Submissions are open for the 2025 Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize.

By Literary Hub

---

February 20, 2025, 10:00am

Literary Hub is pleased to announce that submissions are now open for the ninth annual Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize, which awards $1,000 for “an outstanding book collection conceived and built by a woman aged 30 or younger,” who lives anywhere in the United States.

The guidelines note that “The winning collection must have been started by the contestant, and all items in the collection must be owned by her. A collection may include books, manuscripts, and ephemera; it may be organized by theme, author, illustrator, printing technique, binding style, or another clearly articulated principle. A great collection is more than a reading list of texts: it’s a chosen group of printed or manuscript objects, creatively assembled, that shine light on one another . . . Collections are judged not on their size or their market value, but on their originality and their success in illuminating their chosen subjects.”

The prize, founded in 2017 by Heather O’Donnell of Honey & Wax Booksellers and Rebecca Romney of Type Punch Matrix, seeks to celebrate a type of book collector who has often gone unnoticed. “We observed that the women who regularly bought books from us were less likely to call themselves ‘collectors’ than the men, even when those women had spent years passionately collecting books,” the founders write in a press release. “And a quick online image search for ‘book collector’ brought up page after page of older men. By creating a platform that celebrates and shares innovative collections created by young women, and providing a financial incentive to those collectors as they work, we aim to encourage a new generation of women collectors.”

“I didn’t consider myself a book collector until I heard about the contest and thought, ‘that’s me, I want to participate!'” said 2023 winner, tattoo artist Auroura Morgan, who was recognized for Hybrid Botanicals: A Modern Tattoo Artist’s Reference Collection. “Finding a community with shared interest in books has been a surprising and delightful experience.”

It could be you! The deadline for submissions is July 1, 2025; this year’s winner will be announced in September. Good luck.

If Trump can’t kill you, he wants to hurt you.

By James Folta

---

February 19, 2025, 3:20pm

As a New York City resident, I don’t really have any good governments at the moment. Federally I’m being governed by mendacious and grubbing hogmen, statewide I’m being represented by uninspired and fiddling centrists, and at the local city-level, I’m watching my corrupt, cop mayor flail, only surfacing to yell at journalists and flash corny hand hearts.

To borrow a phrase I grew up hearing: I’m ripshit mad.

Out of everything that’s happened in the past month, there’s one executive order from January that I can’t get out of my head: “Restoring The Death Penalty And Protecting Public Safety”. It’s a bear hug embrace of capital punishment, which isn’t particularly surprising from a group of people obsessed with cruelty, mockery, and vicious displays of power.

But within this death penalty order there’s a more targeted command for vengeance. Before leaving office, President Biden commuted the death penalties of 37 people on death row. Not satisfied to simply re-emphasize state killing of prisoners, Trump has gone a step further and gone after these commuted men and women. The Order commands the Attorney General “to evaluate the places of imprisonment and conditions of confinement” for these 37 prisoners and to “take all lawful and appropriate action to ensure that these offenders are imprisoned in conditions consistent with the monstrosity of their crimes and the threats they pose.”

In no uncertain terms, this is seeking vengeance on the previous administration by inflicting pain on state captives. Using executive power to heighten the punishment for those who are in jail for life is atrociously savage and as close to a thesis statement for this regime as I’ve seen: at every turn be merciless, unrestrained, and uncivil.

There’s no reconciliation with this sort of calculated barbarity. There’s no care here, despite it being a word I hear a lot from Trump fans. Specifically I hear many uses of the phrase “take care,” which is used to convey tenderness — “Trump will protect me and ensure my welfare” — as well as brutality — “Trump will punish those contemptible others who deserve it.”

The recipients of each form of this split “care” are obvious to the Trump faithful, which is indicative of something Jamelle Bouie has being saying repeatedly: these people are segregationists. They are turning back the clock and seeking to reimpose “the worst hierarchies our society has produced.” To the adherents of this retrograde project of social engineering, it’s clear who needs taking care of. Both the kind and cruel usages can coexist without fear that they will ever become entangled: Trump “taking care of my family” will never mean receiving the boot of the state, just as Trump “taking care of prisoners” will never mean extending kindness or a chance for redemption.

Trump and his lackeys see in color. Trump rose to political prominence on lies about the birthplace of our first Black president and who spent the end of his 2024 campaign vilifying Haitians. And of course, a majority of the 37 prisoners that Trump is commanding the A.G. to take care of are non-white.

These years will be a test of our caring, and our ability to act in community and solidarity with others. I hope we’re able to see the humanity in the incarcerated victims of this administration, despite their crimes and failures, especially now that they’re in the cruel and unusual crosshairs of the most powerful lawyer in our country.

