Any Coloradan with a cell phone will soon be able to access banned books for free.

By Brittany Allen

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October 2, 2025, 1:06pm

This #BannedBookWeek, we have a lot to lament. Though some book bans have been stalled or swatted down in the courts, stealthy removal campaigns continue. At home and abroad.

But as Haylee May of CPR News first reported, at least the good people of Colorado will have free speech to celebrate. Thanks to the administrators at Anythink public library, Coloradans will soon have access to a whole digital library of banned books. Free of charge.

Anythink serves Coloradans in Adams County. The library has seven physical branches in Bennett, Brighton, Commerce City, Thornton and the Perl Mack neighborhood of Denver, in addition to a robust digital program.

Beginning this national #BannedBooksWeek, that digital program will play host to “roughly 300 banned and challenged titles and documents,” which anyone in the state can access for free.

This Freedom to Read collection goes by the logistical grace of The Palace Project, a free app that serves readers across the country. Even those without library cards. 

Developed in partnership with the Digital Public Library of America, The Palace Project supports public libraries from Connecticut to California “in their mission to provide equitable access to digital content.” The app collects minimal user data, and lets readers enjoy hundreds of e-books. Again, free, free, free.

As Lauren Penington of The Denver Post reported this May, it’s been a funky time for libraries and e-book licenses. (To bracket, for a moment, the book bans that have made all this hustling necessary in the first place.)

Though e- and audiobooks are much easier to disseminate and continue to grow in popularity, they’re a hard resource for libraries to maintain. That’s because libraries usually pay “more than $65 for a two-year license on an e-book,” where the average American would pay $12.99.

E-audiobooks are even worse. They can run a library up to $100. Which is a much higher investment cost than a print book, which tends to go for less than an Andrew Jackson “and can be loaned out until it falls apart.”

Thanks to a groundbreaking agreement last summer, Anythink and its Rocky Mountain peers can now get around those prohibitive licensing costs. This means more books for more people, and a easier slide past the many forces—legal or not—that continue to hunt “objectionable” books out of public space.

As Anythink executive director Mark Fink told CPR, the Freedom to Read collection will tend a wide stable. From “powerful literary works…like 1984, The Bluest Eye, Where the Crawdads Sing, To Kill a Mockingbird, [and] Wicked,” to nonfiction like “Just Mercy, White Fragility, and A Queer History of the United States.” What unites all these titles is the fact they’ve been challenged by courts in Colorado or around the country.

Good looking out, Anythink. To everyone out of Colorado: Banned Books Week will run from October 5-11 this year. We hope you read something troubling, to celebrate.

Librarian leaves job after declining Melania Trump’s demand for a sword.

By Jonny Diamond

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October 2, 2025, 10:56am

Today in headlines I never thought anyone would I’d write, the head of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library has resigned after a spat with Melania Trump over an original Eisenhower sword she really, really, really wanted to give to King Charles III when she and Donald visited the UK last month.

According to CBS:

First Lady Melania Trump personally decided which gifts to give King Charles and Queen Camilla, and wanted to bestow an Eisenhower sword to reiterate the significance of the US-UK relationship since World War II, one of the sources said.

Officials at the State Department who compiled an array of gift options for the first lady sought an original sword, sources said. But Todd Arrington argued against giving away an artifact that had been accepted as a donation and had become the property of the American people.

Kudos to Mr. Arrington for standing up to this absolutely embarrassing family of pick-me try-hards masquerading as tough-guy power-players. We’ve gone well beyond Idiocracy territory here.

Investigators have been asked to look into the death of Hunter S. Thompson.

By Jonny Diamond

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October 2, 2025, 7:35am

The death by suicide of the late, great Hunter S. Thompson in 2005, at the age of 67, is to be reexamined by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation after a request from his widow, Anita. According to NBC:

The Pitkin County Sheriff’s Office recently referred the case to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation after his widow, Anita Thompson, requested a review into the agency’s original investigation. There is no evidence that suggests foul play in the writer’s death, Pitkin County Sheriff Michael Buglione said in a news release this week.

There’s no indication yet of why Anita Thompson has made the request but obviously there are some questions to be answered. Sheriff Buglione went on to say:

By bringing in an outside agency for a fresh look, we hope to provide a definitive and transparent review that may offer peace of mind to his family and the public.

