birthday boys
• 1894 Dashiell Hammett is born in Maryland.
• 1912 – John Cheever, American author (d. 1982)
• 1915 – Herman Wouk, American writer
• 1925 – Tony Hillerman, American writer
• 1930 – John Barth, American novelist
• 1934 – Harlan Ellison, American author

garçon d’anniversaire • 1894 – Louis-Ferdinand Céline, French writer (d. 1961)

1895 – Oscar Wilde is sent to prison for sodomy. nice to know that’s not a crime anymore . . . well in some places.

worth reading • from the Albuquerque Tribune we have a feature on The Book Stop and the lure and seduction of secondhand bookshops.

1939 – DC Comics publishes its second superhero in Detective Comics #27; he is Batman, one of the most topical comic book superheroes of all time.

yummy books • from the NYT Book Review – We get top foodies talking about their favorite cookbooks. Which I have reprinted here, so you don’t have to log in.

grass roots •The Love Your Local Bookshop campaign, started by Stephen Poulter and Alan Jeffery of Books@Hoddesdon in High Street to save local stores like theirs from extinction, has been an “overwhelming success”

blogs worth reading • Madlyn Blom of Old Bag Lady Books, (nee Center Aisle Books) is going on the road, and has started a blog to report on it!