This week, I'm after some first class stuff

The man who perfected Penguin's classic paperback deserves to be remembered as one of the great designers of the 20th century

Let no one accuse this website of not joining in the Christmas spirit. Here's you're chance to win its very motherlode

This started off as a comment to something that arbeyu wrote in thread downpage, but it wouldn't post for complicated silly software reasons. In any case, arbeyu asked another commentator what was the role of religion in Riddley Walker:

I think RW is fascinating in that there seems to be no religion in Riddley's world. There's dualism expressed in the "goast of a batcherd" (ghost of a badger?) and in Lorna's speech where she's struggling to express a concept for which they no longer have words, and maybe a sense of a basic animism but there's no god - no creator.

While I entirely agree that there is no creator figure in RW; and also with whoever said that the book is remarkable because it has a destruction myth instead of a creation story, I also think that it is saturated with religious questions and indeed religious answers.

I'm picking this up because I think there is a significant and illuminating difference between new and old atheists here. In general, and with varying degrees of self-awareness and deliberation, the New Atheists define religion as something like nineteenth century protestantism: they expect a proper religion to have scriptures, a priesthood, a doctrine of the after-life and a creation myth at the very least.

None of these things are present in the world of Riddley Walker. There is literacy, but there is no canon of scripture, and all the most important texts are passed down as fragments and folk songs. There are Christian artefacts: the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral, a fragment of an account of the legend of St. Eustace, the name given to the chief mutant of "Ardship of Cambry" which is a smooshing together of "Archbishop of Canterbury" – but there is no sense at all of the stories in which these symbols were originally embedded; St. Eustace, for example, has been conflated with the promethean figure of Eusa (USA).

Nor is there any science. There is technology among the charcoal burners and there is the memory of wonders – ships in the air and pictures in the sky – but there is absolutely nothing that might be called the scientific method. When people plan, they "program" and when they reach conclusions, the "print out", but when the Eusa folk, the mutant descendants of a scientific caste, get together, they do so in ecstatic and possibly orgiastic writhings while chanting nonsense they do not understand.

So here is a world completely outside the framework of post-enlightenment atheism, and without any trace of monotheism.

But I think it would be absurd to say that it is without religion. this is not just because it is a retelling in some sense of the myth of Prometheus. The plot is all about the acquisition, or rediscovery, of forbidden knowledge. It takes place in a world full of ritual and superstition, no matter how attenuated the ritual may be. The plot is also full of dreams, omens, coincidences, and telepathies. It is about fate and how little we can struggle against it; about justice and courage and the inadequacies of love. All of these things are apprehended through feelings and intuitions. Riddley never knows quite what he is doing, nor, often, what he was done until it is too late.

This is the world, and these are the struggles, which give life and strength to the religious impulse, and to religious understandings of the world. They are how we react, and how we reason about it – even when scientific rationality is an impossible dream or a corrupted memory.

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Michael Rosen, the children's laureate, is joined by celebrities including Sir Michael Parkinson, Dame Jacqueline Wilson and Harry Hill to read his poem marking 60 years of the NHS

Alison Flood: The economic climate is beginning to leave its mark on the publishing industry in the US and the UK is braced for the worst

Planned legislation is 'unworkable', and an attack on free speech, say publishers

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Stuart Evers: They made a real difference to Britain's literary culture, and it would be a terrible shame if they got forgotten in the age of Amazon

Judge Francine Stock reflects on the 2008 Guardian first book award, while Alex Ross tells the editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, how he told the history of the 20th century through music

One of only seven copies of The Tales of Beedle the Bard handwritten by JK Rowling is unveiled at the New York Public Library as the mass market edition goes on sale around the world

Congratulations to Alex Ross, the deserving winner of the 2008 Guardian first book award. There's been a massed chorus of appreciation for this work already, so I shan't add much, except to say that what I particular enjoy about it is the connections it makes between musics and musicians. I'm the sort of person who goes to a lot of concerts, plays the violin, has some kind of grasp of how the history of music works – but frankly, it's all a bit fragmented and vague, since I have never studied the history of music properly and I can't really do the textbook musicological stuff. As I was reading Ross's book, it dawned on me that most of my knowledge of 20th-century music was based on reading the occasional Grove essay – and mostly, reading programme notes. What Ross's book does brilliantly is knit all these odd and isolated bits of knowledge together, so that everything starts to synthesise rather wonderfully, and you get to know what Sibelius thought of Stravinsky, say (not much – "stillborn affectations" was the phrase employed); or that Alban Berg was lionised by George Gershwin; or that David Bowie referenced Philip Glass and vice versa. That, and then the material is set against its historical and political background, such that this is a book for history-lovers as much as music-lovers.

By the way, there's a pungent criticism of the new-music scene by Hans Eisler in 1928, as quoted by Ross. How much have things changed, I wonder?

"The big music festivals have become downright stock exchanges, where the value of the works is assessed and contracts for the coming season are settled. Yet all this noise is carried out in the vacuum of a bell glass, so to speak, so that not a sound can be heard outside. An empty officiousness celebrates orgies of inbreeding, while there is a complete lack of interest or participation of a public of any kind."

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Having been involved in two book prizes this year, I seem to have spent a surprising amount of time arguing the case for a 40-year-old American music critic. My fellow jurors on the Samuel Johnson panel felt that Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise was perhaps too specialised for a non-fiction prize that was trying to reflect popular taste. This seemed fair enough at the time, and I certainly don't regret the winner, but the effect of Ross's book on the 50 or so readers involved in the Guardian first book award once again raises the question: do the arbitrators of literary taste underestimate what the "real" reader is prepared to read?

Sales of The Rest is Noise would seem to back up the reading groups' judgment: they've now reached 21,000 in hardback in the UK, and nine months after publication it's still going so strongly that its publisher, Fourth Estate, is considering postponing the paperback publication from February, when it was originally due.

Of course it's not in the same league as Julie Walters' or Dawn French's memoirs (which sold 64,405 and 49,104 respectively this week alone). But for a big non-fiction title costing £20, by an unknown author on a specialist subject, it's a huge number, way beyond what anyone could have predicted. To put it in context, one previous Guardian prize-winner, Stuart: A Life Backwards, shifted 16,000 in hardback, while even Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections - which has become one of the landmark novels of the decade - sold only 31,000 hardback copies (though like most fiction, it did much better in paperback).

What's Ross's secret? He's a good communicator with a cracking story to tell that no one until now has found a way of telling. He asks big questions - why, for instance, has abstraction in painting become accepted when abstraction in music has not (both, arguably, originated in the Cedar Tavern on East Eighth Street, New York, where Jackson Pollock used to hang out with John Cage and Morton Feldman)?

The one point of contention in a pretty smooth judging discussion was whether, as a critic, Ross would fulfil the first book prize criterion of showing promise. Having so comprehensively summarised 20th century classical music, where is there for him to go, one judge asked. Well, he has already been signed up for two new books — including the undeniably promising Wagnerism: How a Composer Shaped the Modern World.

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What's Beedle about? A chapter-by-chapter analysis of JK Rowling's latest addition to the Harry Potter universe, The Tales of Beedle the Bard, released to ravening Potter fans at midnight last night

David V Barrett: Over and over again, critical publications have been blocked