Category Libraries

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Stephen King’s son among writers boycotting British Library event in solidarity with striking workers

King’s son, Joe Hill, joins V Castro and Keith Rosson in withdrawing from the Tales of the Weird festival this weekend in support of industrial action

Horror authors are used to pushing the boundaries of fiction, but for some in the field there’s one boundary they won’t cross – a picket line.

Several writers including Joe Hill, the son of Stephen King – who has just released his first novel in a decade, King Sorrow – have withdrawn from a seasonal spooky event at the British Library this weekend over worker pay at the central London institution.

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The Pushkin job: unmasking the thieves behind an international rare books heist

Between 2022 and 2023, as many as 170 rare and valuable editions of Russian classics were stolen from libraries across Europe. Were the thieves merely low-level opportunists, or were bigger forces at work?

On 16 October 2023, a young man and woman sat down in the back row of the second-floor reading room of the university library of Warsaw, Poland. Their reading cards carried the names Sylvena Hildegard and Marko Oravec. On the desk in front of them were eight books with yellowing pages that they had ordered up from the library’s closed-storage 19th-century collection: rare editions of classic works of poetry, drama and fiction by two greats of the Russian canon, Alexander Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol. They studied the books closely, taking photographs on their phones and measurements with rulers.

When the duo did not return from a cigarette break and the invigilators checked their desk, they found that five of the eight books had gone. One of the missing Pushkin works was a narrative poem about the adventures of two outlaws, The Robber Brothers. It was as if the thieves had wanted to send a message.

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