Another Rowling magic spell

The last time I saw a book treated with as much care as J.K. Rowling’s “The Tales of Beedle the Bard,” I was at the Huntington Library, looking at a display for the Gutenberg Bible.

“Beedle the Bard” is a book of fairy tales handwritten and illustrated by the bestselling author. It was originally referenced in the final Harry Potter novel, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” which came out in July. For this special project, Rowling brought a personal touch, making the books by hand -- take that, Gutenberg! -- and stopping after seven copies. (Gutenberg to Rowling: “Is that it?”) One of the books was auctioned at Sotheby’s for nearly $4 million to Internet retailer Amazon.com. The money will go to a children’s relief organization co-founded by Rowling.

Now that “Beedle the Bard” is in Amazon’s hands, you can get a tantalizing glimpse of it on the Web -- bound in leather and decorated with silver, moonstones and skulls -- as well as a synopsis of one of the tales, “The Wizard and the Hopping Pot.” (Amazon promises to reveal more about the book’s contents soon in what must be one of the shrewdest efforts to keep Web traffic pouring into the site).

Customer discussion centers on an obvious question: “What about us?” Despite the fact that the book is an extremely limited edition, it is hard to imagine not seeing it one day, either officially published or in bootleg form.

-- Nick Owchar

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Promoting words with deeds

Eager to foster literary community service, independent publisher Dzanc Books has awarded its inaugural prize for community service to an Emerson College graduate student for her proposal to teach creative writing in Boston area prisons. Laura van den Berg will receive half the $5,000 prize in January, when she begins her community service project, and the remainder when it is completed.

Van den Berg, 24, who is at work on a short-story collection tentatively titled “What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us,” was among 160 applicants. Her “commitment to working with prisoners and helping Dzanc put together a written anthology from these workshops, coupled with her remarkable writing, moved her consistently and undeniably to the front of the list,” Steven Gillis, co-founder of the Michigan-based nonprofit publishing house, said in announcing the prize.

Dzanc Books, started by Gillis and editor Dan Wickett in 2006 to champion writers whose work doesn’t fit the marketing categories of major presses, launched its annual competition this year to encourage working writers who are interested in bettering their communities. Dzanc also helps to develop school educational programs, workshops and writers-in-residence programs.

-- Kristina Lindgren

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A pressing need to be objective

Walter Lippmann’s “Liberty and the News” (Princeton University Press: 92 pp., $16.95) is a small book of essays originally published in 1920 that is startling in its prescience -- or maybe it’s just that nothing ever really changes in the end. The pieces here not only argue in favor of standards in reporting but warn about the danger of news that comes with an agenda, in a society in which the public is increasingly manipulated and misinformed.

Lippmann understood the significance of these issues; a founder of the New Republic, he was an advisor to Woodrow Wilson and later edited the New York World. Beginning in 1931, he spent 30 years writing a Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated column for the New York Herald-Tribune.

In “Liberty and the News,” he lays out, in the most direct terms, his case for how the press may undermine democracy when it does anything other than report, as clearly and directly as possible, information and ideas. In a mass culture, public opinion is everything, which means that the media help corrupt the entire process only if they don’t hold themselves to some higher ideal.

It’s easy to dismiss such a belief as naive or sentimental, especially in these days of the 24-hour news cycle, of Fox News and Air America, Drudge and the Daily Kos. Yet Lippmann was no starry-eyed idealist but a hard-boiled realist who knew the power of the press for good or ill. “If I lie in a lawsuit involving the fate of my neighbor’s cow,” he writes in one of this little volume’s most cogent passages, “I can go to jail. But if I lie to a million readers in a matter involving war and peace, I can lie my head off, and, if I choose the right series of lies, be entirely irresponsible. Nobody will punish me if I lie about Japan, for example. I can announce that every Japanese valet is a reservist, and every Japanese art store a mobilization center. And if there should be hostilities with Japan, the more I lied the more popular I should be.”

-- David L. Ulin