I don’t know how many books I own. Many of them are in storage. Whenever I move apartments, they temporarily feel like a sizable burden. But there can’t be many more than a thousand of them. So I can’t imagine 350,000.

That’s the number a woman in Saskatchewan is dealing with after an unwelcome inheritance. The books belonged to a recently deceased collector whose wife was set to burn them to get rid of them. (”There was a first edition copy of Black Beauty on the top pile and the bottom was all charred off [from being burned] but the top was just immaculate,” the new owner said. But she’s starting to sympathize:

We are kind of at a standstill. I work at two jobs. My husband is a full-time student. We have three kids and no time. And no money. And so we’re at the point now where were looking at having to burn some of the books ourselves.

(Via Bookslut)

On Monday, July 11, I’ll have the distinct pleasure of appearing at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood for the store’s Blogger/Author Pairings series. I’ll be speaking with Carmela Ciuraru, whose book, Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms, hits shelves today. Its title gives you the gist, but you have to dive in to get a sense of its intelligence and spark. A series of biographical essays about 16 writers, including George Eliot, Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, George Orwell, and Sylvia Plath, the book is a great conversation starter, so I’m really looking forward to the 11th. Please join us if you can. (Full details here.)

In the meantime, Salon recently published an abridged version of the book’s introduction. Here’s a taste:

A new work by Stephen King, whose books have sold more than 500 million copies worldwide, is a reassuring promise of success to his publisher. It’s also critic-proof. Yet in the late 1970s, feeling hemmed in by his phenomenally prolific output, King introduced the pen name Richard Bachman. As he later said, it was easy to add someone to his interior staff:

The name Richard Bachman actually came from when they called me and said we’re ready to go to press with this novel, what name shall we put on it? And I hadn’t really thought about that. Well, I had, but the original name — Gus Pillsbury — had gotten out on the grapevine and I really didn’t like it that much anyway, so they said they needed it right away and there was a novel by Richard Stark on my desk, so I used the name Richard, and that’s kind of funny because Richard Stark is in itself a pen name for Donald Westlake, and what was playing on the record player was “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet” by Bachman Turner Overdrive, so I put the two of them together and came up with Richard Bachman.

King’s practical measure to avoid saturating the market (and avoid openly competing with himself for sales) was a success. But in 1985, a bookstore clerk in Washington, D.C., did some detective work and exposed King’s secret. The author subsequently issued a press release announcing Bachman’s death from “cancer of the pseudonym.” King dedicated his 1989 novel The Dark Half (about a pen name that assumes a sinister life of its own) to “the late Richard Bachman.”

A.S. Hamrah reviews Charles Drazin’s French Cinema, “less a history of filmmaking in France than an investigation of the American response to it as seen through British eyes.” He starts with a personal anecdote:

The American reaction against French cinema can be pretty extreme, and I bet every cinephile has experienced it. Once I took a date to a screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s splintery 1964 movie Une femme mariée. Hectoring questions began as soon as we left the theater. “Why would you take me to that?” my date demanded to know. “Why? What possible reason?” “You didn’t like the movie?” I asked in a lighthearted, nonchalant way. “I did not!” she replied, tomahawking her palm, and no amount of post-screening discussion with wine (not French) could make up for whatever it was Godard and I had inflicted on her. The only worse movie date I ever had was in college when I took a girl to see Eraserhead. She cried.

I like French movies, but I’ve always been much more of a Truffaut fan than a Godard fan. That statement probably pisses off both snooty cinephiles who don’t agree with the preference and American populists who sneer at even having a preference.

Read Hamrah’s entire review here.

After recently reading the oral biography of Chris Farley, I turned to Live From New York, a bulky oral history of the show that made Farley famous. It reads about as quickly as a 600-page book can, full as it is of gossipy anecdotes.

The basic arc is as you would expect, from the drug-saturated, world-conquering early days (production assistant Neil Levy: “This pot was from Africa or something. You didn’t even have to smoke it; you just looked at the joint and you were unconscious.”) to the squeakier professional days of Tina Fey, et al. Part of the fun, of course, is the character assassination. Chevy Chase and Harry Shearer come off as the most universally disliked. (NBC bigwig Dick Ebersol on Shearer: “He’s just a nightmare-to-deal-with person.” And writer James Downey: “[Bill] Murray can be a real asshole, but the thing that keeps bringing me back to defend him is I’ve seen him be an asshole to people who could affect his career way more often than to people who couldn’t. Harry Shearer will shit on you to the precise degree that it’s cost-free; he’s a total ass-kisser with important people.”)

I fell in love with Jane Curtin while reading the book. During the insane early days, she would always shake her head at the partying and go home to her husband and dog. This seemed paradoxically hardcore.

The book is full of digressions about things I either didn’t expect to see or didn’t expect to care about, like the ways in which Billy Crystal was a great colleague, the differences between writing for SNL and Letterman, and why Larry David didn’t succeed during a stint as a staff writer.

There’s a ton about Lorne Michaels, who offered a lot of material himself, and who comes off as funny, committed, intentionally enigmatic, and either a dream or a nightmare to work for, depending on your temperament. He was surprisingly OK with Sinead O’Connor’s notorious tearing in half of the Pope’s picture, citing her bravery. (The story of how O’Connor duped the producers into the moment is also a good one.) After a discussion of Janeane Garofalo’s dissatisfaction while on the show, Michaels offers a brief quote that doesn’t even name her: “Some people, their whole lives, are just injustice collectors. They’re going to find new injustices every day. That’s what they do, and that’s what they are.”

If you’re between heady books, I recommend this one as a palate cleanser. The same authors have just published an even thicker oral history of ESPN, which I’m sure I’ll get to at some point. The sports network’s glory days are even more clearly behind it than SNL’s, but such things hardly seem to matter in this format — I found myself flipping the pages just as quickly in the Victoria Jackson era as in the Gilda Radner era. (Everyone loved Gilda, by the way.)