Transworld has at last put on its schedule a book that it signed at the turn of the millennium - Jonathan Ross’s autobiography will be out this autumn. The advance was “nice but not huge” - so it is impressive that the £6million-a-year man made the commitment to go ahead. Perhaps he is jealous of Russell Brand. Also out this autumn will be a memoir by Lord Levy, the Blair confidant at the centre of the cash-for- peerages controversy. It will be very frank and honest, promises the publisher, Simon & Schuster.
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If you wanted to buy William Boyd’s Restless or William Dalrymple’s The Last Mughal on Amazon last week, you could do so only through a third party. Amazon removed the “buy new” button from the titles. The internet bookseller has increased sales and wants higher discounts. Bloomsbury, which publishes Boyd and Dalrymple, resisted. So Amazon did the bookselling equivalent of sending a loved one’s body part. The “buy new” buttons are now back.
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The reclusive chess genius Bobby Fischer, who died last month, spent a good part of his final years in Bokin, a Reykjavik bookshop said to be like “a Parisian flea market without the noise”, reading for hours among the shelves. Sometimes his post was delivered there too. He liked “the mess everywhere, the stacks of books, the smell”, according to the owner.