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Paul Collins

Paul Collins teaches writing at Portland State University, and his work appears regularly in New Scientist, Slate, and The Believer. His next book, The Murder of the Century, will be published in June by Crown.
  • Paul Collins

    Scanners

    New Scientist turns up a new patent for rapid infrared scanning over at Google Books: …Bindings cause pages to arch up either side of the spine – bending text and making it hard to interpret. However, last week Google was…

  • Paul Collins

    The Hottest Book in Charing Cross

    I’ve long been convinced—see my Village Voice piece from a few years back—that the eventual maturing of in-store Print on Demand technology could spell the end for chain stores in their current form. Chains rely on an insane system of…

  • Paul Collins

    The First Known Dust Jacket

    Sunday’s Guardian reports a pretty nifty find at the Bodleian: the first known dust jacket.

  • Paul Collins

    Mr. J.D.

    Once again a journalist turns up at J.D. Salinger’s house, and once again gets turned away. In Japan — not being in easy driving distance of Cornish, NH — they must turn to Blankey Jet City’s song “Salinger,” with its…

  • Paul Collins

    Rock-Arrrrs!

    From the Times (London) archive blog, this 1967 delight on offshore pirate rock stations:

  • Paul Collins

    Secondhand Bookiestore

    A neat find on eBay: someone’s in the last day of an auction on a Harry Stephen Keeler book with a letter from ol’ Harry himself tucked in. Keeler notes one of the more unusual uses for a bookstore that…

  • Paul Collins

    Look Out New Yorkers: Black Hand has an Auto

    “Maintaining the American spirit of up-to-dateness, which is said to attain its most perfect flower in New York, the Black Hand has now added the automobile to its working machinery…. Gus Marino, who has a prosperous junk business at 2045…

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    Paul Collins

    Cobblers and Coverless Books

    Doing well: shoe repair shops and, according to the Telegraph of London, used bookstores:

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    Paul Collins

    Let Them Eat Clicks

    I have a piece in Friday’s Slate about Amazon.com’s seemingly nonexistent corporate philanthropy — and more importantly, whether that should matter. But I hid the real barb in the tail of the piece:

  • Paul Collins

    Bloody Foreigners

    The February Rolling Stone has a fun piece by David Browne on a 2,200 LP album library hidden in the White House:

  • Paul Collins

    What’s Good for General Motors Was…

    …maybe not so great for you. I’m in this week’s New Scientist with a piece on the Cornell-Liberty Mutual Survival Car, and the tremendous resistance safety reforms faced from Detroit in the 1950s and 1960s:

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    Paul Collins

    Around the World in 100 Years

    The best travel writing usually begins with an absurd proposition, so how could I not pick up an attic-sale book subtitled How to See Europe on Fifty Cents a Day?