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Rogan · Pristupio: 14 Apr 2006 Poruke: 5419 Studijska grupa: Istorija umetnosti

Images 'show face of Shakespeare'

The 3D model combines the features of the mask and bust

Forensic experts claim to have proved a bust and a death mask are the exact likeness of William Shakespeare.

Scientists in Germany scanned the sculptures using computerised imaging techniques to show that they match up with portraits of the Bard.

The systems, used by police, map out a person's face to identify whether they tally with known pictures.

Elizabethan experts deny the claim, saying busts and portraits were not true likenesses so often look similar.

The investigation was led by Dr Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel, of the University of Mainz, who has published a book on her findings.

The model of the similar features was built after researchers used the techniques to show that the Davenant bust matches pictures of Shakespeare.

They found the bust's facial features coincided with those of the death mask, which is owned by the German city of Darmstadt.

Shakespeare died aged 52 in 1616, the same year inscribed into the back of the mask.

Leading scholars have doubted its authenticity and the credibility of the bust, which they claim was made 142 years after the playwright's death.

Death claim

They matched the images with the Chandos portrait, the first picture bought by the National Portrait Gallery in 1856, which is believed to be Shakespeare.

The Davenant bust is housed in London's Garrick Club

The police technique, used to show whether separate facial images belong to the same person, found close matches between the paintings and the bust.

The New Scientist magazine said: "Superimposing the models revealed perfect matches between the forehead, eyes and nose."

In her book, Dr Hammerschmidt-Hummel claims to have traced the history of the bust back to 1613, when she believes Shakespeare may have commissioned it.

She also claims that the death mask has a lump above the eye which she says shows the Bard died from a form of cancer.

Catherine Alexander, of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon, disputes the results as being based on a "false premise".

She said representations of Elizabethan men were "spruced up" to make them look intelligent and rich and were not intended to be exact likenesses.

Rogan · Pristupio: 14 Apr 2006 Poruke: 5419 Studijska grupa: Istorija umetnosti

Nedavno je pkrenuta zabavna rasprava povodom autorstva Frankenshtajna...

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Frankenstein's fraud

John Harlow, Los Angeles

March 25, 2007 10:00pm
A new book, The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein claims that Mary Shelley didn't write it. Academic John Lauritsen claims it was her husband's work.
THE conventional account of how Mary Shelley, a teenager, came to invent Dr Frankenstein and his monster is of a "waking dream" brought on by a drinking session with some of Britain's most notorious Romantic poets.

But a new book, The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein, claims Shelley, an icon of modern feminism, was a fraud who did not dream up the gothic monster in response to a challenge by Lord Byron on the shores of Lake Geneva.

The author, John Lauritsen, claims the true credit for the world's first science fiction novel should go to Percy Bysshe Shelley, her future husband, who was present that night.

Lauritsen's book, due out in May, builds on debates that have surrounded Frankenstein since it was published anonymously in London in 1818.

Even Mary seemed slightly amazed by the genesis of the monster when she was older.

Nearly a decade after her husband died in a boating accident, she wondered: "How I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea."

Controversy has begun ahead of the publication of Lauritsen's book, with loyalists rallying to defend Mary as the author, while iconoclastic scholars such as Camille Paglia praise Lauritsen for his "fresh and convincing outsider's challenge to the orthodoxies of today's lazy and overpaid academics".

Lauritsen, a Harvard-educated "independent scholar" who has spent seven years in its libraries comparing the texts of Shelley's great works such as Ozymandias with his wife's subsequent books, says Frankenstein was too profound to have been created by an "ill-educated 19-year-old whose later writings were just ordinary".

He says some of the language, with lines such as "I will glut the maw of death", were pure Shelley, and that the young aristocrat wrote a handful of fashionable horror tales that echo the later tone of Frankenstein. Lauritsen said Shelley had many reasons to disguise his authorship, including hints of "free love" that had already driven him out of England and an undertone of "Romantic, but I would not say gay, male love".

Another factor may have been the critics, who hated it. The Quarterly Review of 1818 said the story of Frankenstein, the Swiss scientist who creates a monster from body parts, only to see it run amok, was a "tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity".

