Hobbyists speak of the tactile joy and sensual delight of moving physical game pieces, and of their appreciation for the detailed art on a game box or board.” Why are board games thriving? “In Germany, the home of modern board-gaming, the industry has grown by over 40% in the past five years the four-day SPIEL trade fair this year saw 1,500 new board and card game releases, with 209,000 attendees from around the world. Wirth forcefully argued that wood-rather than concrete, material, or other materials that have been suggested-was the most ecological and structurally sound material during at a hearing at the National Assembly this week.” By the end of the year, 11 Maigret books had appeared.”Īn influential architect argues that Notre Dame’s roof should be rebuilt with wood: “Emmanuel Macron’s dream of adding a ‘contemporary’ touch to Notre Dame’s reconstructed roof and spire may be dashed entirely after one of France’s leading architects, Eric Wirth, vice president of the Guild of French Architects, declared that it would be a grave mistake to rebuild the roof in anything but same wood used in its original construction. Simenon’s publisher hosted a costume ball at a Montparnasse nightclub, where guests disguised as gangsters and prostitutes mingled with real Paris policemen.

The first Maigret title, The Late Monsieur Gallet, was launched in 1931 with a big burst of publicity. The idea was to impress the public with the high quality of the Maigret books, produce a bunch of best-sellers quickly, and then move on to more respectable genres. But he dreamed of writing literary fiction, and Maigret was supposed to be a means to that end. As ‘Georges Sim,’ Simenon had spent the previous decade churning out pulp fiction at an inhuman pace-in 1928 alone he published more than 40 books-and he earned a lot of money and a certain degree of fame doing it.

When Simenon came up with the character, in 1930, he intended to use him for a specific tactical purpose. Maigret was never supposed to have such a long life. The new Penguin editions have sold more than one million copies worldwide, proving that almost half a century after his final adventure, the detective’s allure hasn’t faded. Adam Kirsch takes stock of Georges Simenon’s accomplishment in Airmail: “This series of new translations in stylish trade paperbacks has been publishing about a book a month since 2013, in roughly the same order as the novels’ original publication.

Penguin has published its last Maigret reissue.

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