Publishing: The British Library is digitising its catalogue, and is offering 65000 rare first editions to download FREE for Kindle owners (I’m still trying find out if it applies to people who’ve got the Kindle apps for iPhones or desktops). What’s of most interest, to me at least, is that they’ve digitized their Penny Dreadfuls too. You can also order paperpacks of the first editions (I had to read that several times to actually grasp it – paperback books containing text and illustrations, including page formatting, from the first editions) for £15. There’s also 2 million newspaper pages you can search for free, which is very handy for research! Unfortunately, lovely as the British Library website is (and easy as it is to lose yourself learning about the Magna Carta orShakespeare’s Quartos) it’s not actually easy to find its own news on there

Interest-Piquing: Dear Jerry, You Old Bastard. Really interesting article by one of the many people employed over the years to answer J D Salinger’s mail. And she didn’t even care for Catcher in the Rye. (actually, Slate has several articles catching my interest this week, also including Exile from Grrrville about 90s feminism, and Google Buzz’s massive errors in assumptions about privacy)

InsPiring: The Guardian offers up the Nat Tate hoax as “The greatest literary hoax ever“. My personal favourite is Ern Malley. What’s interesting is where people draw the line between hoax and fraud; Ern Malley and Nat Tate are a hoaxes, but William Henry Ireland’s Shakespeare forgeries and Konrad Kujau’s Hitler Diaries are frauds. One suspect financial gain probably makes up the largest part of the judgement…

Procrastination: Etiquette Hell. I’ve lost a lot of time reading the archives, and now it’s moved to a blog format. It shows up the differences in teuqette between countries sometimes – the blog owner deems arranging your own birthday party appallingly bad etiquette, whereas in the UK assuming someone else will do it for you is bad etiquette.

No One Can Hear You should pop up on Three Crow Press soon – no sign of it yet, but that might just be those pesky timezones.