I learned via today’s PW Morning Report that Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown’s new mystery book will be promoted with a series of online puzzles. This Web site says the puzzles are “bound to intrigue us as much as any of his mystery novels.” We shall see.

In University of Nebraska Press news, former Boston Celtics star and basketball legend Bill Russell was on the Daily Show the evening before last, promoting his new book. The UNP is not the publisher of Russell’s book, but it is the publisher of The Dandy Dons, which tells the story of Russell and his ragamuffin University of San Francisco team that shocked everyone by being really awesome. And it was fun to see one of the main characters of The Dandy Dons chatting with Jon Stewart.

In other news, former astronaut Alan Bean was featured in the New York Times today. Bean kept a diary while stationed on the space station Skylab, portions of which were published in the recent UNP book Homesteading Space. In 1981, Bean retired from NASA to paint full-time, and the astronauts, spacescapes and other subjects he observed during his Skylab days provide the fodder for much of his work. Bean has been painting since the 1960s, but it wasn’t until he was well into his career as an astronaut that he began painting the moon and other spacescapes, he says in the NYT story:

“My astronaut friends began to say to me, ‘Bean, why do you keep painting the earth?’ ” he recalled. “ ‘You’re the only artist that’s ever been anywhere else but this earth, and you keep painting the earth.’”

That is hands-down my favorite quote in the story.