Poor Mojo's Newswire

In Do Travel Writers Go To Hell?, Mr Kohnstamm, 32, discloses that there was nothing lonely about his three years travelling through Latin America, working on a dozen different titles.

"The waitress suggests that I come back after she closes down the restaurant, around midnight," he writes. "We end up having sex in a chair and then on one of the tables in the back corner.

" That performance earned a guidebook entry describing the restaurant as "a pleasant surprise" where "the table service is friendly". He also recounts how he shared his apartment with a Brazilian prostitute called Inara. Short of cash, he admitted selling ecstasy to pay his way.

Lonely Planet bosses are not amused. Last week, the company's chief executive, Judy Slatyer, sent an email to her writers condemning Mr Kohnstamm. Her greatest concern is his assertion that his advance payment was "barely enough to cover the air fare" and that many guide book writers do not check their facts in a bid to finish before they "run up credit card debt" and "burn out".

While women are more likely to use a man's bookshelf as an insight into his soul -- or a dating deal-breaker -- men, I've learned, are more likely to lie about their reading habits in order to pick up the unwary booklover. Ironically, the Times piece serves as a cheat sheet for the illiterate man.

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"Tom Robbins' Still Life with Woodpecker got me laid by three different women," another of my pals recalled, nostalgically, after reading the Times piece. He was young when the book came out in 1980, and Robbins' psychedelic sentences that twist-and-turn into surprising metaphors were a hit with undergrads.

While the first conquest was a surprise, he later turned the book into a pick-up line. He got positively misty-eyed as he recalled asking a redhead he met in a bar if she was a refugee from the planet Argon where the titian-haired villains owed their tresses to sugar and lust. (I assume he offered her both as he's a very gracious man). It sent him on a lifelong quest for books that hooked his kind of woman. He later seduced radical environmentalists with his love of Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang.

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Author advances and bookseller returns have long troubled the publishing industry. Best-selling authors can command advances so high that publishers often come away with slim profits, even for books that are significant successes. Publishers also sometimes offer high advances to untested authors in the hopes of creating new hits, but often those gambles do not pan out.

Thomas Alvord, with the group "No More Pornography," says, "The issue is exposing people to pornography."

The issue is with "Fun Home," a book assigned for reading in a mid-level English class at the University of Utah. The class introduces students to different literary genres. In the case of "Fun Home," it's told in the style of a comic book. The story centers around the author as she comes to terms with her own and her father's homosexuality.

Drawings depicting sex acts are included in the 230 page novel. A student in the class was offended and approached the group "No More Pornography," which made headlines earlier this year when it staged a successful protest of music videos shown a gym in Provo. The group has started an online petition in protest of the book.