• Can you guess these classic books from their phantom covers? In a word: no. (Well, three of them.)
• Guess these famous novels from their second lines? We batted like .600.
• Also disspiritingly difficult: this John le Carré quiz.
• Buck up! “Without the advertising budgets of major houses, the smaller presses have more difficulty finding readers, Mr. Nelson said, and the idea behind the library was to form a community of people who could share books that were not easy to find elsewhere.” Meet Mellow Pages Library of Bushwick. 
• Iain Banks, who announced last week that he is dying of cancer, married his long-term partner at Inverlochy Castle Hotel in the Scottish Highlands. As he put it, he asked if she would “do me the honour of becoming my widow.”