BookMarks

30/08/2026

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At the University of Coimbra in central Portugal, there are bats in the biblioteca. It’s one of two 18th-century Portuguese libraries where bats are welcome guests, allowed to stay for the bug-eating — and, by extension, manuscript-preserving — services they provide.

What kind of bats make their home behind the bookshelves? And what's your best chance at glimpsing them in action? https://bit.ly/3UXsO16

📸: Julie H. Case

27/08/2026

Washington Irving was the first acknowledged master of American letters. He pioneered forms such as the American essay, short story, and travelogue, as well as emergent genres like horror and the Western. His two masterpiece stories, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” were instant classics, told and retold until they were whittled down to folk tales, a genre that Irving worshipped. He coined the term “the almighty dollar,” helped establish the traditions of American Christmas (including the notion of St. Nicholas riding in a flying wagon), and popularized Gotham as New York City’s nickname. He also bestowed on his beloved home town its first mascot, a fictional, crotchety old man named Diedrich Knickerbocker, whose legacy extends through this June’s N.B.A. championship.

Today barely anyone reads him. But the professor and essayist Phillip Lopate, who read thousands of pages of Irving’s work, found in him “the prototype of a writer’s life, with all its setbacks and triumphs.” Eric Lach reviews Lopate’s book about the forgotten literary figure: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/OzaAgN

25/08/2026

The Voynich Manuscript has long baffled scholars—and attracted cranks and conspiracy theorists, Ariel Sabar wrote in 2024. A prominent medievalist took a new approach to unlocking its secrets. https://theatln.tc/599H1y4v

In the past 500 years, countless academics and so-called “Voynicheros” have attempted to crack the code of the Voynich manuscript; none have been successful. “The manuscript’s unintelligibility had made it a blank screen, onto which people freely projected their own fantasies,” Sabar writes. Centuries of wondering have resulted in countless debunked theories about what exactly the manuscript means.

First introduced to the text as a Ph.D. student, Lisa Fagin Davis returned to the Voynich Manuscript decades later. After building a respectable career as a prominent medievalist, she felt ready to again tackle the mystery of the Voynich.

Davis was forced “to reconsider almost everything she thought she knew about it. The manuscript’s notoriety— as history’s hardest puzzle; as grist for unhinged conspiracies—had for many years scared scholars away,” Sabar writes. “But what if you looked past its extravagant strangeness? What if you focused instead on the things—little noticed—that it shared with countless other manuscripts? Could the ordinary illuminate the extraordinary?”

Davis and other scholars have formed a cross-disciplinary team to tackle the Voynich piece by piece. Maybe one day, these small truths will add up to a broader understanding of the text—but there’s no guarantee. “What if the Voynich remains unsolvable?” Sabar asks. “What if the manuscript is in some sense smarter than us all, its anonymous author, or authors, laughing from the grave at the hubris of reason?”

“Davis has come to believe that the manuscript has meaning, and that scholars will one day find it,” Sabar continues. “A lot of people try to make the argument that surely it would have been read by now if it could be read,” Davis told Sabar. “But that’s just not enough of a reason to give up hope.”

16/08/2026

NYPL The New York Public Library 📚

09/08/2026

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Wall-to-wall books tell an interior design story without saying a word

09/08/2026

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One day, a student asked his teacher exactly the same question.

The teacher listened but remained silent. He offered no answer that day.

A few days later, the student and his teacher happened to meet by the river. The teacher picked up an old pot with several holes in it and handed it to his student.

“Take this pot to the river,” he said, “fill it with water, and bring it back to me.”

The student looked at the pot in confusion. It was clearly full of holes. How could he possibly carry water in it?

Still, the teacher’s request could not be ignored. So the student picked up the pot, went down to the river, filled it with water, and hurried back.

But before he had taken more than a few steps, the water had escaped through the holes.

He tried again.

And again.

Each time, the same thing happened. No matter how quickly he moved, the pot was empty long before he reached his teacher.

Eventually, frustrated and exhausted, the student returned and said:

“Teacher, I’m sorry. I have failed. It is impossible to bring you water with this pot. The holes let it all escape.”

The teacher smiled.

“No,” he replied. “You have not failed. Look at the pot.”

The student looked at it and noticed something he had not seen before. The dirty, dusty pot was now clean. It looked almost new.

“Every time you filled the pot with water,” the teacher explained, “the water passed through the holes and washed away the dirt. You were never meant to carry the water. You were meant to clean the pot.”

Then the teacher continued:

“The same is true of reading.

Your mind is like this pot, and the books you read are like the water. You may read hundreds of pages and remember only a fraction of what you encountered. But that does not mean the reading was pointless.

The purpose of reading is not simply to fill your mind with facts that you can recall word for word.

Books shape the way you think. They introduce you to new ideas, awaken emotions, challenge assumptions, deepen your understanding, and reveal truths you may never have discovered on your own.

Even when you forget the words, something remains.

Every book you read leaves a trace. It changes the way you see the world, even if you cannot always explain exactly how.

And so, each time you read, you are transformed in some small way. You become a little wiser, a little more thoughtful, and perhaps a little more aware of yourself and the world around you.

That is the true value of reading.

You do not read merely to remember what is in the book.

You read to become someone different from the person you were before you opened it.”

Happy reading!

07/08/2026

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We are deeply saddened by the passing of Keigo Higashino, one of the great storytellers of our time

Over a career spanning four decades, he wrote 106 books, sold more than 100 million copies worldwide, and brought Japanese mystery fiction to readers in 41 countries, all while insisting he only wanted to write novels that even his “book-hating childhood self” would enjoy.

We are honored to have been part of bringing his work to English-language readers, and to be publishing The Dark Magician, a brand-new whodunit translated by his long-time collaborator Alexander O. Smith, as a testament to the range and vitality he never lost. He kept moving forward. We're grateful for every page!

07/08/2026

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81 years ago today, the U.S. B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped the world's first deployed atomic bomb. A hundred thousand people were killed. John Hersey's pioneering piece, "Hiroshima," tells the stories of six who lived. A young woman working in a tin plant, a doctor at a private hospital, a widow, a German missionary, a young surgeon, and a local reverend—all wondered why they had survived the blast, which arrived as a soundless flash. "It seemed a sheet of sun," one recalled. Revisit Hersey's intimate, deeply reported piece following those survivors through the deadly day, and the ruin and recovery that followed: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=dhfacebook&utm_content=app.dashsocial.com%2Fnewyorkermag%2Flibrary%2Fmedia%2F706172176

06/08/2026

06/08/2026

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If your TBR pile is out of control, you've come to the right place. These reading memes will make you feel seen.

Read more at the link in the comments. ⬇️