The Bookshop Band are Britain's only literary band. “We've just written a song inspired by Damian Barr's Maggie & Me,” says Ben Please. The Avon trio are fresh from a UK tour of independent bookshops and last month played Glastonbury. Authors who've had their books immortalised in song love it: “Rachel Joyce brought her family to see us when we played at a shop near her home,” says Please.

My copy of Edward Lear's Nonsense Omnibus shows why bookbinding is not a task for the young. The spine has been reattached upside-down. There are no cover boards, but sticky-backed plastic has been applied at a jaunty angle to the title page, preserving crumbs and ink-splotches, my name written in a child's wobbly joined-up, and a sum in blue pencil, confidently underlined: 191-150=15.

Whether it's as part of a classic cream tea or as a savoury snack, the traditional British treat has few equals

From app designing to blogging, we all need help with computing. Here are some of the best guides to the new world of IT

A respected academic, who just happens to be Muslim, was challenged by a Fox News anchor as to why he was qualified to write about Christ

After the boom in Young Adult fiction,  publishers are on the hunt for the next hit genre. Have they found it in the swearing and sex of New Adult fiction?

There's linguistic fun to be had in translating stories backwards and forwards – but will the average reader get the joke?

Amazon.co.uk saw soaring sales of Inferno, Dan Brown's latest book, plus evidence of Britain's baby boom in a leap in demand for nappy wipes, but that could not stop the world's biggest online retailer falling to a surprise loss for the last three months.

Canadian professor’s work captured the attention of the  Microsoft boss

Stephen Alford's fine study begins with an intriguing titbit of counterfactual history: in 1586, Queen Elizabeth I is assassinated, prompting a Spanish invasion after which Protestant England is reconciled to Rome.

Can this close-up patchwork of social detail explain the forces that moulded postwar history?

The literary mole hunt to discover who outed superstar author JK Rowling as the creator of a detective novel written under a nom de plume was in danger of turning into a better whodunnit than the book itself.

As the interest in Nordic detectives and killers wanes, publishers are looking across the Channel for the next wave of crime thrillers.

The book only sold 1,500 copies under Rowling's pseudonym, Robert Galbraith