The Professional Bookshop has moved from Alexandra House to the second floor of the Club Lusitano Building in Duddell Street, Central, and changed its name to Bloomsbury Bookshop.

The new site has double the floorspace, features a range of fiction and non-fiction and a selection of professional law, accounting and finance books. Bloomsbury spokeswoman Joanna Lo says the firm is confident there is a strong market for books and now is the time to expand.

American author Daniel Mason was recently in town to discuss his new book, The Piano Tuner, in which a Londoner travels to the remote Burmese jungle to tune an instrument. Now Ananova.com has reported that Graham Harris, a tuner from Bath, England, is about to set off up the Amazon with 22 others to tune a piano for the Wai Wai tribe, 350km into the Guyanan jungle. The Daily Express said explorer John Blashford-Snell presented the piano to the tribe two years ago, but it now needs attention due to overuse and rainforest humidity.

Harris said: 'I'll be fascinated to see what condition it is in. It is so humid the woodwork could have been eaten by ants.'

Apparently when Blashford-Snell was asked for the piano by the local choirmaster, he replied: 'Good God man, do you know what one of those weighs?'

The Argentina Journal, a book of paintings by Israeli secret agent Peter Malkin that depict the capture of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, had its worldwide launch in Hong Kong at PageOne on November 17.

It's a new language but is it literature? Britain's Guardian newspaper and Orange mobile phones text-poetry competition closed on Wednesday. Entries included:

4 me this txtN is 2 frenetic

I can't get it, it's all fonetic

Xept where fings Bcum mimetik

:-( 2 muj of it tern U pafetik

she cums frm oop norf&she cnt speak propa

she trvls 2 wrk on an ornge spce hoppa

she likes 2 dnce shes a bitva boppa

the grl from oop norf on the ol spce hoppa

Y o Y r u

B4 me in the Q

4 the loo

If you think you can do better, e-mail your verse to Undercover.

'Klingon' is now officially a word in the English language, but 'muggle' hasn't made it (at least not in its Harry Potter usage), according to the latest edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, which has been updated with new words since 1993.

The New York Times reports other additions include: 'fashionista', 'arm candy', 'pashmina', 'Jedi knight', 'dark side', 'wannabe', 'singleton', 'smug married', 'Blairite', 'Falun Gong' and 'Taliban'. Words must have been in common usage for five years to qualify, which is why 'muggle' hasn't been added, though it retains its slang US meaning of a marijuana cigarette. In response to criticisms that some of these are not proper words, Angus Stevenson, the new edition's co-author, explained that the emphasis is not on correct usage, but on common usage, and language purists and Queen's English snobs should look elsewhere.

Prices of rare books are rocketing and Reuters this month reported Christie's auctioned a 1922 first-edition copy of James Joyce's Ulysses for US$460,000 (HK$3.58 million) - the highest price paid at auction for any work of 20th-century fiction.

'Certain authors have begun to jump in price in the last five years,' said Francis Wahlgren, head of printed books and manuscripts at of Christie's New York.

Auction records for first editions by Vladimir Nabakov, F Scott Fitzgerald, Frank L Baum and JRR Tolkien have also been smashed.

For the first time, a husband and wife have been shortlisted for prizes in the annual Whitbread Book Awards, the BBC reports. Michael Frayn is up for best novel for his World War II book Spies, and his wife, Claire Tomalin, is competing for the biography prize with Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self.

Other authors in the running for the GBP5,000 (HK$61,650) novel prize are William Trevor for The Story Of Lucy Gault, Justin Cartwright for White Lightning and Tim Lott for Rumours Of A Hurricane. Competing with Tomalin's work are Ysenda Maxtone Graham's The Real Mrs Miniver, Miranda Carter's Anthony Blunt and Brenda Maddox's Rosalind Franklin.