Kwame Spearman

Kwame Spearman, CEO of Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver, Colo., is resigning from his role at the bookstore as he considers running for a seat on the Denver School Board, Denverite reported.

Earlier this year, Spearman took a leave of absence from Tattered Cover in order to focus on a mayoral campaign. Though he made the ballot, Spearman chose to withdraw from the race prior to the election. Now he is focusing on the school board, telling Denverite: "...we need someone who's willing to have honest, truthful conversations about the direction of the district and help the superintendent come up with plans that help our kids. We're... just not doing that right now."

Though he is stepping down as CEO, Spearman will remain a part-owner of the bookstore. He plans to stay involved with the business but has not yet determined whether he'll join the bookstore's board.

Tattered Cover CFO Margie Keenan, who became interim CEO during Spearman's leave of absence, will remain in that role while the bookstore searches for a permanent replacement.

In a press release, members of the bookstore's board wrote: "While leadership changes are never easy, we are excited to embrace the opportunities and experiences that this new chapter brings."

In late 2020, Tattered Cover's previous owners Len Vlahos and Kristen Gilligen sold the bookstore to an investor group that included Spearman; David Back; former American Booksellers Association CEO Oren Teicher; former Macmillan CEO John Sargent; and Dick Monfort, chairman and CEO of the Colorado Rockies baseball team.

Next Chapter Books, a pop-up bookstore that debuted last year in Detroit, Mich., will again extend its stay at the former Alger Theater, WDET reported.

Owners Sarah and Jay Williams will continue to do business at the Alger through the end of this month, and in the meantime they continue to search for a permanent, bricks-and-mortar location in the Morningside/East English Village area on Detroit's eastside.

The bookstore, which opened shortly after Thanksgiving and was originally planned to run only through the holidays, sells titles for all ages and across all genres with an eye toward local authors and authors from underrepresented communities. There are new and used books available and an emphasis on community and literacy.

Once the Alger pop-up closes at the end of April, the Williamses hope to reopen in a permanent home in the summer.

Lily Huang, a bookseller at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore & 57th Street Books in Chicago, Ill., has been awarded a scholarship to attend the Denver Publishing Institute this summer. A collaboration of the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, Sourcebooks and the DPI, the scholarship includes tuition, room, and board, and up to $2,000 to cover travel and replacement wages.

"We are delighted to partner with Binc once again to enable an amazing bookseller to attend the Denver Publishing Institute," said DPI director Jill Smith. "We view booksellers as heroes in the book industry and consider them a vital link between the publishers and the readers. We look forward to welcoming Lily Huang to Denver this summer."

Dominique Raccah, publisher and CEO of Sourcebooks, commented: "The DPI program has always had a very special place in my heart. For years, my husband and I would drive from Chicago to Denver to participate as publishers, and I know from experience that this is a truly important program that engages and ignites the future of the publishing industry. Everyone at Sourcebooks is honored to have the opportunity to collaborate with our dear friends at Binc on this joint scholarship, and we're thrilled to be part of a book lover's career journey!"

Binc executive director Pam French added: "We are proud to be working with Sourcebooks and the University of Denver to continue offering this career-enhancing scholarship opportunity to booksellers."

Abrams ComicArts, which has been an imprint of Abrams Books, is becoming a new division of the company, alongside its adult and children's books groups. The new division will, Abrams said, strengthen its collaboration with Abrams's parent company, Média-Participations (MPP), which publishes in France an extensive range of original and licensed graphic novels, manga, and books on comics.

Abrams president and CEO Mary McAveney said, "Graphic novels, comics, and manga are an area of tremendous growth with a devoted and diverse fan base. Our unique access to rich content through MPP allows us to strategically expand our presence in this market. Our best-in-class publishing in the art of comics makes Abrams ComicArts the division to magnify our backlist publishing while expanding into this important market."

Rodolphe Lachat has been appointed v-p and publisher of Abrams ComicArts and will continue to edit titles as part of Cernunnos, an imprint he manages under the adult division of the company. Charles Kochman, who created Abrams ComicArts in 2009, will serve as editor-in-chief. Kochman, who joined Abrams in 2005, is a recipient of the Inkpot Award, presented by Comic-Con International, and editor of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series by Jeff Kinney, which he will continue to edit in addition to selected comics titles as part of the children's Amulet imprint. Megascope, the line of graphic novels dedicated to speculative fiction and nonfiction by people of color and curated by John Jennings, will continue to be published under Abrams ComicArts and will be overseen by Kochman.

