Neil Gaiman, author of Coraline among many other critically acclaimed work (the Sandman graphic novels among them), gave an enchanting talk at the St. Lawrence Centre's Jane Mallett Theatre on Monday night.

The Luminato event sold out in three minutes, proving that hearing an author of his caliber read from his own work, and sign autographs afterward, still has the power to draw crowds of fans.

Prior to the talk, it could be said that I wasn't a die-hard fan of his work, but hearing him read from his new novel The Graveyard Book has converted me. Gaiman and his writing are both witty and irreverent.

"People look at my career as an author with puzzlement," said Gaiman, "because I broke all the rules. It's likely because I came out of the comic world, where anything goes."

Now that it's been around for more than four years, YouTube is no longer a novel way to market anything. So just because Toronto-based author Sean Stanley has created a video to market his latest book (Etcetera and Otherwise - a Lurid Odyssey) doesn't mean anyone should take notice.



Except, of course, that the video is pretty darn funny. Shot inside Sweatty Betty's and back alleys around Ossington, the 5 minute video asks viewers to buy the book for which the author will make $1 per sale. It will all add up to help him buy anything from 1/4th of a Labatt's 50 or 1/200th of a sex act from a local prostitute.

Watch the video above and then decide then for yourself whether it's enough to make you buy the book.

Local artist Franke James is no stranger to interest in her endeavours to go green, but with Bothered By My Green Conscience Franke has made the jump to the hardcopy book world. Until now people have only been able to follow her stories through her vertically-oriented, online visual essays, a format that had be to re-worked to fit a book 5.75" wide and 6.75" tall.

Franke not only provided the book content but designed the book too, and thank goodness she did. Her visual aesthetic is as crucial to the stories as her compelling content, and if the design of the pages were left to somebody else I suspect the translation to paper would not have been so perfect. And that's really the word here: perfect.

But don't tell Franke it's perfect - she found a glaring error (and by glaring I mean to Franke only - nobody else would have ever known), and in typical fashion has gone on to tell the whole world about it.

Frontier College invited me to participate in their annual Scrabble Corporate Challenge, which pitted some of Bay Street's leading corporations against each other over a game of Scrabble.

Raising money for literacy is serious business. They brought in a handful of us Scrabble ringers (I've been playing competitive Scrabble for seven years) to help find better plays during the fund-raising game last Wednesday night at The Design Exchange.

Former Canadian and World Scrabble champion Joel Wapnick joined in the fray as we helped about 50 companies from Toronto's leading financial, legal, technology and accounting sectors vie for the coveted TMX Cup.

Wapnick and I joined about half a dozen ringers that participating players could rely on to increase their chances of winning by purchasing Helpful Assists. Each time our services were called upon, players had to purchase our expert advice for $60 (first period) or $80 second period. It was fun and rewarding to have been called upon over a dozen times throughout the game, helping raise over $1000 in the process.

Saturday at 6 p.m. marked an end of an era for many book lovers.

David Mirvish Books closed its doors for the last time. Some diehard book lovers were witness to the closing of one of the best bookstores in Toronto. This included Natalie Kovacs, who identified as a book fetishist.

"Why didn't they replace it with funding for a university library?" Kovacs wondered. "Where else are you going to find books like this? It's about coming here and reading and touching and feeling the books."

Indeed. The book retailer decided to continue selling their wares online only after the closing of their bricks-and-mortar store.

"It's about coming here and reading and touching and feeling the books," said Kovacs. "I wouldn't buy books online unless I had an unlimited amount of money. The endless shapes, fonts, styles... I can't come in here and lust at books anymore.

Poetry On The Way continues to be a nice departure on an otherwise mundane Toronto subway/bus ride, offering up a wide variety of poetry to audiences that may instead be using that time to stare at their iPhones or play 'what's that smell'.

This one is entitled Escondido Nights by Jim Christy, who joins a legion of poets whom I haven't heard of until I stopped subway-flirting long enough to look up...