But after Shelley drowned off the Tuscan coast in 1822, Frankenstein defied the critics to return to life and become a massive hit, first on the stage and then in many sexually censored editions overseen by Mary. However, she was never again able to create such a blockbuster.

After her death in 1851, Mary's family protected her legacy. There are claims they forged letters from Shelley's first wife, Harriet, to make her compare unfavourably with his second bride.

According to Lauritsen, pages from Mary's diary covering key dates are missing, and even the manuscript of Frankenstein raises questions.

This is significant for Paglia, who has taught Shelley's poetry at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. "There are serious questions here that feminists who have turned Mary Shelley into a saint need to address. This is very exciting stuff that will infuriate scholars who cannot accept that Mary was a second-rate writer."

Others disagree.

Kurt Heinzelman, professor of English at the University of Texas, dismissed Lauritsen's book as a "silly wrong-tree bark".

Hilary Bailey, author of the forthcoming novel Frankenstein's Bride, said: "The style of Frankenstein is, to be brutal, clotted and pedestrian. Shelley didn't write it, and if he did, it would be kinder not to say so."

Mary also has a defender in Baron von Frankenstein, 62.

"No matter what stupid jokes the book has caused for me and my family over the years, I am sure Mary is the woman who created Frankenstein."

----------------------------------------

Naravno, ovakve teme izazivaju veoma zabavne reakcije :

Yes, Frankenstein really was written by Mary Shelley.
It's obvious - because the book is so bad

Germaine Greer
Monday April 9, 2007
The Guardian

The latest sensation to galvanise the torpid lit-hist-crit establishment is the "discovery" by market research analyst John Lauritsen that Mary Shelley did not write Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus (to give the novel its full title). John Lauritsen, it should be remembered, is the gay rights activist who has been fighting a lonely battle against the commonly accepted notion that HIV is what causes Aids. It is his belief that the real cause of the occurrence of Kaposi's sarcoma among gay men is not a retrovirus, but their frequent recourse to amyl nitrite inhalants (poppers). Sadly for Mr Lauritsen, nobody has been paying attention to his howling in the wilderness on these topics and so he has been forced to search out another dead horse and give it a good flogging instead. Curiously, in this instance, he appears to be having some success. The media are taking his arguments seriously. His book, The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein, is not out in the US till next month, but already the chattering classes are chattering about it.

The logic goes something like this: Frankenstein is a masterpiece; masterpieces are not written by self-educated girls and therefore Frankenstein cannot have been written by Mary Shelley. If Frankenstein is not a masterpiece, the thesis collapses. Though millions of people educated in the US have been made to study and write essays about Frankenstein, it is not a good, let alone a great novel and hardly merits the attention it has been given, notwithstanding the historic fact that its theme has inspired more than 50 (mostly bad) films.

Literature courses in the US are oddly skewed towards novels because few undergraduates are required to read any poetry. If Lauritsen had read a sufficient quantity of poetry, he would know better than to state that the monster's famous statement that he will "glut the maw of death" by killing all those whom Frankenstein loves, is pure Shelley, because it is, of course, pure Milton (Paradise Lost, Book 10).

In 1818 when Frankenstein was first published anonymously, with a preface by Percy Bysshe Shelley, most reviewers assumed he had written it himself, except for those who suspected that it was written by someone even less experienced than he, perhaps the daughter of a famous novelist, as Mary Shelley was. Marks of inexperience can be found on every page. There are three narrators: Thomas Walton, Victor Frankenstein and the monster himself. The three of them, including the inarticulate monster, speak in paragraphs, with the same tendency to proliferating parallel clauses and phrases and the occasional theatrical ejaculation. The climactic ponts of the action remain undescribed, usually because the abnormally sensitive male narrator has fainted or fled or become deathly sick. The narrative has more loose ends than a grass skirt. The creature made by Frankenstein out of decaying spare parts knows the function of clothes and finds some to fit his 8ft frame and pops them on before he vanishes from the laboratory at more than human speed. The author only grasps the improbability of this sequence of events in the third volume, but can do nothing to resolve it. The account of the monster's education, from speechless to fully literate in a year, would be risible if it were not for its resemblance to Mary's scrappy education.