The first list as a new division will release in Fall 2024 with two new additions in the Marvel Arts line, The Veracity Vortex by Chip Kidd and Michael Cho and a deluxe edition of Fantastic Four: Full Circle by Alex Ross. Upcoming original graphic novels include Cormac McCarthy's The Road: A Graphic Novel Adaptation and Thomas Piketty's Capital and Ideology: A Graphic Novel Adaptation.

The third round of applications is now open for the RISE Booksellers Exchange Program, which "aims to connect booksellers with colleagues and industry experts around the world, enabling them to share experiences and explore new initiatives within the industry." The third round of exchanges is expected to take place in the second half of 2023.

Participants will be granted a three-day stay in a bookshop abroad. They will work at a foreign colleague's shop and learn the practicalities of the book trade in the host's country. The second application round for the Booksellers Exchange Programme is open until April 27. All interested booksellers can apply by sending a filled-in application form to info@risebookselling.eu.

German bookseller Katja Lena Rau at Queen Anne Book Company in Seattle.

Katja Lena Rau of Buchhandlung Fiederer in Germany participated in the RISE Booksellers Exchange last month, traveling to the U.S. and Queen Anne Book Company in Seattle, Wash.

"She was a thoughtful, cheerful, curious, and inspiring part of our workdays," said Queen Anne's children's book buyer Tegan Tigani. "We feel very lucky to have gotten to know her, and we look forward to continuing our international friendship." RISE Bookselling featured "key takeaways that Katja and her host Tegan got from this experience."

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The London Book Fair has changed the dates for next year's fair after a scheduling conflict with Bologna Children's Book Fair. The Bookseller had reported recently that LBF was investigating a date change due to BCBF's scheduling of its 2024 event for April 8-11, which was a bit too close to LBF's April 16-18. 

LBF director Gareth Rapley confirmed that LBF 2024 will instead take place March 12-14, noting: "Our top aim is to deliver a fair that works for as many of our attendees as possible, and this move has been made following extensive dialogue with our advisory board and industry stakeholders, who strongly backed the March dates.

"We appreciate that the tight turnaround between Bologna 2024 and LBF, if it had stayed at its previous April dates, would have imposed real logistical difficulties on exhibitors hoping to attend both fairs. It would also have prevented attendees to both fairs from having much downtime to take stock from Bologna and prepare for LBF."

Adding that the possibility of a date change was "not a foregone conclusion by any means," Rapley said that the LBF team had worked hard with Olympia to enable it: "[I] want to recognize how incredibly helpful the Olympia team have been in making this happen.... This will be a longer-term move to this period going forward, and we now are planning for LBF to be held around the same time in March from here on. We hope this provides welcome certainty for the international adult and children's industry."

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Last week the Norwegian government submitted a proposal for a new book law to Parliament. "Among other topics, the proposal addresses and adjusts the system of fixed book prices in the country," the European & Independent Booksellers Federation's Newsflash reported. "While the Norwegian Booksellers Association welcomes a book law with fixed prices for new books, it is critical towards some aspects of the proposal, namely the proposed regulation of the distribution of income between retailer and supplier. 

"This regulation limits the industry's opportunities to find effective and sustainable solutions themselves in a market that is constantly changing. It will weaken the book's ability to compete with other services and products," said Anne Schiøtz, director of the Booksellers Association.

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Congratulations to Kirjakauppaliitto, the Finnish Booksellers Association, which recently celebrated 120 years of its existence. EIBF's Newsflash wrote: "Following a series of meetings between Finnish booksellers and publishers in the 1890s, the association was founded on 28 March 1903. Throughout the years, it has gone through various changes, acquiring the name Kirjakauppaliitto in 1998. On the occasion of its 120th anniversary, the association will be publishing a series of articles tracing the history of the Finnish book industry. EIBF team congratulates our Finnish colleagues and wishes them at least 120 more successful years to come!" --Robert Gray

Nicole Brinkley, manager of Oblong Books in Rhinebeck, N.Y., is the 2023 Joe Drabyak Handseller of the Year, an award given by the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association to a bookseller who translates their love of books into handselling, marketing, and promotions, in honor of the late bookseller famous for his handselling abilities. Brinkley will receive a full ticket packet and a travel stipend to attend the NAIBA summer conference, New Voices New Rooms.

