "from the heart of the Empire to the soul of the Empire" in a Stinson Detroiter monoplane, made by Stinson Aircraft Corp. in Detroit.

   The pilot ultimately chosen was Capt.Terence Bernard Tully, a 33-year-old decorated Royal Air Force aviator and former Aero plane test pilot for A.V. Roe and Co. Tully and his wife Anne had immigrated from Ireland four years earlier; he had logged more than 2,500 hours flying for Ontario's forestry service. Tully then selected Lt. James Medcalf, 28, another RAF veteran, as his co-pilot and navigator."
  The pilots took off from Harbour Grace, NL and the story is reported by some folks out east: "Disaster Strikes: The Sir John Carling," Community Stories. (n.d.)

See also, "Harbour Grace Airstrip," by Harbour Grace Tourism. 

Fran Lebowitz's Library

  Fran Lebowitz is a very funny person who has a very serious library of around 12,000 books. It is not the kind of library one would expect from someone kicked out of school twice, mostly because of "nonspecific surliness" or general petulance. She became an atheist at 7 and has smoked since she was 12, but is still around at 75. You may have seen her on Letterman or Leno, or even on Fallon or Maher. If you read anything about her or by her, you will laugh a lot. See, Fran Lebowitz on Wikipedia for starters. It doesn't mention that she owns a Checker Marathon, which seems about right.
   Almost ten years ago, she answered some questions about her library and some of them are presented below.
 
[When you saw her name above, you may have thought of that other Jewish New Yorker, the famous photographer who ran into financial trouble a few years ago and whose photo collection caused a real kerfuffle out in Nova Scotia. She is Annie Lebovitz, with a V not a W.]

From: "Fran Lebowitz: By the Book". The New York Times. March 21, 2017.

How do you organize your books?

  My books are organized first by category. Fiction, letters, essays. Those kinds of categories. And then there are many subdivisions. Then within categories, they’re alphabetized. I always have arguments with the guy who helps me organize my books, because I have a biography section. He says: “You can’t have a biography section. You have to have them arranged by writer. For instance, Henry James’s fiction, then the letters, the biographies, etc.” And I say: “I know. That’s the right way to do it. But that would take up too much space.” All the apartments I buy or rent are for my books, not for myself. I don’t need the space. I’m 5-foot-4. I have a whole bookcase that this guy calls “your crazy books.” The crazy book category. Those books are not alphabetized.

   I also have a large reference library. I have numerous encyclopedias; I have many, many dictionaries. I actually bought myself the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1978. I always wanted it, and when I wrote my first book and had some money, I bought it. I didn’t have it growing up; I had the World Book, because it was less expensive. The Encyclopaedia Britannica was so hard to buy, I can’t tell you. I had to make one million phone calls. Because it was generally sold on an installment plan. They didn’t know how to send these books to someone who is just going to send a check.

Nobody uses these books anymore, but I do. When the second edition of the O.E.D. came out, there was nothing I wanted more. It was like $10,000. I had a friend who owned a bookstore, and I begged her to let me buy it at cost, and she did. It was still several thousand dollars, but I’m delighted to own it, even though I think it’s now free on the internet.

You’re in the process of moving your personal library. What’s that been like?

   Believe me, I’m not in the process of it yet. Because it’s so awful, I keep putting it off. But I just did it a year and a half ago. They come and pack the books. That takes three days. But two times before that, it took two months to organize them first. I have many bookcases. They have glass doors. They are mostly 19th-century. The books all go in certain places in my apartment. I like to have fiction in the living room, reference books in the writing room. I have 10,000 books. I know this because I move them. When I move, I go through them and take some out. Many books come to this house unbidden. And unbidden books, I don’t want to keep them. Once the books are all rearranged, I can put my hand on any book. I know where they all are.

When do you read?

   Pretty much all the time. Especially if I’m supposed to be doing something else. I was very frequently punished for reading as a child because I was reading when I was supposed to be doing homework. I got in trouble in school for reading, I got in trouble at home for reading. My mother would actually bang on my door and say, “I know you’re reading in there!” In my adult life, I’ve gotten in trouble for reading because I’m not writing when I’m reading. So it’s really rare that reading is unaccompanied by guilt for me. But I’ve learned to live with it. I feel guilty pretty much all the time.

How do you like to read? Paper or electronic? One book at a time or several simultaneously?

   Obviously, paper. I mean, actually, on his show once, Jimmy Fallon gave me a Kindle. He actually gave it to me as a present. I said: “I know you gave me this because I don’t have one. You know what else I don’t have? A Bentley.”

   I don’t think they’re horrible. I don’t object to them. I’m just not interested in them. People are always showing me this stuff like I’m from outer space and I’ve never heard of it. I have really bad eyesight, so they always tell me you can make the type bigger. I suppose that would be a good thing for me, but I don’t care. I’d rather squint.

"The only monogamous relationship I have had 
in my life is with my car."