The greatest improbability in Mary's story is the one she is least able to confront. A man who dared to manufacture a human being should surely have been prepared to trash it and start again but, instead of stifling his hideous creature at birth, Frankenstein runs away and wanders round Ingolstadt all night. Throughout the novel he remains incapable of confronting the task of killing the creature he made or even realising it is his duty to do so. He is more like the mother of a monstrous child than like the maker of a fake human.

Indeed, the monster is made as human as any other character; his depravity is the consequence of his miserable existence and his existence is Frankenstein's fault.

The driving impulse of this incoherent tale is a nameless female dread, the dread of gestating a monster. Monsters are not simply grossly deformed foetuses. Every mass murderer, every serial killer, the most sadistic paedophile has a mother, who cannot disown him. Percy was capable perhaps of imagining such a nightmare, but it is the novel's blindness to its underlying theme that provides the strongest evidence that the spinner of the tale is a woman. It is not until the end of the novel that the monster can describe himself as an abortion. If women's attraction to the gothic genre is explained by the opportunity it offers for the embodiment of the amoral female subconscious, Frankenstein is the ultimate expression of the female gothic.

What drives Lauritsen is his loathing of the people he calls radical feminists, whom he sees as dominating the literary academy, and drowning out the voice of gay activism in literature. This is an odd interpretation of the fact that women's studies is now gender studies and that queer theory is on every syllabus, but some people are never satisfied. Lauritsen believes that the true theme of Frankenstein is love between men, and that when Percy wrote it he was encoding his own version of the love that dared not speak its name. What Lauritsen makes of Shelley's poems to Mary one can hardly imagine. He probably thinks Mary wrote them.

Rogan · Pristupio: 14 Apr 2006 Poruke: 5419 Studijska grupa: Istorija umetnosti

Doris Lessing wins Nobel prize

Lessing has been nominated for the Booker Prize three times

British author Doris Lessing has been awarded this year's Nobel Prize for Literature.

The 87-year-old has been honoured with the 10m kronor (£763,000) award for her life's work over a 57-year career.

Her best-known works include The Golden Notebook, Memoirs of a Survivor and The Summer Before the Dark.

Lessing said she was "very glad" about the honour - particularly as she was told 40 years ago that the Nobel hierarchy did not like her.

She told BBC Radio 4: "I've won it. I'm very pleased and now we're going to have a lot of speeches and flowers and it will be very nice."

She recalled that, in the 1960s, "they sent one of their minions especially to tell me they didn't like me at the Nobel Prize and I would never get it".

"So now they've decided they're going to give it to me. So why? I mean, why do they like me any better now than they did then?"

The author, who turns 88 on 22 October, said she thought she had become more respectable with age.

"They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now before I popped off," she said.

Lessing was told the news by reporters after returning from shops

Lessing is only the 11th woman to win the prize, considered by many to be the world's highest accolade for writers, since it started in 1901.

And she is the second British writer to win in three years, after Harold Pinter was honoured in 2005. Turkish author Orhan Pamuk won last year.

The Swedish Academy, which awards the prize, described Lessing as "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny".

"Oh good, did they say that about me?" she replied. "Oh goodness, well obviously they like me better now than they used to."

Lessing was out shopping when the announcement was made and said she thought a TV show was being filmed on her street when she returned to find TV crews outside her house.

Lessing was born in what is now Iran and moved to Rhodesia - now Zimbabwe - as a child before settling in England in 1949.

Her debut novel The Grass is Singing was published the following year and she made her breakthrough with The Golden Notebook in 1962.

'Pioneering work'

"The burgeoning feminist movement saw it as a pioneering work and it belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20th Century view of the male-female relationship," the Swedish Academy said.

But Lessing herself has distanced herself from the feminist movement.

The content of her other novels ranges from semi-autobiographical African experiences to social and political struggle, psychological thrillers and science fiction.