Nicole Brinkley

Brinkley, who is also on the ABA's advisory council and the children's advisory council, and reviews children's books for BookPage, said, "Connecting books to eager readers was what made me fall in love with bookselling eight years ago and is what keeps me coming back to the store every day. To be recognized for what is the most joyous part of my job is a real treat. I cannot wait to keep connecting books to the readers who love them--and to keep being inspired to do so by my wonderful NAIBA colleagues!"

Among her fans is Manuel Uribe, an Oblong customer, who said that Brinkley "brings to my attention the multitude of titles available not just in her own bookstore, but even to titles she doesn't carry physically. Where it's not just about the purchase of the book, but about the journey to find out more about myself."

Author and customer Margaret Rogerson added: "Nicole's passion for books shines through in everything she does. She is never without a recommendation or a kind word. As an author, I've been deeply affected by her essays on the publishing community. I often wish that her dedication, insight, and grace were better rewarded. I can think of no one more deserving, and I can't imagine the indie bookselling world without her."

Page and Palette in Fairhope, Ala., enjoyed a surprise visit from "our favorite writer, Rick Bragg, who we consider part of our bookstore family." Pictured: Bragg flanked by event manager Steph Crowe (l.) and Diane Kierper, Penguin sales rep.

Congratulations to Stu Abraham, winner of the 2023 Kay Sexton Award, given annually to "an individual or organization in recognition of longstanding dedication and outstanding work in fostering books, reading, and literary activity in Minnesota." The award is part of the 2023 Minnesota Book Awards, presented this year by Education Minnesota. Abraham will be honored at the 35th annual Minnesota Book Awards Ceremony on Tuesday, May 2

Abraham formed Abraham Associates in 1992 and has represented a range of national, regional and Minnesota publishers. He was cited for being " 'the platform' for introducing booksellers and readers to new titles from Coffee House Press, Graywolf Press, Lerner Publishing, Hungry Mind Press, Holy Cow Press, Redleaf Press, the vast and diverse offerings from Consortium Distribution, and many others. After his early years as a rep in the Chicago area, and then as a house rep for Publishers Group West, Stu settled in the Twin Cities, supporting the efforts of booksellers such as B. Dalton, Hungry Mind, Odegard Books in both Saint Paul and Minneapolis, and others that helped Minnesota become one of the leading literary communities in the country....

"Stu's contributions to the Minnesota literary community go far beyond sales. He has been an essential bridge between publishers, distributors, and bookstores large and small throughout his career. Stu has gone above and beyond in helping young booksellers establish their businesses and has helped launch the careers of many fellow book reps.

"He has also served as an unofficial agent, guiding many Minnesota authors in their efforts to find a publisher, work with bookstores, and build their careers. His advocacy on behalf of authors has always been pro bono and without regard for credit. But these authors know how invaluable Stu has been in getting their books on shelves and in the hands of readers. They have been inspired by Stu's generosity of spirit and the intellectual curiosity he has exhibited for his entire career."

Novel Bay Booksellers, Sturgeon Bay, Wis., shared a photo of the shop's Easter-themed front window display and sidewalk chalkboard message: "Every-bunny loves a good book! We have Easter books for kiddos that will keep them entertained well after the candy is gone. Stop in 10-5 through Saturday to fill those baskets."

At Morrow:

Anwesha Basu and Heidi Richter have each been promoted to executive director of publicity.

Eliza Rosenberry has been promoted to director of publicity.

Kelly Cronin has been promoted to senior publicist.

Tavia Kowalchuk has been promoted to executive director of marketing.

DJ DeSmyter has been promoted to director of marketing.

Deanna Bailey has been promoted to marketing associate.

Taylor Turkington has been promoted to marketing coordinator.

Blue Hour by Tiffany Clarke-Harrison (Soft Skull).

