Category: publishing

“Catch-22 is about everything. It’s about selfishness and sanctimony, the perverse logic of capitalism, nurses and chaplains, parades and murder, heroism and cowardice, love and lust–all the stuff that matters. It’s a 450-page masterpiece of episodic curlicues that vacillate through time.”

“A book’s cover offers an interpretation of its contents – some inflection, if only by its typeface or colour. And yet its effect on the reader is mostly subliminal. Book designers are the ultimate hidden persuaders.” But not this one – at least not any longer.

Some e-books have videos, hotlinks, maps and more – but print books have much shinier covers. Publishers rethink the book as object. Will consumers respond?

“Nicanor Parra, the Chilean poet and mathematician who seeks to demystify poetry and make it accessible to a wider audience, has won the 2011 Miguel de Cervantes Prize.”

“As symbols of love for libraries go, cutting up books wouldn’t be most readers’ first thought. But the delicate paper sculptures that have been left anonymously in recent months around Edinburgh’s cultural institutions have been enchanting.”

“I spoke to the editor Mary-Kay Wilmers and said: ‘Don’t force my hand by forcing me to put it in the hands of lawyers.’ All I have got back is weasel words.”

“There’s something incredibly liberating when you realize that climbing that ladder is a ladder to nowhere.”

The success of Chronicle of a Death Foretold “prompted a lawsuit by Miguel Reyes Palencia, who claimed that Márquez had based the novel’s main character, Bayardo San Román, on his life. This week those accusations were finally dismissed [by] a supreme court in the Colombian city of Barranquilla.”

“The shift has something to do with a re-evaluation of bookstore patrons’ skill set. They can, after all, read the book for themselves–in fact, they may have done so in advance of the author’s visit. But it has at least as much to do with a consideration of authors’ skill set. Sure, they know how to read, but they may be none too skilled doing it out loud.”

“In 1987, The Book Services Ltd published a slim, 144-page cookbook called Microwave for One … a book whose title and cover is so rife with sadness that one almost has the urge to brush the invisible tears from [author Sonia] Allison’s face as she leans over her microwave and her food spread.”