1. Booksquare points to an article in the London Times and agrees that authors need royalty payments for used book sales.
The Times reports “Authors fear that the ease with which readers can find second-hand copies is shortening the shelf life of new books.” I know you’re shocked, but did you know you can pick up A.S. Byatt’s Possession from an English bookshop for 70 pence? That ain’t right. Only dead authors should sell well-used copies for so little. Well, maybe authors who should be dead can sell for that little too. Living authors should be rich, rich, rich, just for selling 15,000 copies of anything. I mean, for goodness’ sake, let’s get realistic. What has Bill Gates done that Beverly Lewis hasn’t? I mean, for money.
2. Jared has learned that Zondervan is claiming that “nowhere is it in print that Lewis said the Narnia stories were Christian allegories or that Aslan was supposed to be Jesus.” He finds that incredible, and so do I , but we agree that with Lewis’ view of fantasy and allegory, he would not have said Aslan was Jesus or that the stories were allegorical. BUT in a letter dated August 6, 1960, he wrote, “Suppose there were a world like Narnia and it needed rescuing, and the Son of God went to redeem, as He came to redeem us. What might it, in that world, all have been like?” Also, note the quotes in an article Jared has written on this subject.
In a 1954 letter to fifth graders, Lewis wrote, “I did not say to myself ‘Let us represent Jesus as He really is in our world by a Lion in Narnia’; I said ‘Let us suppose that there were land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as he became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, and then imagine what would happen.”
Also, though not a quote such as the publisher is denying, David Mills, writing about Tolkien’s fantasy, points out that “Aslan, an obvious Christ-figure, tells the children that they were brought from earth to Narnia so ‘that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.'”
3. Did you know that Margaret Atwood has worked up a prototype device for remote book-signing? It’s called Unotchit. Sarah has the story of its demonstration and the detractors. Abebooks users don’t like it. “‘We quite understand the idea behind Margaret Atwood’s invention because, as she says in interviews, she is an old-age pensioner [who doesn’t want to face the rigours of book tours], but the intriguing thing we found is that it’s not so much the signature that fans care about, it’s meeting the author in person, that’s the real thrill,’ said Richard Davies, a spokesperson for abebooks.com,” reports Canada’s Globe and Mail.
4. Sherry of Semicolon remarks on Time Magazine’s list of 25 most influential evangelicals. Naturally, she includes her own list.