Yulin Kuang will adapt and direct Emily Henry's bestselling novel Beach Read into a film for 20th Century Studios, Deadline reported. Original Film is producing. An Emmy-nominated writer and director, Kuang recently adapted Henry's People We Meet on Vacation for 3000 Pictures, with Temple Hill producing and Brett Haley attached to direct.

The shortlist for the inaugural Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, celebrating creativity and excellence in fiction by women and non-binary writers in Canada and the U.S., has been selected. Each shortlisted author receives $12,500, and the winner, who will be announced on May 4 at a livestreamed event at Parnassus Books, Nashville, Tenn., will receive $150,000 and a residency with Fogo Island Inn. The shortlist:

Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades (Random House)
When We Were Sisters by Fatimah Asghar (One World)
What We Fed to the Manticore by Talia Lakshmi Kolluri (Tin House)
The Sleeping Car Porter by Suzette Mayr (Coach House Books)
Elsewhere by Alexis Schaitkin (Celadon Books)
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The shortlist has been chosen for the £25,000 (about $32,515) Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. The winner will be announced in June at the Borders Book Festival in Melrose, Scotland. Shortlisted authors each receive £1,500 (about $1,875). This year's finalists are:

These Days by Lucy Caldwell 
The Geometer Lobachevsky by Adrian Duncan 
Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris 
The Chosen by Elizabeth Lowry 
The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane
Ancestry by Simon Mawer 
I Am Not Your Eve by Devika Ponnambalam 

photo: Hobbes Ginsberg

Casey Plett is the publisher at LittlePuss Press, a Stonewall Book Award-winning feminist press run by two trans women. She co-edited Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Transgender Writers and wrote A Dream of a Woman and Little Fish. Arsenal Pulp Press has reissued A Safe Girl to Love, her first book, originally published in 2014.

Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:

A Safe Girl to Love is short stories about young transgender women in the early 2010s. And one of them is not so young.

On your nightstand now:

Alice Stoehr's Cisness or Pleasure. I've been ripping through her collections and they're gorgeous. I love a trans book that's so flippin' gay. Alice is right up there with Emily Zhou (whose collection we're publishing at LittlePuss) for short story writers trans literature is currently blessed with.

Also Jeremy Atherton Lin's Gay Bar: Why We Went Out. I was not expecting it to be so meditative! It is such a delight! "If my experiences in gay bars have been disappointing, what I wouldn't want to lose is the expectation of a better night."

Also I just began Hilary Leichter's Temporary. What a trip so far. It rules.

Favorite book when you were a child:

Roald Dahl--The BFG; Danny, the Champion of the World; James and the Giant Peach; Matilda; The Twits. I feel less fondly about him as an adult, to put it mildly, after learning what an antisemite and a racist he was, but those are the books I loved.

Also the Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith books--The Time Warp Trio forever. Oh, and Matt Christopher! I loved baseball as a kid.

Your top five authors:

Miriam Toews, Sarah Schulman, Iosi Havilio, Bryan Washington, Jeanne Thornton.

Book you've faked reading:

Well, I was once a book publicist, so luckily for you I can say with a straight face that I've never done this.

Book you're an evangelist for:

After Delores by Sarah Schulman. It's such an interesting anomaly in her older fiction, which often has more objectively sympathetic protagonists. And I love those books--Rat Bohemia blows the doors off--but After Delores is so deliciously off the rails: a lesbian noir from 1980s NYC in which a violently heartbroken protagonist must suddenly solve a murder, and she is both messily endearing and extremely unhinged. Like, nowadays when I hear "unreliable narrator," I'm kinda like, yeah yeah yeah whatever. This was the OG of that phenomenon on my personal map. She was a really troubled gay character who felt real, wasn't pretty or put on a brave face, was complicatedly dangerous--and all within a bang-up good time of a novel. Everybody go read After Delores right now.

Book you've bought for the cover:

Lucy Warner's Mirrors when I worked at the Strand. I finally read the first story recently after lugging it around for a decade. It was good.

Book you hid from your parents:

I kinda stopped reading in high school, which is when I would've gotten brave enough to hide anything from my parents, so I don't think I ever hid a book from them. I hid my DVD of Requiem for a Dream.

Book that changed your life:

Nevada by Imogen Binnie. As a messed-up trans human, it mapped a private part of my brain I never conceived of seeing daylight--or even explicitly conceived, period. And as a writer, it set me free.

