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Take back Valentine's Day!: "Cut out a paper heart, mount it on a doily, make a collage, and mail it to someone you like." (from A Brief Message, a site that airs the opinions of designers in 200 words or less)

And then make sure that what you've taken back is cruelty free, fair trade, and organic (listen to Democracy Now's Valentine Day Special on corruption among cocoa growers and diamond traders)

Read a love story, but bear in mind:

"When it comes to love, there are a million theories to explain it. But when it comes to love stories, things are simpler. A love story can never be about full possession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims—these are lucky eventualities but they aren't love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name."

(From Jeffrey Eugenides' introduction to his collection of love stories, My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead which includes Eileen Chang's "Red Rose, White Rose," also found in her Love in a Fallen City. Don't know what unrequited love has to do with encouraging kids to write, but the book raises funds for 826 Chicago.)

Boycott Valentine's Day and celebrate Vallotton's Day along with Zyzzvya's blog and Félix Fénéon, who illustrates Mr. Eugenides' point again and again in his capsule "novels":

Matters of the heart. M. Simon, a café owner in Verquin, township of Béthune, married and the father of three, committed suicide.

Prematurely jealous, J. Boulon, of Parc-Saint-Maur, pumped a revolver shot in the thigh of his fiancée, Germaine S.

Discover a love that dares speak its name: that of a little girl for a demure black resident of Greenwich Village.

This picture is offered up by a Princess Latifah at the Datalounge who describes herself as still wanting "a jewel encrusted nose-flute" (like the one the Persian Madame Butterfly has) and says:

"Here's Miss Jenny in all her feline hotness. Is it any wonder a little, gay African-American girl fell in love with this beautiful creature?"

(Thanks Fran, for bringing this to our attention)

Did anybody else catch TMC's showing (and Martha Stewart's selection) of the 1935 film version of The Enchanted April? It was true to the book and much better than expected, at least it was until the over-long scene in which the wacky Italian villa staff fly into a tizzy over an Englishman's desire to have a hot bath. Says the Englishman indignantly: "I am convinced that a bath in Italy is somewhere between a public function and an eruption of Vesuvius!"

The Written Nerd has won a special small-business grant from The Brooklyn Public Library and may soon be opening a small bookstore, possibly in one of the underserved but literate neighborhoods of Clinton Hill, Fort Greene, or Prospect Heights.

The Wall St. Journal pays attention to the high-profile bookstore-rescue trend in a piece called "Who's Buying the Bookstore." Mentioned is Classics-friendly shop The Community Bookstore.

The most recent Longitude Bookstore newsletter reminds us to note the passing of George MacDonald Fraser, author of the Flashman novels. Closer to home, Fraser wrote the introduction to the NYRB Classics edition of The Exploits and Adventures of Brigadier Gerard by Arthur Conan Doyle.

Vladimir Sorokin's novel Day of the Oprichnik has been parodied as Day of the Honours Student by a Putin Satirist popularly known as Mr. Parker. Unfortunately, all further information is in Russian, and so unreadable to us here. [via]

The Guardian rounds up the best bookstores in the world, including one in the Netherlands converted from an unused cathedral that it calls a candidate for "most beautiful bookstore of all time."

Our last.fm Classics group membership drive has netted three new members so far. Welcome to you all.

• You may have already heard about this, but writer Luc Sante has a blog called  Pinakothek (Greek for "gallery"). The format is simple and wonderfully  addictive: for each post, he chooses an image and writes briefly about it. Sante wrote the introduction, and translated, Novels in Three Lines , which also has pictures and was recently named one of Slate's best books of 2007.

• If the YouTube clip of the Espresso book machine from the On the Media post left you feeling a little cold, then shiver no more: here is the Heidelberg windmill platen letterpress. While the Heidleberg appears to be printing an invitation, not a book,  the sound of the gears whirring is a nice reminder of publishing's fine tradition.

Last Friday, I went to the North Bennet Street School to give an informal talk about book publishing.

    The North Bennet Street School was founded in 1885, as a school dedicated to craftsmanship. With programs ranging from  cabinet and furniture making to locksmithing, there's also a bookbinding program, where students learn the various 18th, 19th, and 20th century bindings.

I have to say that I was just overwhelmed and inspired by the different kinds of books that were being produced: leather bindings, books with wooden covers, and boxes specifically made to protect books.

    Thanks to instructor Mark for arranging the visit, and to whoever made the cupcakes—I had a great time.

Books have always played essential parts in horror films. There is the book of spells (or ancient tome of forbidden knowledge); there is the diary or journal which reveals that a character is completely mad; and then there’s the book whose plot starts to actually come to life.

But what I hadn’t expected as I watched The Ninth Gate during AMC’s Monsterfest, was that a book could be a new kind of character in a scary movie:  a victim.