Next week, Amazon is stripping away your ability to download your ebooks.

By James Folta

---

February 19, 2025, 12:01pm

Starting next Wednesday, February 26th, Amazon isn’t going to let users download the ebooks they’ve purchased, forcing users to keep everything within the corporation’s proprietary ecosystem.

As covered in The Verge, the mega-corporation is removing a feature that lets ebook readers do what they want with their purchases, including back-up their books, or convert them to different formats, or transfer them to a non-Amazon e-reader. There are a lot of reasons why you may want to download your ebooks, but the basic argument for it is simple: if you buy something, you should be able to do what you want with it.

Amazon’s downloading process has always been a little obscure, requiring a lot of clicks. And if you want to move books to non-Kindle devices, you have to convert the books out of Amazon’s proprietary file type, which can also be tricky. But even this too-onerous process is giving away too much to its customers for Amazon.

This move isn’t terribly surprising coming from Amazon, a bad company that’s getting worse, and being led by a fascist-fascinated billionaire who looks like Mr. Clean’s uncle — the one who is no longer invited to Thanksgiving. This isn’t just an issue of forcing users to cede ownership and keep everything within Amazon systems — Amazon has demonstrated in the past that it’s not a trustworthy librarian. The company has deleted books that it said were offered for sale by mistake or replaced books with new versions without alerting readers. Amazon’s also not interested in selling their ebooks or audiobooks to libraries, keeping a monopolistic hold on some titles. This is most egregiously the case for “Audible Exclusive” audiobooks, which won’t be available to borrow from libraries or to purchase from other services.

Tech companies selling books, music, and movies have long treated digital purchases more like rental agreements, which is nice for saving space on shelves and hard drives, but means that you’re locked in a strange, almost feudal relationship. The solution is to not give them your business — services like Bookshop.org and Libro.fm not only let you download your own, non-DRM-locked copies of what you buy, but also let you support independent bookstores with your purchases.

If you’ve already bought ebooks from Amazon, you’ve got a week to back them up before the feature disappears. The process seems like it involves a lot of clicking, especially if you have a larger library, but writer Craig Mod shared a tool that apparently helps automate things a bit:

In case you were looking to backup your kindle books (since Amazon is removing the option to download them on the 26th), this script works quite well in minimizing the click-pain of downloading them individually: gist.github.com/spf13/1fee1e…

— Craig Mod (@craigmod.com) 2025-02-19T14:21:16.198Z

And if you’re looking for some inspiring, anti-Amazon, anti-tech oligarchy reading, check out Brian Merchant’s Blood In The Machine and Tim Wu’s The Curse of Bigness — both available as ebooks you can download.

Edward Gorey’s “Great Simple Theory About Art” is essential reading for writers.

By Emily Temple

---

February 19, 2025, 10:11am

“Many of Edward Gorey’s most fervent devotees,” Stephen Schiff wrote in a profile of the artist in The New Yorker in 1992, “think he’s (a) English and (b) dead. Actually, he has never so much as visited either place.” Alas, he has now visited at least one: Gorey—born nearly a century ago, on February 22, 1925—died in 2000, leaving behind a vast catalogue of work—the macabre, deadpan, funny and sometimes brutal illustrations and short narratives for which he has become a cult icon—and a mysterious personal legacy.

It’s always tempting to try to “figure out” what makes a weird genius like Gorey tick, and I doubt the world ever will. But in Mark Dery’s biography of Gorey, Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey, I recently came across a hint. In one of his many letters to his friend and collaborator Peter Neumeyer—collected, by the way, in Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey & Peter F. Neumeyer— Gorey shares what he calls “E. Gorey’s Great Simple Theory About Art,” which Dery notes is “as revealing a statement of his aesthetic philosophy as we’re ever going to get.”

It is, according to Gorey, “the theory . . . that anything that is art . . . is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it’s no good having one without the other, because if you just have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it’s irritating.”

“E. Gorey’s Great Simple Theory About Art isn’t so simple,” Dery writes.

It owes something to his Taoist rejection of the either/or epistemology of Western philosophy. And to his Derridean-Beckettian awareness of the limits of language. And to his Asian-Barthesian belief in the importance of ambiguity and paradox as spaces where readers can play with a text, making their own meanings. And to his surrealist sense that ‘there is another world, but it is in this one’ (Paul Éluard). Yet above and beyond all that, there’s still something mysterious in his Great Simple Theory, an elusive idea or maybe just an inexpressibly quality that’s more than the sum of these philosophical parts. In a postcard to Neumeyer, Gorey quotes Plato’s Gorgias: ‘There is no truth; if there were, it could not be known; if known, it could not be communicated.’

