Fawlty Towers not to be resuscitated

Fawlty Towers must be my favorite comedy show ever. The pace is fast, the characters distinct, the acting superb, and the scripts are just terrific. However -- wisely, in my opinion, John Cleese and his co-writer, Connie Booth, have ruled out a return.

The four stars -- Cleese, Booth, Andrew Sachs, and Prunella Scales -- were reunited for the first time in 30 years, to promote a documentary for TV channel G.O.L.D. Asked the inevitable question, 69-year-old Cleese said they would never make another episode because they are "too old and tired." The pace is too fast, and the expectations too high -- and there is also the memory that it took six intensive weeks to write each half-hour episode.

Last month, the BBC sitcom was named the most "iconic" TV comedy show of all time.

Yet, only 12 episodes were ever made. Cleese said that he and Booth (who played the waitress, Polly) made a joint decision to stop it at that.

"We both felt we'd done our best and we just knew that, if we did it, it wouldn't be as good."

See an interview with Cleese.

Origin of the Species a rare prize

A first edition copy of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection has been sold at auction in Norfolk for thirty-five thousand pounds.

Its value is probably enhanced by the fact that the first print run -- which sold out on the spot -- was just 1,250.

It must be also acknowledged, though, that it must be the most definitive book of biology ever.

The book was purchased by a local book dealer, who undoubtedly expects to make a tidy profit from an ongoing sale.

Read more.

Ongoing crisis on the Boston Globe

The talks drag on.

The owner of the Boston Globe is still talking with unions to try to save the grand old paper from folding. Staff are being asked to take cuts in pay and pensions, and the owner is being asked to give newspaper jobs some permanency.

The Boston Globe is the latest victim of many blows, most emanating from the internet. First and foremost, is the loss of advertising revenue. Perhaps even more grave, as a BBC correspondent points out, is the situation where readers force papers to post instant "Breaking News" on their websites, yet fail to pay to read the same thing in print next day.

The challenge is to devise a business model that copes with the situation. Until one arrives, losses in both revenue and jobs will mount.

Marilyn French dies at 79

Marilyn French, author of feminist classic The Women's Room has passed away.

The 1977 novel, which captured the frustration and fury of a generation ofwomen fed up with society's traditional conceptions of their role, sold 20million copies.

Read more.

First female British poet laureate appointed

It's second time lucky for Carol Ann Duffy, who was reliably rumored to be in strong contention back in 1999, when Andrew Motion was given the job.

Will she enjoy it? That is another matter for contention. Prominent names have ventured the opinion that the post is more stultifying than inspiring.

So, the best of luck to the new voice of verse.

US justice department examining Google books settlement

Still awaiting the big tick of approval from a US judge, Google's settlement with US authors and publishers over its book scanning scheme looks as if it has met another hurdle.

The US Department of Justice has begun informal enquiries into at least one aspect of Google's sweeping settlement of lawsuits from book publishers and authors, according to two people familiar with the discussions.

This follows expressions of concern from anti-trust experts.

Govt. to scale back NZ National Library revamp

The Government has decided to scale back the revamp of the National Library's Wellington building but will ensure the nation's treasures are protected by increasing storage, fixing leaks, upgrading equipment and addressing deferred maintenance.

The revamp is to cost $52 million which will include $35 million in capital spending and $17 million in operational spending over the next four years.

It is a significant reduction from the previously proposed redevelopment plan, which was originally costed at $82 million ($69 million capital plus$13 million operating costs) but has since been costed at about $90 million.

The Minister Responsible for the Library, Dr Richard Worth, said that the Government had been forced to reconsider the previous government's decisionin light of the international recession.

Conde Nast pulls plug on high profile business magazine

Just two years ago, PORTFOLIO magazine was born in the midst of a business media boom. The idea of the parent company was to tap demand from mushrooming brokerage companies and provide a new venue for luxury advertisers. The market was largely male, and largely nouveaux riche -- and boy, though newly so, they were rich, rich, rich.

Now Conde Nast, suffering from a dearth of advertising spending right across its range of publications (which include Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Wired), is pulling the plug.
"It is unfortunate we were unable to give Portfolio the time needed to fully mature," said CEO Charles Townsend. More than 80 editorial and administrative staff will lose their jobs.

Ironically, one of the stories in the last issue is called Confessions of a TARP wife. "Forget the opera," runs the blurb. "Cancel dinner at Bouley. How life has changed since my CEO husband went on the government dole."

Do Pulitzers sell books?

As we all know, the Pulitzers have been announced, and, as Publisher's Lunch remarks, it is interesting to follow the figures.

Sales as tracked by Nielsen BookScan show relative parity among three of the four winners to date in the outlets tracked by the service. The fiction winner sold close to 12,000 copies in hardcover and almost 44,000 in paperback so far; The Hemingses of Monticello is up to just over 45,000 hardcovers after the NBA win; and Slavery by Another Name has sold approximately 22,000 hardcovers and 4,000 trade paperbacks.

American Lion is in a completely different class, with registered sales of close to 360,000 copies, and the publisher reporting 500,000 copies in print. Random House Trade Paperbacks has moved up the paperback release to the end of April, with an announced 200,000-copy first printing.

In case you have forgotten, here is the list.

Fiction: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (Random House)

History: The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed (W.W. Norton & Company)

Biography: American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham (Random House)

General Nonfiction: Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon (Doubleday)

Poetry: The Shadow of Sirius by W.S. Merwin (Copper Canyon Press)

Earliest dust jacket identified

It's official. In March 2009, the earliest known publisher's dust jacket was found in the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Don't hold your breath and expect an object of great beauty (yes, it is that bland object to the left, above, the righthand image being a detail), but for all that it is a very interesting discovery.

For a start, the dust jacket was different from the modern dj, in that it completely enclosed the book, the overlapping edges being stuck to the rest with sealing wax. This meant that the customer could not see the actual book unless the bookstore provided a browsing copy -- rather like the plastic-wrapped fine artbooks of today. It had a comparable price, too, costing the significant sum of twelve shillings, roughly equivalent to forty-five pounds, or 120 New Zealand dollars, or 65 US dollars today (though I stand to be corrected by a certain economist).

The Bodleian treasure is sans book, the dust jacket being in their ephemera collection, but I find that the book itself was worth unwrapping, having an embossed leather trade binding, heavily embellished with gilt. The contents were top quality, too. Friendship's Offering was published annually from the year 1824, marketed as a Christmas or New Year's gift, and attracted contributors as eminent as the great English critic John Ruskin, the artist J.M.W. Turner, and the poet Thomas Hood. Known for his humorous ditties, Hood's most famous Friendship's Offering offering was uncharacteristically morose:

I remember, I remember

The house where I was born,

The little window, where the sun

Came peeping in, at morn;

He never came a wink too soon

Nor brought too long a day

But now, I often wish the night

Had borne my breath away.

Not children's reading, that's for sure - which it should not be, at that price.