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

In a bit of a twist, the archives of the late, great crime novelist Elmore Leonard have come to rest at the University of South Carolina, the school announced Wednesday. Leonard, long known as the "Dickens of Detroit," chose Columbia, S.C., over the Motor City to house his collection after visiting the school last year, just months before his passing.

It was Leonard's tour of the university's literary archives — a walk among the original manuscripts of writers such as Ernest Hemingway and George V. Higgins — that persuaded him. And the choice came quickly: On the flight home to Detroit, Leonard made his decision, according to his son, Peter.

While Leonard was known for his spare writing style — he "had a contempt for putting pretty clothes on hard, direct words," NPR's Scott Simon remembered — he left behind his fair share of those words. More than 450 drafts of manuscripts, ranging from his early Westerns to his best-known novels, will join scrapbooks, typewriters and even a few Hawaiian shirts in the collection.

Samples of the archives went on display Wednesday, and The Associated Press reports that the whole collection is expected to be ready for researchers' eyes in about 18 months.

McSweeney's Makes A Change: McSweeney's is going nonprofit. Founder Dave Eggers says he hopes that the San Francisco publishing house — the force behind a number of books, the magazine The Believer and, well, McSweeney's (the quarterly literary journal) — will become a 501(c)(3) group within a year. Eggers tells the San Francisco Chronicle why: "You know, the taste of the editors and the staff ran toward really worthy books and worthy undertakings and anthologies and series that ... didn't necessarily indicate profit."

Stretch Break: Electric Literature has an infographic's bounty of useful yoga poses for writers who, really, are hoping mostly just to dodge the blank page. Stretches include "Navel-Gazing Poet," "Blurb-Begging Novelist" and, naturally, the "Plot Twist."

Klein's Prize: In a week thick with awards, it's best not to forget neglect our friends north of the border. Journalist and activist Naomi Klein has won the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize, Canada's richest prize for nonfiction ($60,000), for her book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Klein hopes the prize helps expand the book's otherwise "lefty audience," the writer told Publisher's Weekly. "It's all about having the debate, and you can't have the debate unless everybody is talking to each other."

Before The Afterlife: Oh, and you heard, right? Wolverine died Wednesday. But be calm, says Glen Weldon: He's not dead dead.

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"I'm just a hand liner. I put lines on," says Kevin Manypenny. He's been working here for nearly 40 years.

He twirls a plate, dips a brush in brown glaze and paints three delicate lines on the plate's edge. Fiesta is about half of Homer Laughlin's business — the other half is dinnerware for hotels and the sturdy plates and cups you find at chain restaurants. The plate he's working on is for a Boston restaurant.

Manypenny and seven of his eight siblings — and their parents — have worked at this factory. And there are dozens of families like theirs. Brothers founded the company: Homer and Shakespeare Laughlin — presumably a literary family — jumped on a new fashion for a whiter, more refined dinnerware.

"They were the young whippersnappers in the pottery world, and they were the ones who ended up successfully firing four kilns worth of whiteware before any of the other potteries could and then they won a prize of $5,000 ... and that's what launched the Laughlin brothers into pottery production on a big scale," says Sarah Vodrey of the Museum of Ceramics across the river in East Liverpool, Ohio, where Homer Laughlin used to be based.

Around the turn of the 20th century, the factory changed hands. The new team built a plant on the West Virginia side of the river, and those long low factory buildings are still in use today.

Then in the 1930s, the company created Fiesta: inexpensive, colorful, cheerful dinnerware. It was a hit even in the Depression. In 1948, Homer Laughlin really stepped up the production of plates and bowls. The company designed and built its own machine inside the factory. Dave Conley, a longtime employee and unofficial company historian, calls it "the big, flat automatic."

Credit: The "big, flat automatic" machine allows Homer Laughlin to mass produce multiple types of items at once. (Ross Mantle for NPR)

"You've got three machines here and each one has two heads on it, so theoretically we could be making six different items at a time," he says. Conley says that's 3,000 dozen pieces — or 36,000 pieces of pottery — every 8-hour shift. (People who make dishes talk in dozens.)

There have been improvements. Computers control the firing now. 3-D printers speed the design process. Ceramic engineers found a way to make glaze shiny without using lead — all in house.

"The people that owned our company have always put profits back into the plant to modernize, and we've always had state of the art equipment [like the big, flat automatic], and I call that state of the art even though that's as old as it is, it's almost 60 years old," Conley says.

Credit: Fiesta salt shakers are sent down the line to be glazed. (Ross Mantle for NPR)

Fiesta Revival

Inside the old buildings, with fog pouring off the Ohio River and drifting into the windows, the ware comes out of the fire, magically transformed — creamy orange, intense red, vivid turquoise. Bright pottery, stacked in bins and crates, are piled all over the place.

"I remember the first time I actually went to the facility and I'm looking around and I'm thinking, 'Boy am I back in the 1940s or what?' I mean, even the office it isn't all spruced up," says Bruce Smith, the head of the union representing the pottery workers. "It's the old look, and they're focused on making product and not being flashy." He says while nothing about Homer Laughlin is flashy, the workers do make decent money.

Calling All Fiesta Fans

Do you have a Fiesta collection or a favorite Fiesta dish? Take a picture, tag it #nprfiesta on Instagram and we may feature it on NPR.org.

"They're good jobs and they're making a living, being able to buy a home and raise a family and retire with some dignity," Smith says.

Both management and labor consider that an achievement.

