Lenny sends his best:

[T]he 71-year-old songwriter-poet-novelist has donated 140 banker’s boxes full of stuff, in return for a rumoured seven-digit tax receipt from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. (The Fisher has a U.S. corporation to facilitate such donations.) “We got it because we’ve maintained an ongoing relationship,” says Landon, “even when Cohen was up Mount Baldy being a Buddhist.” The Fisher is still negotiating with Cohen over what will be restricted, as libraries usually do for donations from living writers.

(via Rare Book News)
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Evil Editor tells us why he became an editor.
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So, what did Paul Celan and Yehuda Amichai think of each other? (via Nextbook)
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Yet another reason to regret not living in New York: the National Stationery Show. (via whip up)
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The Bat Segundo Show #41 features a bit of discussion on I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. It’s a book I remember fondly (and still have on my shelf), and not only for its great first line: “I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.”
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While some other bloggers are criticising NYTBR’s food issue, I have few complaints. Sure the thematic issues are a bit much, but as someone who loves food and plans to start a food blog some time this fall, I have no prejudice against cookbooks. I even wrote up a review yesterday of Vegan with a Vengeance for a local newspaper.

Anyway, there’s one NYTBR article that stands out: Save These Books! They asked various people about their favorite out-of-print cookbooks. Over the past year I’ve been collecting the cookbooks my mom used religiously while I was growing up. They’re all out of print at this point, but after a year of effort I have them all.
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On Your Marks, Get Set, Poeticize:

Here’s the setup: Two writers are given 15 minutes each to compose a poem based on a little inspiration furnished by an editor. They type their poems for posting on a Web site called QuickMuse (quickmuse.com). Fifteen minutes later the poems go up on the site, and can be played back so that readers see the keystrokes unfold second by second and follow each erasure and false start, all the little compromises necessitated by the constrictions of time.

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John Baker has a post on the saddest books. I’ve read some devastatingly sad books, and I’d say that Ethan Frome is definitely on my list of saddest books. In retrospect, it may not have been the best book to read in 6th grade.
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Judith Moore, 66, Author of Angry Memoir ‘Fat Girl,’ Is Dead

James W. Carey, Teacher of Journalists, Dies at 71

James B. McClatchy, 85, Patriarch of a Newspaper Family, Is Dead

Ted Berkman, 92, Screenwriter, Dies