But technically it’s simple. Look how few lines it takes up. And Gorey liked this kind of non-simple simplicity, as his own work makes clear. “The way I write, since I do leave out most of the connections, and very little is pinned down, I feel that I’m doing a minimum of damage to other possibilities that might arise in a reader’s mind,” he told Schiff. He disliked, he said, writers who “forced a personality” on him, or who were “completely exhaustive about whatever it is they’re writing about until you’re just left feeling ‘O.K., you’ve nailed me to the chair, that’s it, there’s nothing left to think about, there’s nothing left to question.'” (Not afraid to name names, he told Schiff that his least favorite writers were Thomas Mann and Henry James—”I hate Henry James more than tongue can tell,” he said. “I have read everything he wrote, sometimes more than once. I think he’s the worst writer in the English language.”)

“My favorite genre is the sinister-slash-cozy,” Gorey added.

I think there should be a little bit of uneasiness in everything, because I do think we’re all really in a sense living on the edge. So much of life is inexplicable. Inexplicable things happen to me; things that are so inexplicable that I’m not even sure that something happened. And you suddenly think, ‘Well, if that could happen, anything could happen.’ One moment, something is there, and then, the next, it is not there. One minute, both of my feet are perfectly all right, and then, a minute later, somebody has dropped a fifty-pound weight on one of them, and now suddenly I’ve got an injured foot and I have to go do something about this injured-foot thing. The things that happen to you are usually the things that you haven’t thought of or that come absolutely out of nowhere. And all you can do is cope with them when they turn up.

The something, the something else, the unexpected, the world-changing, and all of us on the edge, all of us left grasping. That sounds like good art, all right.

Remembering David Ruggles, the radical abolitionist who opened the first Black-owned bookstore.

By Brittany Allen

---

February 18, 2025, 10:31am

This Black History Month is the fraughtest. Maybe even apex fraught.

As many hard-won minority group commemorations are being actively scrubbed from government websites, we the recognized are asked to consider what those commemorations have come to mean under elite capture. When your very existence is contested, what are the limits of federal recognition?

As Frederick Douglass once put it, “What to the slave is the fourth of July?”

In a wonderful Substack reflection (“A Black History Month Love Note“), author Kaitlyn Greenidge reminds us:

Black History Month began not as a business move or a way to build monetary wealth or a desire for white American understanding or a marketing push. It was an effort of Black librarians and researchers to preserve memory and build self. It was started not by CEOs or ‘disrupters’ but by the people who keep and safeguard our archives.

One archivist well worth remembering is the abolitionist David Ruggles.

As Ashawnta Jackson reports in JSTOR, David Ruggles was born into freedom in 1810. A journalist who worked for The Emancipator and The Liberator, Ruggles spent his life committed to abolition. He eventually went on to found his own newspaper, Mirror of Liberty, and was an early conductor of the Underground Railroad. He personally sheltered hundreds of escaped enslaved people at the height of the Fugitive Slave Act—Frederick Douglass himself being one.

His first public endeavor was a grocery store, located at One Cortlandt Street in New York. This store, which subscribed to the Quaker-supported Free Produce movement and sold only produce made without slave labor, also served as a reading room for Black New Yorkers who were then denied access to the state’s public libraries.

At 24, Ruggles opened the first (known) Black-owned bookstore, on Lipsenard Street. He stocked his stacks “with abolitionist and feminist publications.”

This space also served as a meeting place for groups like the New York Manumission Society, or the New York Committee of Vigilance—an abolitionist working group that Ruggles co-founded. Haters in the press referred to the joint as an “incendiary depot.”

The depot was often caught in enemy crosshairs. A mob once set fire to his collection. And Ruggles himself was often tormented (and once, arrested) for his activism.

All that good work took its toll. Ruggles spent his late thirties seeking and then extolling the water cure at a minor magic mountain in Northampton, Massachusetts. He died at 39, enjoying the reputation of a super radical, too extra for even some of his abolitionist peers.

Ruggles’ name isn’t usually uttered in the same breath as those major Black history icons (see: Douglass) but I can only explain that by erasure. Which of course we’re likely to get more of, institutionally. The way things are going.

But here’s Greenidge again.

The intentions of Black History month have nothing to do with a multinational corporation’s shareholders or a tech CEO who has never been more curious about anything other than himself. It’s reminding us that even when the dominant narrative insists that Blackness is on the outs (an absurd belief) that ‘DEI’ has been eliminated, we keep creating and building and planning and making.”

It’s a useful time to remember our radical literary histories. The movers and shakers who made havens against prevailing winds. So this Tuesday, I’m pouring one out for David Ruggles.

May we all make or find refuge in incendiary, communal space.

Images via, via, via