She has been nominated for the Booker Prize three times - for Briefing for a Descent into Hell in 1971, The Sirian Experiments in 1981 and The Good Terrorist in 1985 - but has never won.

In addition to the Nobel cash prize, Lessing will receive a gold medal and an invitation to give a lecture at the academy's headquarters in Stockholm. She can also expect to see a rise in sales.

US author Philip Roth had been the bookmakers' favourite for the award. His name has been mentioned in connection with the prize for many years, but he has always been overlooked.

Rogan · Pristupio: 14 Apr 2006 Poruke: 5419 Studijska grupa: Istorija umetnosti

Dumbledore's a Whoopsie!
David Smith
Sunday October 21, 2007
The Observer

There could hardly have been a bigger sensation if Russell Crowe, Rod Stewart or Sven-Goran Eriksson had come out of the closet. Millions of fans around the world were yesterday digesting the news that one of the main characters in the Harry Potter novels, Albus Dumbledore, is gay.

The revelation came from author JK Rowling during a question-and-answer session at New York's Carnegie Hall. It instantly hurtled around the internet and the world. News websites in China and Germany announced starkly: 'JK Rowling: "Dumbledore is gay".' One blogger wrote on a fansite: 'My head is spinning. Wow. One more reason to love gay men.'

After reading briefly from her mega-selling book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, on Friday night, Rowling took questions from an audience of 1,600 students. A 19-year-old from Colorado asked about the avuncular headmaster of Hogwarts School: 'Did Dumbledore, who believed in the prevailing power of love, ever fall in love himself?'

The author replied: 'My truthful answer to you...I always thought of Dumbledore as gay.' The audience reportedly fell silent - then erupted into prolonged applause.

Rowling, 42, continued: 'Dumbledore fell in love with Grindelwald [a bad wizard he defeated long ago], and that added to his horror when Grindelwald showed himself to be what he was. To an extent, do we say it excused Dumbledore a little more because falling in love can blind us to an extent, but he met someone as brilliant as he was and, rather like Bellatrix, he was very drawn to this brilliant person and horribly, terribly let down by him.'

She added: 'Yeah, that's how I always saw Dumbledore. In fact, recently I was in a script read-through for the sixth film, and they had Dumbledore saying a line to Harry early in the script saying, "I knew a girl once, whose hair..." I had to write a little note in the margin and slide it along to the scriptwriter, "Dumbledore's gay!"'

Amazed by the warm reaction of the audience, Rowling, on her first US tour in seven years, joked: 'Just imagine the fan fiction now.'

Rogan · Pristupio: 14 Apr 2006 Poruke: 5419 Studijska grupa: Istorija umetnosti

JK Rowling to sell hand-written new book
By Iain Gray
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 01/11/2007

JK Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter adventures, has written a new book, but has only made seven copies of it.

JK Rowling illustrated the book herself

Tales of Beedle the Bard is a book of fairy tales handwritten and illustrated by Rowling herself, and each copy is leather-bound and covered in silver and jewels.

Six of the seven copies have gone to people who are “most closely connected to the Harry Potter books over the past 17 years”.

However, the seventh will be auctioned in Sotheby’s in December, with all proceeds going to the Children’s Voice Foundation.

Rowling has also recorded a personal message for the purchaser, saying “to whoever now owns this book, thank you, and fair fortune be yours.”

Rogan · Pristupio: 14 Apr 2006 Poruke: 5419 Studijska grupa: Istorija umetnosti

Norman Mailer dead at age 84

By RICHARD PYLE, Associated Press

NEW YORK - Norman Mailer, the macho prince of American letters who for decades reigned as the country's literary conscience and provocateur with such books as "The Naked and the Dead" and "The Executioner's Song" died Saturday, his literary executor said. He was 84.

Mailer died of acute renal failure at Mount Sinai Hospital, said J. Michael Lennon, who is also the author's biographer.

From his classic debut novel to such masterworks of literary journalism as "The Armies of the Night," the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner always got credit for insight, passion and originality.

