paper trail

Aug 9, 2012 @ 12:22:00 am

Joan Rivers at Costco

To get Costco to carry her new book, I Hate Everyone... Starting With Me, Joan Rivers decided to chain herself to a shopping cart in a Burbank, California, Costco store and air her complaint that the company won’t stock the book because it has dirty words on the back.

Joy Press—formerly an editor at the Village Voice Literary Supplement and Salon—has just been promoted at the LA Times to become its books and culture editor.

A new startup offers customers the full Fifty Shades of Gray treatment. According to MySecretLuxury’s website: “So you read the book ... but you really want to live the full fantasy. Our concierge can help. My Secret Concierge can work with you to re-create one of Anastasia and Christian’s special moments.”

Kottke highlights the only surviving footage of Mark Twain, which was shot by none other than Thomas Edison in 1909, a year before the author’s death.

Of the top 235 Y.A. titles on a recent NPR best-of list, 147—or 63 percent—were written by women.

David Sedaris’s “C.O.G.” (that’s short for “child of god”) has been optioned for a movie. The Christian Science Monitor reports that the piece, about Sedaris selling rocks in the shape of the state of Oregon at a county fair, is headed to the big screen, with production starting this October.