"I'm very proud to have kept this business here in the Ohio Valley. That's very important to us," says Elizabeth Wells McIlvain, the first woman to lead Homer Laughlin, and the fourth generation of her family at the plant. Her immediate family now owns most of the business. Her daughter, Maggie, is an intern in the marketing department.

Homer Laughlin stopped producing Fiesta for a time beginning in 1973. A harvest gold color and an avocado green didn't sell. But in 1986, Bloomingdale's came calling looking for a retro china for its stores, and Homer Laughlin made a typical, practical decision: restart an old line and revive Fiesta for retail sale, along with its existing hotel and restaurant business.

"We have two sides of the business and that's helped us tremendously because it seems when ... the retail side of the business is flourishing, the hotel side is ... having difficulties, and vice versa," McIlvain says.

Palettes of Fiesta pieces are lined up in preparation for an upcoming retail outlet tent sale at Homer Laughlin in Newell, W.Va. Ross Mantle for NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Ross Mantle for NPR

It helps that Fiesta has a big fanbase. Collectors stand in line for hours to get into the factory tent sales. Fans meet, they swap, they critique the company's color choices. And they wait for the new Fiesta color unveiled each March. (The color for 2014 is poppy, a bold, saturated orange.)

"They always have suggestions. One year they all wanted fuchsia, and they all arrived to Homer Laughlin to go on their tours dressed in whatever fuchsia they had. That was their silent but very loud statement," McIlvain says.

But she offered no color clues for this coming March. "That's a very deep, dark secret," she says with a laugh.

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homer laughlin

Saying that he "clarified how to understand and regulate industries with a few powerful firms," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the Nobel Prize in economic sciences to Jean Tirole, who teaches at the Toulouse School of Economics. He studies oligopolies, markets that are controlled by a handful of powerful (and interdependent) companies.

"I was very surprised, I was incredibly surprised," Tirole said shortly after he received the phone call informing him of the win. "The honor... it took me half an hour to recoup from the call. I still haven't recouped yet."

The Nobel committee said Tirole is "one of the most influential economists of our time," describing how he helped to reshape regulators' approach with his idea that the same policy rules have different effects — both good and bad — in different industries. In particular, he applied those theories to burgeoning sectors such as telecommunications and banks.

"The problem is that regulators often don't understand the markets they regulate very well," NPR's Jim Zarroli reports for Morning Edition, "so they don't know the potential scope of improvement — they don't know how much really can be done to make the industry more productive."

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From the committee's announcement:

"Tirole showed theoretically that such rules may work well in certain conditions, but do more harm than good in others. Price caps can provide dominant firms with strong motives to reduce costs — a good thing for society — but may also permit excessive profits — a bad thing for society. Cooperation on price setting within a market is usually harmful, but cooperation regarding patent pools can benefit everyone."

A more detailed (54-page) recounting of Tirole's achievements celebrates his contributions to the area of economics known as industrial organization, the study of how markets and corporations are structured — and how those and other variables, such as policy interventions, affect competition. The Nobel panel also said that Tirole "has facilitated realism," by more directly applying his theoretical models to actual markets.

Tirole, 61, holds a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his thesis was titled "Essays in Economic Theory." His recent published work includes the articles "Cooperation vs. Collusion: How Essentiality Shapes Co-opetition" and "Bonus Culture: Competitive Pay, Screening and Multitasking."

The Nobel in economics and other fields will be formally presented in December. If you missed hearing about one of this year's prizes, you can look back on our coverage of the awards for medicine, physics, chemistry and literature, as well as the Nobel Peace Prize.

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Nobel Prize

The ability of U.S. hospitals and public health systems to handle the deadly Ebola virus has been called into question. Doubts began to be raised once Thomas Eric Duncan became the first person in the U.S. to be diagnosed with Ebola.

Now that a second nurse who cared for Duncan at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas has become ill, the federal government is concentrating on improving the response to the disease and getting the necessary information out.

According to reports, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, earlier this week cleared the second nurse, Amber Joy Vinson, to fly on a commercial airliner from Cleveland to Dallas.

Her reported temperature was below the threshold set by the agency, and she had no symptoms, according to CDC spokesman David Daigle, who talked to The Associated Press.

President Obama for a second day has canceled out-of-town trips to stay in Washington, D.C., and monitor the response to the outbreak.

Obama has made ramping up efforts a priority and wants to make sure what happened in Dallas doesn't happen elsewhere across the country. He said efforts are being taken very seriously at the highest levels of the government.

"As soon as somebody is diagnosed with Ebola, we want a rapid response team, a SWAT team, essentially, from the CDC to be on the ground as quickly as possible — hopefully within 24 hours — so that they are taking the local hospital step by step through exactly what needs to be done and making sure that all the protocols are properly observed; that the use of protective equipment is done effectively; that disposal of that protective equipment is done properly," Obama said after yesterday's Cabinet meeting.

On Capitol Hill today, the oversight subcommitttee of the House energy and Commerce Committee, scheduled a hearing on Ebola.

Panel members are expected to hear from Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Daniel Varga, chief clinical officer and senior executive vice president at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institutes of Health,

In prepared testimony, Fauci said Duncan's death and the infections of the two Dallas nurses and a nurse in Spain "intensify our concerns about this global health threat." He said two Ebola vaccine candidates were undergoing a first phase of human clinical testing this fall. But he cautioned that scientists were still in the early stages of understanding how Ebola infection can be treated and prevented.

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Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

President Barack Obama