(In the meantime, you can read about the time Thompson himself ran for sheriff.)

Image via.

Here’s the shortlist for the 2025 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction.

By Literary Hub

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October 1, 2025, 7:01pm

Today, the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction, which recognizes excellence in Nonfiction from authors of any nationality published in English in the UK, announced their 2025 shortlist, six books whittled down from 350 published between November 2024 and October 2025.

“Formidable female novelists, ghastly literary men, a faith-shaken poet, eunuchs, pirates, horny wolves, international terrorists. This is who the judges have been spending time with,” said Robbie Millen, chair of judges, in a statement. “And what good company. The six books on this year’s shortlist have real breadth in terms of subject matter and style. We have been delighted by the candor and courage displayed by the sextet, by the wit and scintillating prose, by their confidence and impressive command of their subjects. It’s a shortlist that will be bold company in the darkening autumn evenings.”

The winner will be announced on November 4, and receive a prize of £50,000; each shortlist author will receive £5,000.

In the meantime, here’s the shortlist:

Jason Burke, The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s

Helen Garner, How to End a Story: Collected Diaries

Richard Holmes, The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief

Justin Marozzi, Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World

Adam Weymouth, Lone Wolf: Walking the Faultlines of Europe

Frances Wilson, Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark

How many books is a lot of books? How many is too many?

By Jonny Diamond

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October 1, 2025, 11:39am

As they say, one man’s collection is another man’s hoarded fire hazard, but reading this story—of a fancy Philadelphia townhouse stuffed to the rafters with 100,000 books—had me wondering where, exactly, that line is.

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer:

[Estate sales expert] John Romani encountered an enigma recently when he was hired to handle the estate of the late attorney Bill Roberts, whose private literary collection— estimated to be at more than 100,000 books—covered every room in his Rittenhouse Square townhouse and every topic imaginable, from poetry to paleobotany.

I’ve worked in multiple bookstores (and have moved too many books, too many times) so I understand that 100,000 books is, indeed, a lot of books. But how does that compare to your average corner bookstore, or your big old boxstore, or your little town library, or the largest library in the world?

For answers to these important questions I did what any literary blogger would do, I turned to the internet (what’s left of it) where I immediately found a great Tumblr post from way back in 2016, in which Rebecca Fitting, co-founder and book buyer at Brooklyn’s Greenlight Bookstore answers the question “How many books does it take to open a bookstore?” Her answer, as it related to the opening of a second store (now closed) in Prospect Lefferts-Gardens:

Here’s the big reveal on the stats:
Individual titles: 7,248
Total units: 11,305

Compared to the established store in Fort Greene where they “…carry approximately 10,000-12,000 titles depending on the time of year.”

For those of you who’ve never been, Greenlight in Fort Greene is kind of the Platonic ideal of a neighborhood bookstore, size- and curation-wise: it’s big enough to have that new book you just read about in Bookforum, but not so big that it doesn’t have a thoughtfully curated vibe.

So how does that compare, say, to a Barnes and Noble? The answer to this was pretty easy to find, right there on the Barnes and Noble website: “We stock over 100,000 unique book titles in our stores and over 1 million unique titles in our warehouse.”

This, obviously, puts into perspective the dude with 100,000 books in his townhouse (and has me leaning closer to hoarder than collector).

But what about the largest bookstores in the world?

For years, Powell’s in Portland has been claiming to be the “largest new and used bookstore in the world” with over a million books, and sure, that’s a lot, but just today a new bookstore in China has opened, becoming the world’s largest at 700,000 square feet. As of now, though, Shenzhen’s “Eye of the Bay Area” store only carries 300,000 books, so I guess the unofficial title still belongs to Powell’s.

And libraries? This one’s easier to answer. According to a 2013 library survey by the Institute of Museum and Library services, the average American library carries 116,482 books (including e-versions and audiobooks). The Library of Congress (at least until this year) has over 41 million titles, which is a lot of books! And makes it the largest library in the world.

And now, based on the numbers above, I’m actually going to answer the question posed by the headline: 100,000 books is a lot of books for one person to have and is DEFINITELY too many; at the lower end, the cut-off number for any individual reader to claim they have “a lot of books” is 1,000—not enough to open a bookstore, but enough to line a couple rooms in a house.

And to be honest, you don’t actually even need that many in, unless you’re filling an inner emotional void… just go to the library.