Favorite line from a book:

"Look to the stars. Look at how the winners get history and the losers get culture. Close your eyes and ask God for light and look for it." --Julian K. Jarboe, Everyone on the Moon Is Essential Personnel

Five books you'll never part with:

Paradises by Iosi Havilio--I maybe wouldn't have begun my novel Little Fish without reading this. It is so moving and propulsive and gorgeous, and the urban life of Buenos Aires he builds is so amazing--and also at its core, the story is the plain, recognizable tale of a lone mother with a small kid putting one foot in front of the other. It's a beautiful dark magic trick of a book, and it will stay with me forever.

A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews--This novel taught me how to write fiction. It's about Mennonites in southern Manitoba, where my family is from.

The Break by Katherena Vermette--This novel shattered my qualms with ensemble casts, and it is beautiful and elegiac and almost perfect. The book blew up in Canada, but I wish the entire world was reading Katherena. It's about Métis women in my hometown of Winnipeg.

Be With: Letters to a Caregiver by Mike Barnes--On the surface, it is a short book of essays about Mike caring for his mother with Alzheimer's. Beneath the surface, it is about the necessity of life.

Little Cat by Tamara Faith Berger--Best hetero sex-writing in existence. Don't @ me.

Other books have been huge on my personal map, yet perhaps eventually they finished doing what they needed to do for me? These books, though, are wells from which I am not done drinking.

Book you most want to read again for the first time:

Invasions by Calvin Gimpelevich. I had to blurb it, so I was reading it with the work-eye, but it's so unique and beautifully put together that I would love to experience it for the first time with some slow, internal, personal consideration, without any attached owing it of something.

When you have a harried professional literary life, I think it's important to keep reading on the go, books to which you don't owe anything.

Vanessa Walters's American debut, The Nigerwife, is a gripping work of suspense, a psychological puzzle, a mystery, and a critique of marriage and high society. The prologue begins: "Nicole often wondered what had happened to the body." This foreshadowing line refers to a body floating in a trash-filled Lagos lagoon, viewed from the home of a young woman who had recently left London to join her Nigerian-born husband. This narrative perspective, "Nicole, Before," defines every other chapter of the novel, interspersed with the viewpoint of "Claudine, After." The pivotal event of these dual timelines is Nicole's disappearance, which gives the prologue's opening line new and sinister meaning.

Nicole spent years in Lagos with her husband, Tonye, and their two young sons. She ceased communication with her family in London and formed and dissolved friendships both in and out of a club called the Nigerwives. "The Nigerwives were so different, a pick 'n' mix of skin tones, hair textures, body shapes, and facial features, but their stories were one and the same. They had all defied the prides and prejudices of their families, sacrificed friendships and careers and independence, and followed heart and husband to Nigeria for what they believed would be an epic adventure." For Nicole--and perhaps for other Nigerwives before her--that adventure would end badly. Between fancy dress and art openings, social posturing and boating parties, she struggled to keep her sanity and independence.

In the days after Nicole goes missing, the aunt who raised her travels to Lagos to look for answers. Claudine does not know Tonye's family well and is dismayed to find how little the family or the police seem to be doing to find Nicole. "She could see [the household help had] been warned not to tell her anything, not even what time of day it was, though they were very respectful clams." The more she attempts to unravel her estranged niece's life, the greater her fear that she's arrived too late. As their timelines progress, Claudine and Nicole each work separately to sort out the family issues that drove them apart, which will not be revealed to readers until the story's end.

With a sense of foreboding, The Nigerwife considers overlapping loyalties and betrayals and the strict constraints of marriage, family, gender, and culture. Nigeria's largest city is ruled by glamour, glitz and materialism; motivations for marriage include love, financial and political gain, and cultural compatibility. Various characters criticize Lagos and Nigeria, but this is not the novel's aim. Rather, Walters's inexorably paced plot examines institutions and the choices women face. "Nothing compensated for having family around to look out for you. But then, what kind of family?" This engrossing novel both entertains, with the mystery at its heart, and provokes questions that go far beyond Nicole's personal story. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Shelf Talker: In this riveting novel about a young woman's disappearance, Lagos high society hides personal struggles and larger cultural concerns.

