When James Murray, the founding editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, issued his famous “Appeal to the English-speaking public to read books” in 1879, asking readers to send word-evidence from those books to help him make his dictionary, he couldn’t have envisioned reality TV getting involved. But it has. Punctuation is no place for zero tolerance: Lynne Truss and others demand a rigidly standard English, but our language has fewer unbreakable rules than they want. A small margin for success: Ian McMillan enters the world of the fringe publishers – who survive with only ingenuity and innovative writing to help. Curse of the Mommy: John Sutherland on the best way to sell books in the US. Harry Potter and the Death of Reading: Why America's literary obsession is bad news for books.

From PopMatters, We Are What

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