Melville House Books

Valerie Merians

Valerie Merians is the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.

• Writing is a vice, explains William Faulkner

  The University of Virginia library’s archive is an absolute treasure trove of audio clips of 20th century authors reading and discussing both their own work and that of others. A… Read more »

• Books vs police batons

  The People’s Library of Occupy Wall Street observe that books have played a crucial role in the OWS. As they write on their Facebook page: Books have become a key… Read more »

• Judging a book by its cover, 6-year-old style

  Recently, Shelf Awareness pointed us to this wonderful survey of a six-year-old’s judgments on classic books by their covers. The blogger-mom at Strollerderby asked her daughter to tell her what… Read more »

• Book industry alive and kicking, new report reports

  Bookstats, a cooperative venture between the Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group to crunch book industry data, has announced the release of its annual survey of… Read more »

• Giant, Texas-sized book auction

  It’s finally happening. We warned you. Out of Archer City, Texas, comes Larry McMurtry’s  giant Last Book Sale. According to the Austin Chronicle: Larry McMurtry is putting two-thirds of the inventory… Read more »

• Amazon pulls controversial Caravaggio book

  The bad-boy painter of the Italian Baroque has stirred up trouble again. As a report  from the Daily Telegraph explains, “A controversial new book in which two Italian art historians… Read more »

• A commuters book club, at last!

  Seattle, long recognized as one of the most literate cities in the US, is living up to its reputation. The city now has a bus-riders book club. Books on the… Read more »

• The case of the pilfered Codex Calixtinus

  A priceless 12th-century illuminated manuscript, the Codex Calixtinus, considered one of Spain’s most important cultural and religious treasures, which was stolen a year ago from the cathedral of Santiago de… Read more »

• Rare Agatha Christie Poirot book breaks auction house record

  A rare copy of Agatha Chrisie’s Poirot Investigates, the 1924 story collection featuring her soon-to-be-famous detective Hercule Poirot, went for a record-breaking sum at auction, according to this report in… Read more »

• Wes Anderson is making book trailers now?

  Leave it to Wes Anderson to reverse engineer things, and make a book trailer for a movie — for books that only exist in the fictional universe of the movie.… Read more »