KidLit Con has launched a fundraising partnership with Reading is Fundamental (RIF).

Earlier this year, we reported that the federal budget for RIF has been reduced. With the new partnership, readers can donate to the childhood literacy program in the name of KidLit Con.  Follow this link for more details about how to make a donation.

Here’s more from the announcement: “KidLit Con is seeking to make a more personal and direct contribution as the funds we raise will be coming directly from book lovers in the pursuit of creating more book lovers. Now is the time, quite frankly, where we need to put up or shut up. If you are a writer or a librarian or a bookseller or a book blogger or if you read blogs about books then this fundraiser is targeted directly at you … This is easy. You think books matter then you need to do something to help kids get books. Period.”

Author Mindy Klasky is testing a “reader-supported serialized novel” model with her new book, Fright Court. The author will publish her novel by chapters online, asking for PayPal donations at the end of each post.

Donors will receive a variety of gifts, ranging from a magnet to a personalized signed poster of the Fright Court book cover. Klasky has already published several books through traditional channels.

Here’s more about the book: “Sarah Anderson has found her dream job: Clerk of Court for the District of Columbia Night Court. Dream job, that is, until she’s attacked in the open courtroom by a vampire defendant. And until she’s forced to take self-defense lessons from her boss, the enigmatic vampire James Morton. And until she learns that she can’t share the truth about any of that with her best friend, Allison Ward – even over delectable cupcakes from the Cake Walk bakery.”

In an effort to raise money for Japanese earthquake relief, singer Justin Bieber sent a lock of his hair on tour and fans around the country have paid $1 to take a picture with it. Mimicking the young pop star, author David Thorne has sent a lock of his own hair on a bookstore tour.

Thorne’s editor, Michael Solana, explained in the release: “Thorne declared war on Justin Bieber last month with his site HelpMeSellMoreBooksThanJustinBieber.com. A 10-city tour of his hair was kind of inevitable.”

Thorne’s hair will spend three days in each store. For every location that hosts the Thorne lock, Penguin Group (USA)’s Tarcher/Penguin will donate $200 to the National Children’s Cancer Society.

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Former Café des Artistes restaurant owners George and Jennifer Lang have donated 21,000 books on food and cooking to New York University’s (NYU) Fales Library. With this donation, the NYU’s food library now contains more than 50,000 volumes in its collection.

Here’s more from The New York Times: “[The donation] made the Fales collection one of the largest culinary collections in the country, in the same league as the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive at the University of Michigan; the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard; the Cook Book Collection at Texas Woman’s University; and the Culinary Arts Museum at Johnson and Wales University.”

Author Betty Russell told the NY Times that most food scholars were dependent on the Schlesinger Library before the Fales collection. She praised NYU’s work to provide accessibility to so many cookbooks. (via Publishers Weekly)

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London seeks donations to preserve and restore three handwritten Charles Dickens manuscripts from acid paper rot. They hope to raise £25,000 (more than $40,000) to save the manuscripts.

The Guardian has a quote from John Meriton, the museum’s deputy keeper of word and image: “At the moment we can’t display these manuscripts safely because they are so damaged and so fragile … They were last conserved in the 1960s, when they were rebound and placed in what are called ‘guard books’. But the backing paper used, unfortunately, was very acidic, causing a lot of stress to the original manuscript leaves.”

According to the article, the collection includes A Tale of Two Cities and David Copperfield. The other manuscript, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, was never published.  (Via CBC News)

Cambridge University Press will donate 100,000 books to schools in 12 sub-Saharan African countries through a partnership with the nonprofit organization, Book Aid International.

The press release reports: “School libraries in Cameroon, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Namibia, Somalia (Puntland, Somaliland), Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe will each receive 50-100 new and unused copies of each book donated, ensuring that whole classrooms of school children will be able to learn from them. Cambridge University Press has supported Book Aid International for a number of years, but this is the largest single donation to date.”

Since its inception, Book Aid International has supplied 30 million books to developing countries. Every year, approximately 500,000 books are collected and given to sub-Saharan Africa and Palestinian territories.