This mystery Beatrix Potter illustration is expected to fetch up to 15,000 pounds at auction next month. The watercolour - of a girl rabbit with a pink ribbon tied daintily around her neck - has left experts puzzled. For while the painting is highly-finished, its subject never appeared in any of the author's rabbit tales.

Potter's children's stories of Peter Rabbit, Benjamin Bunny and The Floppy Bunnies have sold millions since they were first published at the turn of the century. Bonhams of London said the watercolour, which has been in a private collection for 50 years, has never been under the hammer before.

This weekend's convention in Los Angeles will include much discussion about the environment. Three panels will review recent trends and initiatives and a featured speaker, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, will promote his new book, "Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution - and How It Can Renew America."

Virtually every major publisher, from Random House Inc. to Scholastic Inc., has announced environmental goals, mostly through the increased use of recycled paper and fibre from forests certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, an international environmental organization. But the revolution has not quite arrived at BookExpo.

Around 30,000 event guides, just over 40 pages long, will be distributed at the Los Angeles Convention Center, along with 19,000 copies of the 700-page program guide. More than 10 million pages in all will be printed, none on recycled paper. "I'm very proud of the green programming that we created this year at the show," BookExpo vice president and show manager Lance Fensterman told The Associated Press. "Earlier in the year we had thought about doing even more green programming at BEA. But we felt that until we started being more green ourselves, it was not entirely right to proclaim the virtues of being green.

"We are fully aware that improvement can be made in our green related efforts," he acknowledged. Fensterman said that BookExpo, produced by Reed Exhibitions, welcomes any "constructive suggestions." He will likely hear from Tyson Miller, founder and director of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit program that has worked extensively with publishers on environmental issues. Miller sees "an opportunity for the convention to do more about practising what it preaches." "The small things add up and environmental leadership and action is something that perpetuates itself," says Miller, who will moderate an environmental panel at BEA.

He says he's pleased that fans of his Thursday series (four books, with a fifth coming next summer) seem to have taken to the new Nursery Crime series, of which "Fourth Bear" is the second.

"The diehard Thursday Next fans want of course nothing else but Thursday Next year after year," he says. "But there's a lot of people who say, 'We like this series very much, and we're looking forward to Thursday Next when she comes back next year.' And there are other people who have joined me on this series, because they had some sort of notion that Thursday Next was about the classics, and if you didn't have an English major you wouldn't get the jokes. Which is not true at all."

Fforde's books are very hard to classify. They have the broad contours of mysteries or thrillers, with identifiable crimes, villains and clues. But they're full of more gags, both highbrow literary in-jokes and lowbrow puns, than three books in the humor section.

Mathew alleged that beginning in the 1980s, he "created and wrote a number of original works including drawings, screenplays, outlines, blueprints, storyboards and other original materials" for what he termed a "Super Natural Pirate Movie." Material filed with the U.S. Copyright Office included drawings depicting a pirate ship named Black Pearl, the suit claimed, adding the material was also pitched in Hollywood.

Disney denied the allegations. "The suit has no merit," Disney studios spokeswoman Heidi Trotta said without elaboration. Bruckheimer's publicist Paul Bloch had no comment, referring calls to Disney. Messages left Friday for Buena Vista Home Entertainment, a unit of Disney, were not immediately returned. The film raked in $305 million domestically at the box office. The sequel, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, earned a record $135.6 million in its opening weekend beginning July 7.

Mathew is seeking unspecified damages, and a permanent injunction against the movie or "other infringing works," according to the lawsuit. Messages left for his attorney, Stephen Thomas, were not immediately returned.

When John Updike approached the lectern in the Convention Center ballroom Saturday morning, most of his bleary-eyed, coffee-swilling audience expected him to talk about his latest novel, "Terrorist." But Updike, the much-honored 74-year-old author of dozens of volumes of fiction, poetry, essays and criticism, said that would be "immodest." Instead, he praised the assembled booksellers as "the salt of the book world" and reminisced for a while about bookstores he had loved in his youth.

Then, without warning, he opened fire on the technorati. "I read last Sunday, and maybe some of you did too, a quite long article by a man called Kevin Kelly," he began. He proposed to read a few paragraphs so that listeners who hadn't seen the article might "have a sense of your future." The reference was to a piece called "Scan This Book!" in the previous week's New York Times Magazine. (The title echoes activist Abbie Hoffman's 1970 provocation, "Steal This Book.") In it, Kelly described -- in the messianic/hyperbolic style favored by Wired, the magazine with which he has long been associated -- the inexorable march toward an "Eden" in which the totality of human knowledge will be downloadable onto a single iPod-size device.

" 'When Google announced in December 2004 that it would digitally scan the books of five major research libraries to make their contents searchable, the promise of a universal library was resurrected,' " Updike read. He then followed up with later selections that had, he said, "clarified" Kelly's vision: " 'At the same time, once digitized, books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced further into snippets of a page. These snippets will be remixed into re-ordered books and virtual bookshelves . . . once created, these "bookshelves" will be published and swapped in the public commons. . . . " 'The new model of course is based on the intangible assets of digital bits, where copies are no longer cheap but free.' "

Reading further, Updike noted Kelly's assertion that "copy-protection schemes" are helpless to hold back the technological tide. "Schemes," he repeated sarcastically, drawing a laugh. As his audience well knew, the Association of American Publishers filed suit last year on behalf of five major publishers alleging that Google's library scanning project is a massive and flagrant violation of copyright law.

Updike went on at some length, heaping scorn on Kelly's notion that authors who no longer got paid for copies of their work could profit from it by selling "performances" or "access to the creator." ("Now as I read it, this is a pretty grisly scenario.") Unlike the commingled, unedited, frequently inaccurate mass of "information" on the Web, he said, "books traditionally have edges." But "the book revolution, which from the Renaissance on taught men and women to cherish and cultivate their individuality, threatens to end in a sparkling pod of snippets. "So, booksellers," he concluded, "defend your lonely forts. Keep your edges dry. Your edges are our edges. For some of us, books are intrinsic to our human identity."

Kerouac's enlistment lasted 10 months. He died at the age of 47 after alcohol had consumed his life and destroyed his liver. Kerouac's intense personality is evident in his medical records.

According to records, Kerouac enlisted in the Navy on Aug. 12, 1942, during World War II, at the age of 20. It took him less than a year to land in a naval hospital in Newport, R.I., where a doctor wrote that he had been diagnosed with "dementia praecox," an antiquated term for schizophrenia.

Kerouac didn't agree with the diagnosis. "As far as I'm concerned," he's quoted in the record, "I get nervous in an emotional way. ... I don't hear voices talking to me from no where but I have a photographic picture before my eyes. When I go to sleep and I hear music playing. I know I shouldn't have told the psychiatrist that, but I wanted to be frank."

On June 26, 1943, a sparse medical entry shows a doctor evaluated him "unsuitable." He was discharged two days later.