Incroyable, n’est pas? C’est dommage…mais je suppose que c’est la vie. September 30 is the day of reckoning for the beloved seventy-four year old bookshop, Librairie de France in Rockefeller Center.  According to this New York Times blurb the rent is too much for the current owner and he will be forced to close.  This saddens me greatly.  I spent many a yuletide visit to New York with widened, childlike eyes, browsing the stacks and imagining myself in Paris instead of packed in, shoulder to shoulder, with the holiday matinee crowds.  The shuttering of theLibrairie means that yet another little relic of Old Manhattan will disappear into the history books.

What are your memories of the Librairie de France and other long-gone vestiges of book culture?

Owen Barder of Development Drums recently spoke with Daryl Collins and Jonathan Morduch (two of the authors of Portfolios of the Poor)  about the poor’s use of financial services and what new models of financial services would best assist them in managing their limited funds. The interview is available for a listen here.

Author Josh Angrist just forwarded this photo of the LSE’s Economist Book Shop window with 5 copies of Mostly Harmless Econometrics on display. But, based on the sales history for this book, those copies might not last too long. Mostly Harmless Econometrics has been a sleeper hit for us this year and we are currently on our 5th printing. And did we mention the t-shirts again?

Caleb Crain’s terrific piece on The Invisible Hook appears in the current issue of The New Yorker. Here’s a quick excerpt:

A brisk, clever new book, “The Invisible Hook” (Princeton; $24.95), by Peter T. Leeson, an economist who claims to have owned a pirate skull ring as a child and to have had supply-and-demand curves tattooed on his right biceps when he was seventeen, offers a different approach. Rather than directly challenging pirates’ leftist credentials, Leeson says that their apparent espousal of liberty, equality, and fraternity derived not from idealism but from a desire for profit.

Bonus — head over to Crain’s blog to read a “behind the scenes” post on the sources he used to prepare the piece.