Peter Robins

The complexities of using the word douchebag in an essay on Dante. The risks of attempting to take Thomas Kinkade seriously. A great answer to the "Have you really read all those books?" question. A home for unfinished novels. An almost instant bookshop.

An exciting new bookshop that shut down after three weeks (on purpose). A young man who helped a branch of the previous bookshop go out of business. The logical (but not necessarily pleasant) conclusion of the "Jane Austen remix" trend. A short history of the heavy-metal umlaut. Imaginary movie posters for David Foster Wallace fans. The continuing battle over the moral effect of young-adult fiction. The new editor of the world's most important newspaper, and her book about puppies. Some polite corrections to the New Yorker swearing piece I linked last week. Libraries dying that a golf course may live.

A way of becoming very drunk while stocktaking your bookshop's science-fiction section (via). A collector's guide to true crime, including an unexpected connection between Dennis Nilsen and Virginia Woolf. A celebration of the typographic specimen book that is rather lovely to look at. An easy way into Jean Rhys - at least, easy if you know sufficient French. A vintage television interview with Joan Didion, elegantly glossed. A book-promotion technique based on photographs of cute dogs reading. An erudite discussion on the right Nordic crime to choose if you really, really didn't like Stieg Larsson.

Philip Larkin is not the best poet in HMP Norwich, but could console himself by licking a colouring book. The effects of high-speed rail would be familiar to Dickens. Martin Amis's complaints would be familiar to Proust. John Fowles's desk is emigrating to Texas. Ebooks are indeed the wild frontier; and Google might not be the bloke in the white hat. Shouting at critics remains unwise.

If you want to read the kind of tribute properly owing to the great children's author Diana Wynne Jones, who died on Saturday, you should probably go elsewhere. (You might start with Jenny Davidson, an American blogger, academic and children's writer who has a Wynne-Jonesian sensibility and a gift for conveying enthusiasm in print; Neil Gaiman, who needs less introduction, has also written movingly.) I just want to point to one paragraph in her obituaries which puts her in unusually direct contact with some distinguished predecessors: "When the second world war broke out Jones and her family were evacuated to the Lake District, eventually living in the house once inhabited by the Altounyan children, on whom Ransome had based his Swallows and Amazons series.

Much twittering and blogging occurred yesterday about a new publishing format called the "flipback" - a species of compact paperback. Word first reached me from Canada, and doubtless the conversation spread even further than that. The main talking point was the clever headline that a subeditor on the Guardian had given the story: Could this new book kill the Kindle? But I was more interested in the official pitch for the flipback, because it sounded oddly familiar: "I am keen to see what the hype is about so I take a pre-released copy on my travels: Chris Cleave's The Other Hand. Nearly 370 pages long in its original format, the flipback version has more than 550, but still fits easily in my pocket. The book's not called The Other Hand for nothing.

Peter Robins emailed through the following, in response to my post on “extra features” in literature, yesterday – Pete Hoskin Eighteenth-century authors were deep into this sort of thing. Pope was continually reissuing the Dunciad with extras to adapt it to his latest enemies: a new fourth book, a complete set of fake scholarly apparatus. (There are editions with real scholarly notes on Pope’s fake scholarly notes, and real notes of textual variations next to his fake ones.) Something similar happened with Swift’s first major work, A Tale of a Tub – he sliced up unfavourable responses and turned them into deliberately foolish annotations to the next edition.

Here is a selection of news from elsewhere on the literary web: A woman in New York is attempting to smell 300,000 books, making notes as she goes. As of 12 December, she was up to 150. It's art. F Scott Fitzgerald, Nathaniel West, John Buchan and Isaac Babel are among the authors who may or may not be going out of copyright this year. The list comes courtesy of 'Public Domain Day', which exists to 'celebrate the role of the public domain in our societies', but also, perhaps inadvertently, highlights the difficulty of knowing the public domain's extent.

When they found Hans Blix dead, his throat was slit and his tongue was pulled through the hole, an arrangement apparently known as a ‘Cuban necktie’. William Gibson did not do the deed – it was the work of an overenthusiastic hit man – and nor is he the person who commissioned the hit; their identity remains unclear. But he can, with confidence, be held directly responsible. After all, it happens in one of his novels. Hans Rutger Blix, ‘naturalised citizen of Costa Rica’, is a character in Virtual Light (1993); his death is punishment for losing the book’s macguffin, a rather special pair of dark glasses.

There is an evil genius in Peckham Library. Not among the patrons: the book stock is sound enough, but, were you researching a plan for world domination, you’d want more extensive reference shelves and perhaps quicker Wi-Fi.   No, the evil genius is on the staff. He or she was responsible for the offer that marked the library’s 10th anniversary: a free canvas bag for any user who withdrew ten books in one go.   Some readers may already be snorting at the spendthrift generosity of this. But Peckham Library’s anniversary is worth marking - it is, for better or worse, an icon of regeneration. And the offer is more cunning than it initially seems.