What causes that old-book smell in libraries? According to Popular Science, it’s cellulose decay caused by the breakdown of lingin, a compound typically found in paper pulp.

The view from Dennis Cooper's window in Paris.

What happens in bookshops when nobody’s looking: a stop-motion animation video set in Toronto’s Type bookstore.

Echoes of Simon Reynolds? At Vanity Fair, Kurt Andersen argues that for the past two decades, pop culture has been stuck in a feedback loop: “The past is a foreign country, but the recent past—the 00s, the 90s, even a lot of the 80s—looks almost identical to the

Is Twitter ushering in a new, better kind of relationship between authors and readers?

The movie adaptation of Haruki Muramaki's Norwegian Wood is now in theaters.

Via NPR, how self-publishing “paranormal romances” earned 27-year-old author Amanda Hocking over $2 million and a book deal last year.

Barnes & Noble has dropped its Nook e-reader, betting that it “can't finance the future of the book business while it's still lashed to the past of the book business.”

Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, Samuel Beckett’s doodlings.

At the New York Review of

It’s especially easy to hate on James Franco now that Amazon has bought his first novel, but at Slate, David Haglund speculates why the book might actually be good.

The Associated Press is teaming up with twenty-eight other news organizations to start an organization dedicated to "licens[ing] original news content and collect[ing] royalties from aggregators."

“The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Mayer,” “Slaughterhouse Five Guys Burgers and Fries,” “In Search of Lost Timex (or, Swann's Wayfarers)”; and “Tropicana of Cancer” are our favorites contributions to the |#!/search?q=%23bookproductplacement|funniest

Longtime New York Times veteran David Kelly has been named the deputy editor of the Times’ Book Review.

After nearly thirty years at the alt weekly, the Village Voice has laid off crackerjack film critic—and Bookforum contributor—J. Hoberman.

Live in New York and want to attend a forty-eight hour reading of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans? Then the launch event for online magazine Triple Canopy’s new space might be up your alley.

We’re marking our calendars: On March 11 at the Museum of the Moving Image, Geoff Dyer will give a talk called “Tarkovsky, Cinema, and Life.”

Check out

Rumor has it that an Apple event scheduled for later this month in New York won’t be about the Next Big Apple Product, but about e-books and the future of digital publishing. Details are scant, but according to TechCrunch, “attendance will also be more publishing industry-oriented than consumer-focused."

Will the real Michiko Kakutani please register their Twitter handle? Two Twitter users both claiming to be the New York Times book critic are beefing online. As far as we know, neither Kakutani is secretly Colin McEnroe.

The Millions releases its “Most Anticipated Books of 2012” list.

James

The GOP primaries kick off today with the Iowa caucus. To get a sense of the Republican candidates, check out Longform’s guide to the 2012 contenders, a recent New York Times profile of Mitt Romney, and a New Yorker piece on Newt Gingrich.

Norwegian police are on the hunt for forged documents allegedly belonging to writers Henrik Ibsen and Knut Hamsun after a Norwegian scriptwriter was arrested for falsely claiming to have discovered fragments of a lost Ibsen play. "He was very convincing," an Oslo antiquarian booksellers, told The Observer. "His story was that he was a collector of all kinds

As the Merce Cunninghman Dance Company concludes its final tour in New York, writer Alma Guillermoprieto remembers her former instructor: “Merce insisted throughout that his dances were not abstract: ‘I have never seen an abstract human body’ he often remarked. He himself danced like a man on fire.”

The New York Times publishes Sam Anderson’s year in marginalia, highlighting the critic’s best in-book scribblings. Lines from an Anne Carson poem get a “LOL,” while a note in Anderson’s copy of The Pale King reads, “DFW + Dostoevsky: investigative journalists of self-consciousness.”

For its

Despite an overall decline in book sales, it was a banner year for rare books. According book dealer Abe Books, the site made over $220,330 from the sales of ten books alone, with a copy of Marx’s Das Kapital going for $51,739 (irony!) and a signed first edition of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird bringing in $25,000.

The Rumpus interviews Marie Calloway, a twenty-one year old writer whose story “Adrien Brody,” a thinly fictionalized account about sleeping with an older New York writer, has been creating a stir among the internet literati. Kate Zambreno has also weighed in on Calloway on

After participating in the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization protests, one demonstrator decided take a job in an Amazon warehouse—and attempted to unionize the company.

For years, presidential candidate Ron Paul sent out newsletters that offered political and financial advice, but “also routinely indulged in bigotry,” as the New Republic writes in a round-up Ron Paul’s most incendiary bulletins.

Amazon has pushed back the launch date of its Japanese e-book site after local publishers refused to agree to the company’s terms.

At the Paris Review Daily, Alexander Chee reflects on sex and

The multitalented novelist Dennis Cooper has been chosen to participate in the 2012 Whitney Biennial with longtime collaborator Gisele Vienne, with whom he has recently collaborated on a handful of controversial (and in some cases critically acclaimed) theater shows. According to the New York Times, for the show, Cooper will “install a speaking robot."

It’s the economy, stupid: Robert Christgau ranks the best non-specialized books on the economy, naming Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera’s All the Devils Are Here and John Lanchester’s I.O.U. as his top picks.

Wiliam Faulkner’s hot toddy recipe,

Why doesn’t the Federal Aviation Administration allow passengers to read on Kindles and iPads during takeoff? The New York Times’ Nick Bilton challenges the claim that electrical emissions are to blame.

Ezra Pound’s daughter has filed suit to force far-right Italian fascist group CasaPound—a name it chose in homage to her father—to call itself something else.

The Lorax, We Need to Talk About Kevin, Norwegian Wood, and The Hunger Games are only several of the books getting silver screen treatment in Spring 2012.

Anticipating that e-readers will be a popular holiday gift, the New York Public

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