Articles
Shakespeare's First Folio Found in Saint-Omer
The story of the Saint-Omer copy of Shakespeare's First Folio, catalogued for two centuries as a worthless eighteenth-century reprint before a librarian looked twice.
Books Preserve a Civilization's Literary and Artistic Heritage
We reflect on how books preserve literary and artistic heritage. The identity a civilisation carries forward each time it keeps a book alive from one generation to the next.
The Book Lady: How Dolly Parton's Imagination Library Gifted 332 Million Books
Celebrating Dolly Parton's literacy legacy, the Imagination Library she built for her father, who never learned to read.
Great and Unfortunate Things: The Memoir Jason Arday Leaves Behind
What Jason Arday's memoir Great and Unfortunate Things tells, and how critics have received it, following his death days after its US publication.
Jason Arday, Cambridge's Youngest Black Professor, Dies Days at 41 After His Memoir is Published
Jason Arday resigned from Cambridge on 5 August amid allegations of academic misconduct he denied. His memoir was published three days before he was found dead at his London home, prompting tribute from colleagues and renewed debate over how certain media reporting against him, not about him, were conducting toxic journalism.
A Music Photographer Is Hanging His Marked-Up Contact Sheets Next to the Finished Prints
Andy Gotts brings forty portraits to Santa Barbara for his first California show, and six of them carry the sitter’s signature as well as his own.
Lisa F. Crites Turns Her Own Cancer Recovery Into a Patented Invention and a New Memoir, Beautifully Unbroken
The medical journalist behind The Shower Shirt™, the first patented water-resistant garment for chest surgery patients, tells how the sudden loss of her mother, a breast cancer diagnosis, and a book deal she turned down twice became an Amazon Best Seller, with proceeds pledged to breast cancer support groups.
Destroying Books Is a Cultural Crime. Project Panama Destroyed Millions of Books with No Legal Consequence
Anthropic bought millions of books, cut them apart and pulped them after scanning. No court called it a crime. Destroying books is a cultural crime and no ruling changes that.
In Conversation With Francis Fukuyama on the Last Man He Once Declared Triumphant
In 1989, a young political scientist announced that history itself had reached its destination. On 2 September, at the London School of Economics, Francis Fukuyama returns to ask what he got right, what he got wrong and what thirty-seven years have done to that argument. He discusses his new memoir In the Realm of the Last Man at the London School of Economics on 2 September 2026. Here is what to expect.
A Social Reading App Now Has Five Million Members, and Most of Them Are Women Under 40
The company's own figures, and a survey of its own users, are the case it is making against the idea that young people have given up on books.
Authors May Have to Keep Records of How They Write Their Own Books
HarperCollins' chief executive says no software can reliably tell a human manuscript from an AI-assisted one, and that a book written with AI help might not be copyrightable at all.
Readers Cannot Tell Whether a Short Story Came From a Person or ChatGPT
In three experiments with more than 2,500 adults, the same story scored higher whenever readers were told a human had written it.