Culture

At last, Beryl Bainbridge has won the Booker Prize. What a pity it is won posthumously, because she deserved recognition in her lifetime. The Booker Prize, either out of sentimentality, self-promotion or a combination of the two, urged readers to pick the Best of Beryl to mark an influential author who had been overlooked by 5 different Booker judging panels, which led her to be known as the ‘eternal bridesmaid’ of the prize. Master Georgie, her novel about the Crimean War, won the public vote. It’s all terribly nice. The Booker’s literary director, Ion Trewin, gushed: "I have a feeling that, wherever she is now, she'll be hugging herself and saying 'gosh, how lovely'.

There seems to be something of a fashion at the moment in panning James Franco’s literary debut, Palo Alto. If you are looking for motives they are not hard to find: Franco is nauseatingly prolific – not only did he host this year’s Oscar ceremony but he was also nominated for his performance in 127 Hours; he recently took four Masters programmes and is now doing a PhD at Yale; he’s a keen artist and has presented his work at the Clocktower Gallery in New York. Oh, and he’s all right to look at too. Gucci agree, having made him the face of their men’s fragrance. So no, there’s no shortage of motive in dismissing his short story collection as the unoriginal work of a vain Hollywood pretty boy. Yet to do so would be a mistake.

The Desert News, Utah, reports on the discovery of a 600 year old travel book, The Nuremburg Chronicle: ‘Rare-book dealer Ken Sanders has seen more than his share of old books. But he's never seen one in Utah quite like ancient tome that made his jaw drop last weekend. "It's a real thrill and a treat to hold something in your hand that was new when Columbus discovered America and the New World," he said of the dilapidated book that is more than 500 years old, making it one of the oldest books ever printed with movable type.

Dan Hodges disagrees with me (and with Dan Hannan) and argues that, yes, we should definitely imprison people for burning books. Certainly if that book is the Koran. And perhaps other books too. Who knows where it will all end once you start? Those who defend Quran-burning on the basis of free speech miss the point. [...] This is an overt, conscious action, motivated by malign intent. It is not the product of open, free-spirited discourse, but an aggressive, premeditated provocation. Nor is it actually speech. It's not opening a dialogue or building an argument. Quite the opposite. It's a deliberate act of destruction; the destruction of a dialogue and argument constructed by others. If you don't like Islam, fine. Write a book about why. Don't burn one.

‘Atlas shrugged. And so did I.’ I’ve always wanted to write that, but the incomparable P.J. O’Rourke has got there first in this summary-cum-review of the new film of Ayn Rand’s magnum opus. By all accounts the book has been reverentially adapted to the screen, and O’Rourke warns that the ‘uninitiated will feel they’ve wandered without a guide into the midst of the elaborate and interminable rituals of some obscure exotic tribe.’ Rand’s exhaustive and exhausting book has long divided critics, a trait that seems not to have been inherited by Paul Johannson’s movie. With the predictable exception of the Atlas Society, critics are panning this film.

At 5pm today, the doors will close on this year's London Book Fair. What have we learned from the publishing industry’s major annual conference? First, most publishers and agents agree that the e-book will soon outstrip the paperback. This, insiders claim, is an opportunity. Speaking at an event on Tuesday, Corrine Turner of Ian Fleming Publications argued that the e-book was more flexible than the strict format of the paperback, which means that publishers can reach a more diverse range of customers. Production costs are also significantly less, so an ever greater number of books can be published to exploit niche markets across the globe.

Melanie McDonagh has written the Bookend column in this week's issue of the Spectator. Here it is for readers of this blog. In July, the world’s most famous restaurant, elBulli, closes, to reopen in 2014 as a ‘creative centre’. Rough luck on the million-odd people who try for one of 8,000 reservations a year. It’s also a blow for the eponymous young cooks of Lisa Abend’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentices, the 45 stagiaires who labour in Ferran Adria’s kitchen for a season in the hope of sharing in the magic. Ferran, you see, is no mere cook. With him, ‘hot turns into cold, sweet into savoury, solid into liquid or air’. The stagiaires have a dog’s life by this riveting account: tedious, repetitive work for no pay.

Jonathan Coe is surprised by his eminence. ‘I’m just a comic Agatha Christie,’ he says. Coe was at the Guardian last night in King’s Cross – the newspaper’s book club has been reading What A Carve Up, Coe’s satire of the Thatcher years. Coe understands the book’s continued popularity and relevance. ‘The political mood has not changed in that time, arguably it’s got worse.’ He welcomes the book’s success; but regrets that society has not rejected the apostles of greed and laments that even the Labour party now dallies with the filthy rich. Coe conceived of writing a political-satire-cum-social-panorama in the mid-eighties, but took several years to complete the project.