Believe me, there’s nothing scarier than seeing a leather-bound book, supposedly over a century old, being handled by an alleged book collector who noisily turns its pages without gloves, while smoking.  You just keep telling yourself, it’s only a movie.

This summer postal rates for small- and medium-sized periodical publications went up between 20% and 30%. For a magazine like The Nation, this means an increase in postage of about $500,000 a year. Maybe The Nation  (and The New York Reivew of Books for that matter) will be able to carry on despite the hike—though not without being forced to pass along at least a portion of the increase to subscribers—but what about journals without such large, dedicated bases?

Thanks to lobbying by conglomerates like TimeWarner (or did they write the bill in the first place?) large publishers are unaffected by the increase.

But there's something we can all do to help. Congress will be holding hearings on the matter on October 30th. To quote a letter sent out today by the publisher of The New York Review of Books:

Free Press, working with a wide variety of small publishers, is hoping to collect well over 100,000 signatures by the end of this week in order to get the attention of the committee members prior to the hearing.

We hope you will join in this effort. These new postal rates threaten the existence of the small independent magazines and journals that are so important to a free press and a vibrant democracy.

So, please take a moment to sign the petition at Free Press.

Listen to the npr story on the issue.

Read what Bill Moyers had to say about it.

Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City, Iowa is approaching its 30th birthday. The independent bookstore has expanded from a 1,000 sq foot space to an 11,000 sq ft space.

Girl Gone Wild? The LA Times interviews Elaine Dundy, author of The Dud Avocado.

Too busy for one of those old-fashioned, long and difficult books? What about Mann's Magic Molehill, Banville's Puddle, or Faulkner's Sound? [link] [link]

The Queen a fan of J.R. Ackerley? According to Alan Bennet's novel, she is. But she's less fond of Ivy Compton-Burnett.

Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critic's Circle, has posted an excerpt from Roxana Robinson's introduction to The New York Stories of Edith Wharton.

And Mrs. Wharton's World War I humanitarian work makes this list of "Real Life Plot Twists of Famous Authors."

Simenon appears to be another unlikely humanitarian. While in Iranian custody, American academic Haleh Esfandiari stayed sane by reading books by Dostoyevsky and the graphomaniacal Belgian. 

Is there anything he can't draw? The Guardian interviews Quentin Blake, whose drawings help to make J.P. Martin's Uncle books so delightful.

Eco-Libris: Plant a tree for every book you read.

At Shelf Awareness, columnist Robert Gray summarizes [scroll to the bottom of the page] the Reading the World panel at BookExpo last week. It sounds like it was a worthwhile event. Karl Pohrt, one of the organizers of RTW, and owner of Shaman Drum bookstore, comments that he "prefer[s] to use the term 'world literature' over translation" and points out that strangeness of setting is in itself not a turn-off to readers, just look at a typical science fiction work: "People are often dropped into a world where it takes a hundred pages to figure out what's going on."

• also see: Jascha Hoffman's handy graphic from The New York Times Book Review that crunches the numbers on works in translation, and throws in a few oddball facts as well. Apparently, there are 611 "copies of the 13-volume Complete Works of Guy de Maupassant in Yiddish translation currently held at the National Yiddish Book Center." Gay veys!

Katherine Powers writes about the Patrick Hamilton revival for The Boston Globe. The title of the piece says it all: "Whiskey, War, and Bad Wallpaper." We published the darkly funny Slaves of Solitude   (Powers admits that she "will not insist on the comic nature of this book—though I laughed many times") this year, and next year we'll bring out the darkly dark Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky.

• also see: The Midnight Bell literary blog. The title is an allusion to one of the three sections of Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky.

Chris Andrews, who has translated the seemingly ubiquitous Roberto Bolaño and Cesar Aira (both published by New Directions) among others, is interviewed at The Quarterly Conversation. He discusses his art and what's going on in Latin American literature these days.

To celebrate the release of our 200th classic, NYRB is presenting an unusual—if not unprecedented— opportunity to our blog readers.

If you're curious about what books you might be missing out of our two hundred, we'll be happy to help. Just give us a list of all the titles or ISBN numbers of books in your posession, and we'll email you with a list of  what you're missing.

Those of you with Delicious Library or Library Thing may have an advantage. For those without, we have a website with a handy search function to help. Please share with us how you compiled your list, we can let our other readers know if there's a better, easier, or more fun way than these other options.

Send your list in an email to [email protected].

Iron-Poet New York?

Want to know what Canadian librarians will be reading?

"There is a famous anecdote about [Kenneth] Fearing that, however newsworthy it once was, makes for a perfect illustration of Benjamin’s idea of the inexhaustible story. During the Red-baiting years of the 50s, the FBI rounded up Fearing and asked him the inevitable question: “Are you a member of the Communist Party?” His answer: 'Not yet.' " McKenzie Wark reviews The Big Clock 

Jane Austen gets a makeover. File under: What is the world coming to?

Through the looking glass with the OUP blog's first book club pick.