Your role model:

https://www.openculture.com/2020/03/the-cork-lined-bedroom-and-writing-room-of-marcel-proust.html

I've most often seen that with Harry Potter books from India. India can do very good book production, world class stuff at very fair prices. Rowling didn't need the money but the fakers are robbing the legitimate Indian book trade too. Same probably goes for whatever country you're dealing with.

I don't know the US situation but in most of the world copyright on unpublished materials is held by whoever owns the literary estate. Once it's published it will expire in 70 years. This shows how sick it can get:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/jul/22/poetry.books

The claimed holder of the rights in that case is an American though the materials are in the UK.

Mark Twain successfully embargoed his autobiography for 100 years after his death.

The recent developments in AI are going to open up possibilities for Borgesian complexity in the idea of "authorship". It'll be so much more difficult to tell where human creativity comes into a literary work that authors will play all sorts of games with mechanization.

Most of the discussion about it I'm getting links for now on Google is in academic papers I can't read for free. Just searching "the white hotel plagiarism" will give you some idea of what the issues were.

The main reason anybody remembers The White Hotel was because of the plagiarism scandal around it. He never lived that down.

I have occasionally communicated to well known authors by email, snailmail or on Twitter when I had something to say - e.g. when they'd said explicitly that there was something they wanted to know, and I happened to know it. I've never sent generic fanmail but I don't suppose they would have objected.

I would suggest the political novels of Rex Warner, written in the runup to WW2: The Wild Goose Chase, The Professor, and The Aerodrome. He was something like a British Kafka, or what Orwell might have been if he'd had more flair and imagination. There are less than 100 ratings for all these books together, and the first (my fave) gets no reviews and 7 ratings, mostly poor. It won't take much googling to show you how little use Goodreads is for books like this.

Try Elias Canetti, Auto da Fé.

The anarchist Freedom Bookshop in Whitechapel. Founded in 1886 in Kropotkin's time which makes it one of the oldest bookshops in town.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Press

Very rarely with books as I have a ridiculously huge vocabulary. Where I do find myself googling is when reading articles on the web about New Zealand today - I left decades ago and have only been back once, and the language is changing fast. It's almost turning into a creole with added Māori words for concepts about society and interpersonal relationships. I didn't need to know what "hapū", "tamariki" or "taonga" meant back in the 1970s, but I do now.

Springer seems have maintained their paper and binding quality but (for mathematics, the field I know about) their typesetting is all done in LaTeX with its standard thin and spidery fonts.

I've only heard of loot boxes via academic researchers on the internet (who have never bothered explaining what they are). Not something the general public is aware of, I think.

Fortunately with videos on the web they say "Watch till the end!" so you know not to start.

Nearly always, if I have the opportunity. Example: I've seen a few books by Lesley Blanch and have The Sabres of Paradise in a pile upstairs. Contemporary of Barbara Cartland writing about a 19th century Islamic revolutionary and Victorian sexual bohemians. Seeing a book written in an over-the-top style about such very exotic subjects, you want to know straight off, how did she come to do that? and did she know what she was talking about? The Wikipedia page isn't that great but it does say who she hung out with, which explains something.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesley_Blanch

The Sabres of Paradise reads like a novel but the biography makes it clear that it wasn't one.

There is no antisemitism in HP. The whole idea was made up by spin doctors. The dwarves aren't antisemitic symbols either. There were many celebrity antisemitic writers in England while Tolkien was working - Chesterton, Belloc, Eliot, Sassoon for four. They were completely explicit about it, no secret coding. Anyone in Tolkien's position could have got away with it. But he didn't have anything to do with that gang.

Rowling's attitudes to trans people postdate the HP books. And at this point she can afford to take the attitude that any publicity is good publicity.

I visited it at the time when they were refurbing it (early 90s I think; big international effort). At that point the frescoes were quite badly damaged, with graffiti in Greek with occasional dates in the 1880s. They got it back to looking like new for a while, but I never saw it like that. It was much more badly damaged a few years ago by Islamist vandals.

The isolated location was probably intended to keep women out.

It'll be public domain in two years and it's unlikely anybody will be actively policing piracy by now. Just search around.

A lot of it is fairly realistic. Highland weirdos who never talk to their neighbours are a stereotype. Can't remember if the house in the book is surrounded with piles of tyres and Irn Bru bottles.

It's not the article, it's what you wrote:

"Lovecraft had picked up on the ideas of a writer and a biologist, Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English."

There's a true and interesting statement trying to get out in your post though.

Lovecraft died in 1937. Ehrenreich was born in 1941, English in 1948. I don't think he was quoting them.

I vaguely remember that Allingham poem (haven't read Little, Big) but it was decades ago and no way would I have got that reference.

This kind of thing leaves you vaguely paranoid that just about any book might be up to tricks you're not getting.

I haven't read Nabokov's Ada but saw a review of it when it came out, by the New Zealand writer Bruce Mason. He mentioned an offhand phrase that seemed to come out of nowhere, "Te Work-Basket". Mason was alerted by the "Te", which is Māori for "the". Like me he didn't know what "work-basket" was in Māori so he looked it up. "Paro no mahia". Māori has no "s" sound, so that's the closest you can get to "paronomasia" - which is ancient Greek for "pun".

I'm sure the reader's experience was greatly enhanced by that. My reaction was, bugger it.

Daleks on a Mac Plus. There was a thing called Doom around the same time, I couldn't be bothered.

First ones I played were in 1974. I knew people who were developing the first text-based MRPGs on university weekend computer time and they had things like Asteroids consoles in their houses. I looked at that stuff, thought "I can see where this is going", and decided reading books, playing Go and playing the flute were more my thing.

I haven't played a video game in 30 years, so you aren't talking about me. Or are you saying Daleks were Jewish?