Friday 13 January 2012

Non-Fiction, Apostrophes and Sad News...

It's been a while since I did a round up of interesting items I've come across while scanning the literary news, so here are a few links for this weekend...

I came across a short piece on the Bookseller website about the 'stand-out' books commissioning editors are looking for this year.
The Andrew Lownie literary agency have the views of twenty editors on what they are hoping for this year in non-fiction.
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Apostrophes- especially when they're missing or in the wrong place completely.

Well there's been mixed views on bookseller Waterstone's intention to drop the apostrophe in their name. Managing Director James Daunt said that it was "a more versatile and practical spelling" for the digital age of e-mails and URLs.

You can test your skills with apostrophes at the start of  Philip Hensher's article 'Leave the apostrophe alone – it makes sense' in the Telegraph online. Admittedly now that Waterstones is no longer owned and run by its founder Tim Waterstone, the remaining bookstores are technically Waterstones...

And after all the comments about them changing the big W to a small w in 2010...Well they're going back to the big W.
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Sadly, the death has been announced of crime writer Reginald Hill. His Dalziel and Pascoe characters were brought to the screen by actors Warren Clarke and Colin Buchanan.

Though I haven't read any of his books (crime fiction not being my preference) I tried not to miss Dalziel and Pascoe when it was on the BBC.

What was probably unknown by many (including me) was that he wrote other work using a number of pseudonyms.

3 comments:

Rosemary Gemmell said...

Interesting post, Carol. I tend to agree about Waterstones and used to think they didn't have an apostrophe anyway! Sad about Reg Hill - like you, I watched the TV series.

Teresa Ashby said...

Great post, Carol with some interesting links, thank you for those!
Very sad about Reg Hill.

Carolb said...

Thank you, Rosemary.
I expect it also makes sign writing Waterstones a lot easier too...:-)

Thank you Teresa. Yes it is very sad news about Reg Hill.