“Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books, even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome.” – William Ewart Gladstone

An interesting look at copyediting, written by Carol Fisher Saller: “’Please tell the copyeditor to leave my prose alone.’ That’s an actual author request I encountered in a newly arrived manuscript.”

“America Writes Home” is a website with a wonderful collection of some existing pre-1920s letters, giving a flavor of that time before iPhones and email.

My favorite is the part about the writer who put up a slideshow on his Facebook page. It showed famous people reading his novel.

“The recently departed whose time overlapped with people still here are the Sasha, the living dead. They are not wholly dead, for they live on in the memories of the living … when the last person knowing an ancestor dies, that ancestor leaves the Sasha for the Zamani, the dead.”

The most interesting reaction was that of his grandchildren who sat fascinated. They had heard some of his tales over the years but for the first time they were able to get a true picture of just what an incredibly resilient and fascinating person their grandfather is.

They call it “a cautionary tale about husband-and-wife authors, or, ‘Love in the Time of Amazon.com.’”

The books were passed, hand-to-hand, for over a mile. It was all completed in a day.

Read about our On The Cheap sites in the news.

I half got it because of the name. Love the name.