Category: publishing

“A ‘magnificent’ collection of first edition books is expected to fetch up to £15m when it goes under the hammer later this year.” The collection “includes a copy of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol complete with author’s inscription, … first editions of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Pride and Prejudice, as well as important works by Charles Darwin, Chaucer and Milton..”

“The death on Tuesday of Andrei Voznesensky, a stirring poet of the post-Stalin ‘thaw era’ in the 1950s and early 1960s, caused many to recall a time when [poetry’s] reach was enormous. Voznesensky’s generation of poets, which included Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Bella Akhmadulina, declaimed their work in sports stadiums to overflow crowds.”

“Just what the Vatican’s motivation was is none too clear. Scholars have been allowed in the archive since 2003, so long as they know exactly which document they’d like a look at – browsing is not allowed. Certainly, they haven’t always looked kindly on book proposals about the secret archive.”

“Back in the day, we became writers through the laying on of hands. Some teacher who we worshipped touched our shoulder, and this benediction saw us through a hundred defeats. And then an editor smiled on us and wrote us a check and our babies got shoes. But in the New Era, writers will be self-anointed. No passing of the torch.”

“The intellectual community was not large,” he told an audience in Paris. “The fact remains that I was rubbing shoulders in daily life with people who in secret were making judgments about whether or not I was going to be allowed to be published and read in South Africa.”

“The entire impulse behind Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iBooks assumes that you cannot read a book unless you own it first — and only you can read it unless you want to pass on your device. That goes against the social value of reading, the collective knowledge and collaborative discourse that comes from access to shared libraries.”

“There is no substitute for the book, and it would be a great deprivation and danger if the book should disappear and be replaced by something with a battery. I am not talking in a fuddy-duddy way about this. These things are wonderful for disseminating information. But for poetry, for novels, stories – those things that have the imagination at their heart – there is no substitute for the book.”

Named after its address in the Mission district of the city and guilefully hidden behind a Pirate Supply Store shopfront, “826 Valencia” helps students aged from eight to 18 to develop writing skills in informal workshops. By seducing young patrons with pirate parrots and peg legs, it removed the stigma associated with extra literacy lessons.

“In the week the iPad is launched in the UK, it’s clear that several decisive recent cultural engagements have also torn up the map by which, for at least a century, writers and publishers have fought the battle of the books.”

Neuropsychology can help to explain poetry, to demystify the impulse. There has been work done on why poetry can send shivers down our spine. The poem activates the same parts of the brain that react when a child is separated from its mother. A deep sense of separation and longing.