The Guggenheim has become the first museum to issue an electronic exhibition catalogue, for the Maurizio Cattelan show. It's also making out-of-print publications available for online browsing, and an e-book version of the kid’s book I’d Like the Goo-Gen-Heim.
Have bestselling books gotten more expensive? At The Awl, Brent Cox looks at hardcover prices decade by decade, adjusting prices to 2011 dollar values. He finds that since 1951, “you can make a pretty strong argument that the adjusted price of a hardcover book has held constant, neither inflating or deflated, and that this price equals roughly thirty 2011 dollars.”
Here’s a last-minute gift idea: For ninety-five dollars, a website is offering a signed copy of a Salman Rushdie book (either Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses, or Luka and the Fire of Life) and a six-course gourmet dinner at an Indian-Latin fusion restaurant (Rushdie appearance not included).
At the TLS, Michael Dirda reviews Christopher Hitchens’s essay collection, Arguably: “Hitchens . . . might have justified his more coloratura pages with the disdainful response of the Indian chief who, devouring everything in sight at a White House banquet, was gently reprimanded for eating and drinking a little too much. The chief responded: ‘A little too much is just enough for me.’”
After making the case last week that Amazon is “a boon for the book industry and ‘literary culture,'” Slate’s Farhad Manjoo returns to explain how independent bookstores can hold their own against the online behemoth.
