A reputable business

Yesterday was Bloomsday--the one which saw the centenary of James Joyce's Ulysses. And Slate looked back on the story of the novel’s American legalisation.

For while smaller publishers balked at Ernst’s fee, Random House’s business model prompted him to work on contingency: Ernst would get a percentage of royalties on every copy of Ulysses they sold.

And it’s not just that money set the stage for the Ulysses battle. The corporate sheen of Random House was part of the substance of Ernst’s arguments. He noted Random House’s deluxe editions of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Emily Brontë and emphasized that its Leaves of Grass edition “sold for $100 a copy.” His point was clear. Obscenity is an underground, illicit trade. Random House is a reputable business, and reputable business deserves protection. (Kevin Birmingham)

Daily Mail asks bookish questions to poet, journalist, playwright, and broadcaster Ian McMillan.

[What book] ...are you reading now? 

I’m taking my time with a brilliant anthology called A Poet For Every Day Of The Year, edited by Allie Esiri. It’s a book that does exactly what it says on the tin, presenting a poet for you to meet and take your time with every day; to savour, enjoy, read, re-read and return to, knowing that there’ll be another one along tomorrow.

There are contemporary poets here such as Imtiaz Dharker and Brian Bilston as well as older names including Edward Lear and Emily Brontë. 

John Mullan reviews in The Times the Jane Austen spinoff Godmersham Park by Gill Hornby:

The novelist can venture on what the historian cannot suppose. Anne is given a suitably misfortunate backstory (as readers of 19th-century fiction know, from Jane Fairfax to Jane Eyre, no young woman becomes a governess unless she has to). Her own consciousness of the governess’s awkward position in such a household — a subordinate who is not quite a servant — is nicely rendered.