You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

   None. I would never do it. My idea of a great literary dinner party is Fran, eating alone, reading a book. That’s my idea of a literary dinner party. When I eat alone, I spend a lot of time, before I sit down to my meager meal, choosing what to read. And I’m a lot better choosing a book than preparing a meal. And I never eat anything without reading. Ever. If I’m eating an apple, I have to get a book.

Postscript:
  I see that this is the third private library in a row that I have presented, which is curated by a woman. The other two: Hannah Arendt and Marilyn Monroe!

London's Bicentennial (Snippet 43)

 The Kidnapping of John Labatt - 1934
  If you search for old news about London, you will find many mentions of this event. Over three days in August 1934, newspaper readers wanted to know what had happened to this wealthy beer baron.

You will notice that in Nome the Dionne quintuplets are mentioned and the articles provide another example of words spelled differently in British/Canadian and American English - kidnapped/kidnaped.

This is what the front page of the London Evening Free Press looked like on Aug. 14, 1934.

  It is found on the website of the Archives and Special Collections at the Western Libraries. See, Labatt: A Closer Look, from which the following is copied:

  "The fact that the Labatt brewery prospered during prohibition when so many other breweries failed made John S. Labatt a target for kidnappers. Kidnapping was common during the darkest days of the Great Depression. Kidnappers targeted people who could command a “king’s ransom,” and few had prospered more than the beer barons who had survived prohibition. In 1934, John S. Labatt was one of the wealthiest brewers in Canada. At a time when many across the nation could not even afford the gas to run their cars, John Sackville was chauffeured around in a stately black limousine.

   On August 14, 1934, three kidnappers pulled John Sackville from his car on a secluded gravel road just outside of London and ordered him to write a note to his brother. “Dear Hugh,” John wrote, “do as these men have instructed you… and don’t go to the police.“ On the other side of the note, the gang’s leader, Michael McCardell, a sharp-featured man of forty-two who had lost his index finger in a shoot-out with police, wrote: “We are holding your brother for $150,000 ransom. Go to Toronto immediately and register at the Royal York Hotel… You will know me as Three-fingered Abe.”

   For three days, John Labatt remained blindfolded and chained near Lake Muskoka. When the kidnapping became front-page news, the bandits panicked and agreed to let Labatt go if he promised to pay them $25,000. At 12:30 am on Friday August 17, John Labatt was dropped off at the corner of Vaughan Road and St. Clair Avenue in Toronto, just a few miles northwest of the Royal York Hotel, where Hugh Labatt was stationed. John Labatt was free."
[The author of the above is Matthew J. Bellamy.]

Sources: 
  For additional ones, see the Wikipedia entry for, John Sackville Labatt, where this one is found: "Three Fingered Abe and the Labatt Kidnapping."

Postscript:
   There is still a Labatt's brewery in London, but it is no longer Canadian-owned. The oldest baseball park is also in London and it is Labatt Mermorial Park. See Snippet 11.

Campus Novels (#2)

    Back in 2024 I offered a list of sixty novels that take place in the groves of academe. The Groves of Academe is on the list and is mentioned in the post. Henry Mulcahy is a character in it, but we are not related. It is a work of fiction.
   In a newsletter provided by The New Yorker, Merve Emre offers her choice of "Five Great Campus Novels" and those choices are provided here along with pictures of Professor Emre. I hope she doesn't mind. I trust, as well, that The New Yorker won't mind my copying her selections. They do appear in a newsletter and I am not sure if they will show up in the print magazine, to which I subscribe, so I am offering them here in a post for posterity. 

  

Five Great Campus Novels (Selected by Merve Emre - "What We're Reading," The New Yorker Newsletter, c. Aug. 1, 2026)

  “Half the campus was designed by Bottom the Weaver, half by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe,” Randall Jarrell writes in “Pictures from an Institution.” In the 1954 novel, the university is home to two types: the asses and the industrialists. The former are dreamy, romantic; the latter, hard-nosed, pragmatic. Each of the campus novels below makes comedy out of these types, and warns us, as Jarrell did, “This institution’s drunk.”

The Amanda Cross Mysteries, by Carolyn Heilbrun (1964-2002)

Heilbrun was the first tenured woman in Columbia’s English Department. In her detective series, under the pen name Amanda Cross, an English professor solves murders whose motives include bad psychoanalysis, student riots, and biographers who know too much for their own good. My favorite, “Poetic Justice,” was described as a “homicidal valentine” to Heilbrun’s mentor, Lionel Trilling.

Possession, by A. S. Byatt (1990)

A swoony double romance. The first love affair is between a Victorian poet and poetess who wrote coded letters and poems to each other in the nineteenth century. The second is between two scholars in the nineteen-eighties who set out to answer the only question worth asking: Did the poets do it? A little-known fact: great chunks of the poems are sentences in blank verse from Henry James’s “The Golden Bowl.”