Some of his works were highly praised, some panned, but none was pronounced the Great American Novel that seemed to be his life quest from the time he soared to the top as a brash 25-year-old "enfant terrible."

Mailer built and nurtured an image over the years as pugnacious, street-wise and high-living. He drank, fought, smoked pot, married six times and stabbed his second wife, almost fatally, during a drunken party.

He had nine children, made a quixotic bid to become mayor of New York, produced five forgettable films, dabbled in journalism, flew gliders, challenged professional boxers, was banned from a Manhattan YWHA for reciting obscene poetry, feuded publicly with writer Gore Vidal and crusaded against women's liberation.

But as Newsweek reviewer Raymond Sokolov said in 1968, "In the end, it is the writing that will count."

Mailer, he wrote, possessed "a superb natural style that does not crack under the pressures he puts upon it, a talent for narrative and characters with real blood streams and nervous systems, a great openness and eagerness for experience, a sense of urgency about the need to test thought and character in the crucible of a difficult era."

Norman Mailer was born Jan. 31, 1923, in Long Branch, N.J. His father, Isaac, a South Africa-born accountant, and mother, Fanny, who ran a housekeeping and nursing agency, soon moved to Brooklyn — later described by Mailer as "the most secure Jewish environment in America."

Mailer earned an engineering science degree in 1943 from Harvard University, where he decided to become a writer, and was soon drafted into the Army. Sent to the Philippines as an infantryman, he saw enough of army life and combat to provide a basis for his first book, "The Naked and the Dead," published in 1948 while he was a postgraduate student in Paris on the GI Bill of Rights.

The book — noteworthy for Mailer's invention of the word "fug" as a substitute for the then-unacceptable four-letter original — was a best seller, and Mailer returned home to find himself anointed the new Hemingway, Dos Passos and Melville.

Buoyed by instant literary celebrity, Mailer embraced the early 1950s counterculture — defining "hip" in his essay "The White Negro," allying himself with Beat Generation gurus Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and writing social and political commentary for the Village Voice, which he helped found. He also churned out two more novels, "Barbary Shore" (1951) and "Deer Park" (1955), neither embraced kindly by readers or critics.

Mailer turned reporter to cover the 1960 Democratic Party convention for Esquire and later claimed, with typical hubris, that his piece, "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," had made the difference in John F. Kennedy's razor-thin margin of victory over Republican Richard M. Nixon.

While Life magazine called his next book, "An American Dream" (1965), "the big comeback of Norman Mailer," the author-journalist was chronicling major events of the day: an anti-war march on Washington, the 1968 political conventions, the Ali-Patterson fight, an Apollo moon shot.

His 1968 account of the peace march on the Pentagon, "The Armies of the Night," won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He was described as the only person over 40 trusted by the flower generation.

When he covered the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago for Harper's magazine, Mailer was torn between keeping to a tight deadline or joining the anti-war protests that led to a violent police crackdown. "I was in a moral quandary. I didn't know if I was being scared or being professional," he later testified in the trial of the so-called Chicago Seven.

In 1999, "The Armies of the Night" was listed at No. 19 on a New York University survey of 100 examples of the best journalism of the century.

Mailer's personal life was as turbulent as the times. In 1960, at a party at his Brooklyn Heights home, Mailer stabbed his second wife, Adele Morales, with a knife. She declined to press charges, and it was not until 1997 that she revealed, in her own book, how close she had come to dying.

Mailer had views on almost everything.

The 1970s: "the decade in which image became pre-eminent because nothing deeper was going on."

Poetry: a "natural activity ... a poem comes to one," whereas prose required making "an appointment with one's mind to write a few thousand words."

Journalism: irresponsible. "You can't be too certain about what happened."

Technology: "insidious, debilitating and depressing," and nobody in politics had an answer to "its impact on our spiritual well-being."

"He had such a compendious vision of what it meant to be alive. He had serious opinions on everything there was to have an opinion on, and everything he had was so original," said friend William Kennedy, author of "Ironweed."

