Category: publishing

“I found that even in a very small font that if the original line is beyond a certain length, they will take the extra word and have it flush left on the screen, so that instead of a three-line stanza you actually have a four-line stanza. And that screws everything up.”

“A handful of high-end publishing houses are pushing the boundaries of extravagance and novelty in the luxury book market. Such books are being treated as investments and sometimes commanding prices usually reserved for original art works.”

“Bateman’s voice – obsessive, and only a very small fraction of a degree madder than the average style magazine – is a superb achievement: equally unsettling when he describes a suit, the ’emotional honesty’ of Phil Collins, or doing unspeakable things to prostitutes. There’s also the disturbing uncertainty of the whole thing. Should we believe anything Bateman says? Does he actually look good? … Is he really a killer? Do cash machines really demand that he feeds them cats?”

“Mayor Nutter kept his promise to balance the 2010-11 budget with across-the-board cuts to police, fire, arts, education, and neighborhood cleanup Wednesday, but he relieved library lovers by breaking his vow to reduce branch operations.”

“Faulkner spent two years as the writer-in-residence at UVA, where he gave lectures and readings and took questions from students. The lectures,” from the late 1950s, “were recorded on reel-to-reel tapes, which have now been digitized and published online.”

A contemporary of the mid-20th century’s “jostling alpha males,” Jackson “was the bard of the domestic nightmare…, of people who were trapped, excluded, usurped and pushed in a corner to wither away unnoticed. If there was anything Homeric about her … it was the serene pitilessness with which she dispensed their doom.”

“‘The Clark Library is the greatest unknown literary treasure in Los Angeles,’ said Kathleen Thompson, who with her husband owns Michael R. Thompson Booksellers, a rare bookshop that works closely with the institution. ‘The minute we saw it 40 years ago we fell in love with it, and our love has only grown.'”

“Horrible stereotypes of corrupting older women seducing young innocents and the lesbian as primitive do abound, as does that ever so popular way of dealing with a character with a deviant sense of morality: the tragic death. But it’s a much more lively and open history than you might imagine.”

Lucy Mangan: “Oh, my beloved Billy bookcases, I fear I will never look at you the same way again. I am in a free-standing, multi-storey wooden tower comprising a spiral staircase and walls composed of open shelves lined with 6,000 books.”

“Makers of e-books are stingy with their numbers, and industry watchdogs disagree, but some say a large proportion of early e-book owners – up to 66 percent in some surveys – are older than 40, with a “sweet spot” in the 35-to-54 range.”