Moo, by Jane Smiley (1995)

A pastoral satire about a Midwestern land-grant university, for readers who find John Williams’s “Stoner” too nostalgic and sentimental. The campus novel with the funniest building name (“Old Meats”), and the only one I have read that features the workers of the university: cafeteria servers, horse trainers.

The Last Samurai, by Helen DeWitt (2000)

A zany modern epic about a suicidal mother and her genius son, who trade perusing the dust-choked libraries of Oxford for riding the Tube, and the pathetic utilitarianism of the élite university for a useless love of ancient languages, atonal music, and games of chance. Also: a helpful book for teaching young children the Greek alphabet.

I Am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe (2004)

Wolfe’s most hated novel, but my guilty pleasure since freshman year of college. At the fictional Dupont University, the beautiful, naïve, and self-superior Appalachian protagonist learns that what counts in the twenty-first century is not what you know, it’s who you know. Its alternative title could have been “Hillbilly Elegy.”

Sources: 
  A list of the "60 Best Campus Novels"  is found in Mulcahy's Miscellany in Campus Novels.  It is based on a list taken from Literary Hub and the citation is found in the post. Another list of "9 Best Campus Novels" is also provided, and for even more see Wikipedia's, Campus Novel.  

CANCON:

   For some older campus Canadian content see, The Rebel Angels, Robertson Davies.  For some very new, read the review of Lords of Serendipity, by Randy Boyagoda: "Both Sides Now: With His New Novel Lords of Serendipity, Randy Boyagoda Combines Two Worlds: Authorship and Academia," Emily Donaldson, Globe and Mail, Sept.3, 2026. An enticing bit from the review:
   "Lords of Serendipity is ultimately a campus novel that’s less about campus life than the global market that feeds it. Here is the university reduced to a ticket, a brand, a status symbol. Devi has set her sights on getting into Ochyps (OxfordCambridgeHarvardYalePrincetonStanford). What she wants to study is beside the point. She wants to study at Harvard because she wants to go to Harvard.

   The universities of Lords have effectively become borderless, drawing students from across the world even as their own substance and history are being hollowed out. Chapels become wellness centres, library stacks give way to meditation zones, a century-old Gothic quadrangle is “a beautiful front for hedge fund investments.” Employees are made to train the artificial-intelligence bots designed to replace them.

Boyagoda has, as ever, a sharp eye for the absurdities of university politics and pieties."

Anger Management

 "You're A Loser!" - "No, You're A Loser!" - We Are All Losers Now

  That represents the low level of discourse these days and whataboutism abounds. Everyone agrees that everyone is angry and everyone seems on the verge of shouting, at whatever network they are watching - "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!"

 Tempers High 

   Proof of the madness has been offered and that is the reason I now provide a short post about the current affairs we all try to ignore. The illustration above "shows the evolution of anger in policy-related congressional floor speeches since 1874. Anger rises sharply after the mid-2010s in both the House and Senate and reaches its highest level in the 2020s." Another set of results "documents a sharp rise in anger in political discourse, with anger emerging as the dominant emotion among citizens, voters, and policymakers alike." This study suggests that "American politics is angrier than ever."

   I am choosing not to say more because I am more depressed than angry. Those wishing to investigate the anger should read the following article, and the study on which it is based:

  "Quantifying Anger in American Politics: The Country is Awash in Indignation," The Economist, Aug. 30, 2026.

  The study: "The Rise of Anger: Emotions and Policy Views," Eve Davoine, et al. can be found here and the abstract is provided:

Abstract:

  "In this paper, we document the rise of anger in U.S. political communication and study its effects on policy views. We combine online and offline data, including the full record of congressional floor speeches since the 1870s, tweets from members of Congress, tweets from voters matched to electoral registries, campaign speeches, and Reddit comments. Anger in U.S. congressional speeches has risen sharply in the last decade, reaching its highest level in a century and a half. In voter tweets, the share of policy-related sentences expressing anger rises 35% between 2013 and 2025. In tweets by members of Congress, the angry-sentence share rises by 72%. Angry tweets by members of Congress or by voters receive around 60% more retweets relative to tweets with no emotion. Our two experiments show that negative emotions increase support for protectionism, restrictive immigration policies, and redistribution. Positive emotions mainly improve perceptions and reduce support for populism. Anger also changes climate policy views, while fear has no detectable effect. Building on the ACTORC framework of Bordalo et al. ( 2026 ), our model shows how emotions direct attention toward different features of policy problems. Overall, emotions shape both engagement and policy views."

The entire report is available as a pdf and it consists of 186 pages!

Postscript:
In Canada it seems that we are just as angry, but perhaps a bit less mad.

London's Bicentennial (Snippet 42)

 Some Taddy Snuff 
   Shopping on Dundas Street over 150 years ago appears to have been better than it is now. Perhaps one didn't have to go to Tytler & Rose if they also delivered the wine along with the white fish.

Source: London Free Press, April 7, 1873