Books Archives - Public Books

How the “New York Times” Covers Black Writers

There has long been a fear that media only makes room for one Black writer at a time. But that’s always been difficult to prove—until now.

A fundamental truth about bestseller lists? They are not a neutral window into what the public is really reading.

People who use audiobooks are expanding what reading is and can be. But they are also incentivizing publishers to change, in unexpected ways.

We talk of “making discoveries” as if forming them out of clay. Yet, for Samuel Johnson, discovery is an action rather than an object.

For centuries, book-makers, printers, furniture-makers and, now, programmers have worked to answer: how do you find what you need in a book?

For more than five centuries, equilibrium between profit and passion has remained elusive to book buyers and sellers.

How should readers and scholars look on the tangible traces writers leave behind?

Paper was never simply a writing surface, but a complicated substance that folded itself into the fabric of culture and consciousness.