Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today's stories:
The Graphic Arts Collection at Princeton University has acquired a rare manuscript of W. B. Yeats poems published in 1935. Yeats’s sister, Elizabeth Corbet Yeats, printed just thirty copies of the manuscript on Cuala Press—a small publisher she founded in 1908. (Melville House)
Jorge Luis Borges’s philosophical short story “The Library of Babel” imagines the universe as an infinite library that contains all possible texts. Brooklyn author Jonathan Basile has recreated Borges’s universal library as a website. (Flavorwire)
Yesterday, Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti celebrated World Book Day above the world—on the International Space Station, in fact. (Shelf Awareness)
The Granada police headquarters recently released documents revealing that the 1936 execution of Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca was carried out on official military orders. It was previously thought that a right-wing firing squad killed Lorca, and this is the first admission of Franco-era officials of their involvement in the poet’s death. (Guardian)
Poetry is less popular than knitting? According to new government data, there has been a consistent decline in poetry readership in the United States over the past twenty years. The most recent Survey of Public Participation in the Arts found that only 6.7 percent of Americans had read a work of poetry at least once in the past year, which is down from 17 percent in 1992. (Washington Post)
In partnership with the nonprofit organization unPrison Project, the Children’s Book Council is launching an initiative to establish children’s book libraries for incarcerated mothers in ten states. (Publishers Weekly)
A new website called Bound & Dedicated invites people to share photos and stories about physical books they own that are inscribed by the authors, or otherwise hold special meaning for their owners. Site creator Tim Huggins started the project not to make a profit, but instead to “memorialize a tangible item in a digital world.” (Washington Post)