Mailer's suspicion of technology was so deep that while most writers used typewriters or computers, he wrote with a pen, some 1,500 words a day. In a 1971 magazine piece about the new women's liberation movement, Mailer equated the dehumanizing effect of technology with what he said was feminists' need to abolish the mystery, romance and "blind, goat-kicking lust" from sex.

Time magazine said the broadside should "earn him a permanent niche in their pantheon of male chauvinist pigs." Mailer later told an interviewer that his being called sexist was "the greatest injustice in American life."

"He could do anything he wanted to do — the movie business, writing, theater, politics," author Gay Talese said Saturday. "He never thought the boundaries were restricted. He'd go anywhere and try anything. He was a courageous person, a great person, fully confident, with a great sense of optimism."

In "Advertisements for Myself" (1959), Mailer promised to write the greatest novel yet, but later conceded he had not. Among other notable works: "Cannibals and Christians" (1966); "Why Are We in Vietnam?" (1967); and "Miami and the Siege of Chicago" (1968), an account of the two political conventions that year.

"The Executioner's Song" (1979), an epic account of the life and death of petty criminal Gary Gilmore, whom Mailer never met, won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. "Ancient Evenings" (1983), a novel of ancient Egypt that took 11 years to complete, was critically panned.

"Tough Guys Don't Dance" (1984) became a 1987 film. Some critics found "Harlot's Ghost" (1991), a novel about the CIA, surprisingly sympathetic to the cold warriors, considering Mailer's left-leaning past. In 1997, he came out with "The Gospel According to the Son," a novel told from Jesus Christ's point of view. The following year, he marked his 75th birthday with the epic-length anthology "The Time of Our Time."

Besides Morales, Mailer's other wives were Beatrice Silverman, Lady Jeanne Campbell, Beverly Bentley, actress Carol Stevens and painter Norris Church. He had five daughters, three sons and a stepson.

Mailer lived for decades in a Brooklyn Heights town house with a view of New York harbor and lower Manhattan from the rooftop "crow's nest," and kept a beach-side home in Provincetown, Mass., where he spent increasing time in his later years.

Despite heart surgery, hearing loss and arthritic knees that forced him to walk with canes, Mailer retained his enthusiasm for writing and in early 2007 released "The Castle in the Forest," a novel about Hitler's early years, narrated by an underling of Satan. A book of conversations about the cosmos, "On God: An Uncommon Conversation," came out in the fall.

In 2005, Mailer received a gold medal for lifetime achievement at the National Book Awards, where he deplored what he called the "withering" of general interest in the "serious novel." Authors like himself, he said more than once, had become anachronisms as people focused on television and young writers aspired to screenwriting or journalism.

"Obviously, he was a great American voice," said a tearful Joan Didion, struggling for words upon learning of Mailer's death.

Lennon said arrangements for a private service and burial for family members and close friends would be announced next week, and a memorial service would be held in New York in the coming months.

Rogan · Pristupio: 14 Apr 2006 Poruke: 5419 Studijska grupa: Istorija umetnosti

Amazon buys Rowling's Latest Book For $4 mil!
by Josh Grossberg
Fri, 14 Dec 2007

Amazon.com has sold millions of J.K. Rowling's books. Now the Internet giant is spending millions to get the author's latest tome.

Amazon.com has confirmed it anted up a whopping $4 million Thursday to win the bidding for The Tales of Beedle the Bard at a Sotheby's auction. The leather-bound book is personally illustrated by the author and one of just seven copies created.

While Beedle is not technically a Harry Potter book, it does play a role in the final installment of the saga, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Professor Dumbledore bequeaths the collection of fairy tales to Hermione Granger, and one of its five yarns, The Tale of the Three Brothers, contains an important clue to defeating the evil Lord Voldemort.

"The Tales of Beedle the Bard is really a distillation of the themes found in the Harry Potter books, and writing it has been the most wonderful way to say goodbye to a world I have loved and lived in for 17 years," Rowling wrote in the auction's catalog.

Rowling, 42, gave the first half-dozen copies of Beedle as gifts to those instrumental in making Harry Potter a worldwide sensation.

But she decided to put the last copy on the block to help fund the Children's Voice, a charity aiding institutionalized youth across Europe that Rowling cofounded in 2005.

