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‘Virtual unfolding’ is hailed a breakthrough in the study of historic documents as unopened letter from 1697 is read for the first time using X-ray technology

In a world first for the study of historic documents, an unopened letter written in 1697 has been read by researchers without breaking the seal.

The letter, dated 31 July 1697 and sent from French merchant Jacques Sennacques in Lille to his cousin Pierre Le Pers in The Hague, had been closed using “letterlocking”, a process in which the letter is folded to become its own envelope, in effect locking it to keep it private. It is part of a collection of some 2,600 undelivered letters sent from all over Europe to The Hague between 1689 and 1706, 600 of which have never been opened.

Related: Undelivered letters shed light on 17th-century society

• Author’s estate aims to represent and support ‘all communities’
• Dr Seuss children’s books earned $33m pre-tax in 2020

Publication of six Dr Seuss books will cease, the company that preserves and protects the author’s legacy said on Tuesday, due to their racist and insensitive portrayal of people of color.

Dr Seuss Enterprises said it would cease publication of And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, Scrambled Eggs Super! and The Cat’s Quizzer.

The profit-sharing platform, billed as an alternative to Amazon, has been used by more than 200,000 UK customers since its November launch

Four months since it launched, Bookshop.org – billed as an alternative to Amazon – has generated £1m in profit for independent bookshops in the UK, the website announced on Monday.

Set up by Andy Hunter, the writer and co-founder of Literary Hub, Bookshop.org was launched in the US a year ago and in the UK in November. Pitching itself as a socially conscious way to buy books online, it allows booksellers to create a virtual shop front. For books ordered directly from these online stores, booksellers receive 30% of the cover price from each sale without having to handle customer service or shipping. When a sale is made and not attributed to a specific bookseller, 10% of the cover price goes into a pot that is split between all of the shops.

Related: Elena Ferrante names her 40 favourite books by female authors

International Booker winner Marieke Lucas Rijneveld will not translate inaugural poet’s work into Dutch after anger that a Black writer was not hired

The acclaimed author Marieke Lucas Rijneveld has pulled out of translating Amanda Gorman’s poetry into Dutch, after their publisher was criticised for picking a writer for the role who was not also Black.

Related: 'My family are too frightened to read my book': meet Europe's most exciting authors

Related: Amanda Gorman's inauguration poem launches author to top of book charts

As sales of cosmetics for men soar, book reveals industry’s first boom was in 1700s

Male cosmetics are no longer the preserve of rock stars, with data showing sales are booming. But a new book by a historian at the University of Exeter reveals that far from being a modern trend, grooming products for men were popular centuries before being advocated by the likes of Russell Brand, David Bowie and Prince.

Dr Alun Withey says it all started in the 1750s. “The 18th century is actually the beginning of the market for men’s cosmetics that we see today,” he says, noting there was a “new focus on refining the body, so personal grooming becomes important”.

Hortense Mancini’s celebrated London salon allowed her female peers the freedoms men enjoyed

There were few places in 17th-century London where women could embrace the same economic and intellectual freedoms as men. Hortense Mancini’s salon next to St James’s Palace was one of them, new research reveals – yet its influence in Restoration society has largely been dismissed throughout history.

Mancini, a mistress of Charles II, was a renowned Italian beauty who famously fled to England dressed as a man to escape her abusive aristocratic husband. But she also wielded her fame and status to create a subversive space in London where royal mistresses could meet, gamble, drink champagne and discuss science and literature on an equal footing with men, according to Annalisa Nicholson, a researcher in French Studies at Cambridge University.

As museum prepares to celebrate Lewis Carroll’s heroine, ties to mysticism and magical societies have come to light in a new work, Through a Looking Glass Darkly

Great art spawns imitation. And great weird art, it seems, spawns still weirder flights of fancy. Lewis Carroll’s twin children’s fantasies, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There have both inspired a string of adaptations, artistic and musical responses down the generations.

Now, as the Victoria & Albert Museum prepares to celebrate Alice and her cultural influence in Curiouser & Curiouser, a landmark exhibition next month, a new book containing unseen original images is to expose the secrets behind the darker world of the second Alice story.

The Books of Jacob, praised by the Nobel prize judges and winner of Poland’s prestigious Nike award, will be published in the UK in November

The magnum opus of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk – a novel that has taken seven years to translate and has brought its author death threats in her native Poland – is to be published in English.

The Books of Jacob, which will be released in the UK in November, is the Polish author’s first novel to appear in English since she won the 2018 Nobel prize for literature for what judges called “a narrative imagination that with encyclopaedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life”.

Related: Olga Tokarczuk: ‘I was very naive. I thought Poland would be able to discuss the dark areas of our history’

The recent sale of a cast for £12,500 is a testament to the Romantic poet’s enduring legacy, on the bicentenary of his death

There’s no mention of John Keats’s name on his tombstone – in fact you might accidentally pass right by it while strolling through the Cimitero Acattolico in Rome, were it not for its distinctly dour epitaph. “Here lies one whose name was writ in water,” is the bitter description, etched at Keats’s dying request, the final sentiment from a poet who believed his words would fade into oblivion.

When Keats died from tuberculosis aged 25, on 23 February 1821, the furniture in his room – now a museum – was burned. But his face was shaved and prepared, so a plaster cast could be applied to preserve his likeness. Now, 200 years on, two versions of Keats’s death mask produced by two castmakers circulate galleries, auctions and private collections for large sums. Their value is a testament to Keats’s enduring appeal; Where the Wild Things Are author Maurice Sendak owned one and would reportedly take it from its box next to his bed to stroke its forehead.

Related: John Keats: five poets on his best poems, 200 years since his death