• Sigrid Rausing, owner of Granta, gets the investigation treatment from The Guardian. Are Rausing’s “charitable causes” actually ways to evade taxes and promote friends’ books? Has Granta’s collaborative editorialship turned into a dictatorship? You make the call.
• Donald Hall is the new poet laureate. Give him enough time and he’ll be the new black too. More on Donald Hall at the Biederbecke Affair.
• Michelle Richmond notes the Chronicle Book Review‘s diminishing pages and relays Ann Cummins’ advice that people contact Chronicle‘s ombudsman Dick Rogers. But Rogers is there more to vet standards or accuracy and Cummins is, quite frankly, being as diffident as a Democrat. Given that the Chronicle tried this once before, I’m thinking that energies might better be directed towards the money men (i.e., the people who make these decisions to cut pages). That would, of course, mean Bronstein and company, or these guys. If you want the Chronicle Book Review, letting the money men know you subscribe to the paper because of it is the answer.
• “TV’s Book Club lascivious, not literary.” Oh, come on. Was anyone really expecting meaningful literary discussion?
• Product placement in books.
• The Wind in the Willows: childhood classic or cash bonanza television adaptation?
• Like books? Then move to Wigtown, Scotland, where the streets are literally lined with books.
• John Cleese to teach comedy.

© 2006, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.