To hype the auction, she gave a one-time only public reading of the tales.

The auction drew a standing-room-only crowd, that erupted in applause as the bidding passed the million-pound mark. London art agent Hazlitt, Gooden and Fox purchased the volume on behalf of Amazon.

The winning bid was more than 40 times the minimum selling price of $100,000; the auction house claims the amount is the highest ever for a literary manuscript.

"We have to reach back 80 years to find a comparison when we sold the manuscript of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland on behalf of the original Alice," Philip Errington, Sotheby's book expert, told London's Times.

"J.K. Rowling had done the world a rare and immeasurably valuable service—enlarging forever our concept of the way books can touch people—and in particular children—in modern times," Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, said in a statement.

Rowling's Potter books have been translated into over 65 languages and sold nearly 400 million copies worldwide, with Hallows ranking as the biggest-selling book of all time.

Rowling, who watched the auction via the Web from her home in Edinburgh, was "stunned and ecstatic."

"This will mean so much to children in desperate need of help. It means Christmas has come early to me," she said in a statement.

Shortly after the purchase, Amazon posted images of Beedle online, including the cover, and some of Rowling's elegant runes and drawings, which you can see here. The site created a message board to answer questions on the book from fans.

Amazon also published reviews of the stories, including The Wizard and the Hopping Pot ("Rowling has always made her stories as funny as they are clever, and The Wizard and the Hopping Pot is no exception") and announced plans to take Beedle on the road, touring libraries and schools.

Finally, the Web retailer reprinted Rowling's simple, etched dedication.

"Six of these books have been given to those most closely connected to the Harry Potter books during the last 17 years. This seventh copy will be auctioned, the proceeds to help institutionalized children who are in desperate need of a voice. So, to whoever now owns this book, thank you—and fair fortune be yours!"

Rogan · Pristupio: 14 Apr 2006 Poruke: 5419 Studijska grupa: Istorija umetnosti

Coelho pirates his own books

The Brazilian best sellers' author Paulo Coelho decided to give away all is books in electronic form in the Internet.

He created the blog "Pirate Coelho" where he lists links to all is books.

Coelho has already sold about 90.000.000 paper books and he now claims that giving away ebooks raises the number of paper copies sold.

"In 2001, I sold 10,000 hard copies. And everyone was puzzled. We came from zero, from 1000, to 10,000. And then the next year we were over 100,000. […]

I thought that this is fantastic. You give to the reader the possibility of reading your books and choosing whether to buy it or not. […]

So, I went to BitTorrent and I got all my pirate editions… And I created a site called The Pirate Coelho."

http://www.paulocoelho.com/engl/dow.shtml

Luna · Pristupio: 12 Feb 2007 Poruke: 2481 Studijska grupa: neki drugi fakultet

garant ce sad izdavac da ga tuzi LOL

devianna

Misterija oko smrti Antoan de Saint-Exupery-a je mozda reshena...

German pilot fears he killed writer Saint-Exupery

PARIS (Reuters) - Horst Rippert, an 88-year old former pilot of Germany's Luftwaffe, has said in a forthcoming book that he may have killed French writer and war pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupery in 1944.

Saint-Exupery, who achieved worldwide fame with his fairy-tale-like book "The Little Prince," died in mysterious circumstances when his plane came down near Marseilles while on a reconnaissance mission. His body has never been found.

Extracts of the book "Saint-Exupery: The Final Secret" were published in Le Figaro magazine over the weekend, and Le Figaro quoted Rippert as saying: "It's me, I shot down Saint-Exupery."

However, Rippert also said in the article that he could not be certain of the identity of the French pilot whose plane he shot down. He also hoped it was not the French author as he was a big fan of Saint-Exupery's works.

"I didn't see the pilot and even so, it would have been impossible for me to know that it was Saint-Exupery. I have hoped ever since that it wasn't him," he said.

Saint-Exupery was a pioneering pilot of his era. Following the Nazi German occupation of France in 1940, he moved to New York but then came back and joined the Free French air force. He was 44 years old when he died.