It is universally known that there are books compos'd without any strength of genius, which appear quite insipid and unaffecting to the reader, and only tire the eyes; but those that are compos'd with an exquisite force of ideas, and with an exact connexion of thought, elevate the foul, and fatigue it with the very pleasure, which, the more compleat, lasting, and frequent it is, breaks the man the more. 

--An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Literary and Sedentary Persons by Samuel-Auguste Tissot, M.D. (1768, London)

What's the perfect book gift for the person on your list who's trying to ban every book they encounter for any reason that occurs to them? A former bookseller (once a bookseller, always a bookseller), I still read with that little voice in the back of my head wondering: Who could I handsell this to? Book banners seem like an ideal target for the title cited above. Keep 'em guessing.

As a book banning Fahrenheit 451 wildfire continues to spread across parts of the U.S. that will remain anonymous to protect their lack of innocence (including states we'll code name FL and TX), I recently found myself entranced by a 250-year-old work that has everything you'd want to read if you were intent on never reading again. Comps? Let's say Edgar Allan Poe co-authoring a self-help medical book with Dr. Oz. A work at once terrifying, nausea-inducing, absurd, and boundlessly overconfident. 

Samuel-Auguste Tissot, by Angelika Kauffmann, 1783

The full title of Tissot's aberrant treatise (long-term side effects still to be determined) is An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Literary and Sedentary Persons with proper Rules for Preventing Their Fatal Consequences and Instructions for their Cure. The author was a notable 18th-century Swiss physician once praised by Napoleon and apparently best known for Avis au peuple sur sa santé (1761) and L'Onanisme (1760). 

A Facebook post by The Public Domain Review clued me in, linking to a copy of Tissot's essay. "It was dangerous to be a man of letters in the eighteenth century," PDR noted. "All that rumination; such single-minded concentration; countless hours hunched over the escritoire. 'Some men are by nature insatiable in drinking wine, others are born cormorants of books,' wrote the Swiss physician Samuel-Auguste Tissot.... As with the reckless consumer of claret, an overindulgence in books could have devastating consequences for the mind and body."

Tissot offers hundreds of "examples of men who read too much, studied too hard, and consumed knowledge to the point of madness," including the young man who developed an allergy to reading ("if he read even a few pages, he was torn with convulsions of the muscles of the head and face, which assumed the appearance of ropes stretched very tight") and another whose intense focus affected hair retention ("his beard fell first, then his eye-lashes, then his eye-brows, then the hair on his head, and finally all the hairs of his body"). Then there's the guy experiencing "dreadful palpitations" while reading Descartes' Treatise on Man, and the one who "fainted away whilst he was perusing some of the sublime passages of Homer." 

Edging into Poe territory, Tissot diagnosed "the blind Constantius Huygens, whose 'immoderate studies so broke the force of his sensorium, that he thought his body was made of butter.' Huygens found himself very cold, shunning the fire 'lest it should melt him,' and tragically ended his life by leaping into a well. And there 'have been many instances of persons, who thought themselves metamorphosed into lanterns, and who complained of having lost their thighs,' " PDR wrote, adding that some of Tissot's prescriptions have modern relevance in our era of "dopamine fasting" and "digital detoxes." Paging Dr. Oz.

Given the curious obsession of contemporary book banners with removing excellent rather than bad books from libraries, it's interesting to note that Tissot believed the best writers were potentially more damaging to a reader's health. According to PDR, "Unlike later moral panics about the corrupting effects of fiction on female readers, here it is paradoxically the most praiseworthy material that produces the most lamentable results."

After pages of cautionary and sometimes odious medical detail (for studious men, "a perpetual dissipation of the nervous fluid springs from the incessant action of the nerves."), it's curious that Tissot ends his treatise on a relatively upbeat note: "Cheerfulness of temper is the source of health, and a virtuous life is the source of cheerfulness: a good conscience, a mind pure and clear of all contagion, all the best preservatives of health; and if the learned were without them, it would be a shame: for of what use is learning without wisdom?" I guess everybody loves a happy ending. 

-Doctor, it hurts when I read An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Literary and Sedentary Persons. 
-Well then, stop reading! Give it to the book banners. At least you'll confuse them.