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The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

Jane Austen will be the new face of the 10-pound banknote, replacing Charles Darwin, the Bank of England announced Wednesday. That follows an uproar after the bank said it would replace Elizabeth Fry — the only woman to appear on a banknote other than the queen — with Winston Churchill on the 5-pound note. Austen's portrait will be accompanied by a quote from the insipid Miss Bingley: "I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!"

Buzzfeed has launched a books page, and it's exactly what you'd expect. A sandwich-themed reinterpretation of Yeats' "Second Coming" reads: "Turning and turning in the widening gyro / The kebab cannot hear the kebaber; / Wraps fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."

For The Millions, Alan Levinovitz writes a history of back-cover blurbs: "The excesses and scandals of contemporary blurbing, book and otherwise, are well-documented. William F. Buckley relates how publishers provided him with sample blurb templates: '(1) I was stunned by the power of [ ]. This book will change your life. Or, (2) [ ] expresses an emotional depth that moves me beyond anything I have experienced in a book.' ... My personal favorite? In 2000, Sony Pictures invented one David Manning of the Ridgefield Press to blurb some of its stinkers."

The Flamethrowers author Rachel Kushner lists her favorite art books in The Guardian. She says of Feelings Are Facts by Yvonne Rainer, "This is the motherlode, as a crash course on the art and artworld social scene of the 1960s and early 1970s in downtown New York, with in-depth portraits of the main personalities, in all their glory and sordidness."

The book-recommending website Goodreads says its membership has doubled in the past 11 months and now has 20 million members. The site was recently bought by Amazon, despite an uproar in literary circles, but the move doesn't seem to have put off potential members.

In a spree that lasted for years, Anders Burius, a librarian at the National Library of Sweden, stole more than 50 rare and valuable books and sold them to collectors. Two of these books, worth a collective $255,000 according to the library's lawyers, were returned Wednesday at a ceremony in New York. After the thefts were discovered, Burius confessed to the crime in 2004 and committed suicide soon after. Baltimore bookstore owner Stephan Loewentheil had bought and then sold the two volumes, but he bought them back at his own expense after finding out that they were stolen.

The death toll is approaching 80, scores more were wounded and the eyewitness accounts are sobering in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, after Wednesday's crash of a high-speed passenger train.

Reuters writes that "in what one local official described as a scene from hell, bodies covered in blankets lay next to the overturned carriages as smoke billowed from the wreckage after the disaster. ... Cranes were still pulling out mangled debris on Thursday morning, 12 hours after the crash."

"The scene is shocking, it's Dante-esque," the head of the Galicia region, Alberto Nez Feijo, said in a radio interview, according to The Guardian.

A man who went to help, 47-year-old baker Ricardo Martinez, tells the wire service that:

"We heard a massive noise and we went down the tracks. I helped getting a few injured and bodies out of the train. I went into one of the cars but I'd rather not tell you what I saw there."

So was that real?

I hear variations on this theme all the time from readers. Titrating fact and fantasy can give a story a mysterious energy. Writers fetch up those details that sate the senses, allowing us to touch and taste, hear and feel how things were once upon a time. A woman steps out in Gilded Age New York City. Would she wear muslin or silk, petticoats or a hoop of whale baleen? Short kid gloves or long satin ones? How deep is her decolletage? All the particulars, please!

Some classics — Jack Finney's Time and Again comes to mind — place invented characters in an authentic historical milieu. This approach is great. But I have a soft spot for those authors who revive some living, breathing figure, often a relatively minor one (hello, Thomas Cromwell). Real events, forgotten or infamous, also have a welcome grit about them.

Each of these summertime reads picks up where history leaves off. All are rich enough that I felt satisfied even before I read the author's source notes. But when I learned "what was real" in these books I reached a whole new level of delight.

From the township of Alexandra in Johannesburg, shack dwellers can look across a ravine to the spires of Sandton City, which houses the most lavish shopping mall in sub-Saharan Africa.

Alex, as this slum of roughly a half a million people is known, was home to Nelson Mandela when he first moved to Johannesburg in 1941.

The small house where Mandela rented a room is marked with a plaque, but the yard is littered with trash and construction debris. The concrete wall around the compound is collapsing and someone has spray-painted, "Do not pee here" in Zulu slang across the front of it.

"South Africa is poor, brother. Poor, poor," says Wellington Nzuza, standing nearby leaning against the compound wall. He says the biggest problem in South Africa is that people don't have work.

“ When Mandela dies, watch out, xenophobia is going to come up again.