Category: publishing

“In a business environment where many of the principal publishers, booksellers and rival literary agents are reeling from the remorseless depredations of recession and digitisation (the IT revolution), he can make a good claim to be the most powerfully composed and uniquely global writers’ representative on either side of the Atlantic, a king of the book publishing jungle.”

“Some book publishing officials have given up on attending next week’s London Book Fair because of the volcanic ash from Iceland that has shut down major airports throughout Europe. But organizers said Friday that the three-day gathering will proceed.”

“The literary game is a dangerous one. Art schools have long been considered breeding grounds for bands — the Rolling Stones, Wire, Roxy Music — but there are surprisingly few graduates in English on the scene. While a casual allusion is often a safe bet for reflected cool, more sustained homage runs the risk of pretension.”

From the British Library comes “an audio CD of Plath recordings, including a rare recording of Plath and Hughes talking about their relationship. The poet, who committed suicide in 1963 aged 30, is heard speaking cheerily about life in England, and about her meeting and marriage to Hughes.”

“The difference between Philly and Flatbush is that our region’s emerging novelists did not move here in search of a scene. They were already here – raising children or working in unrelated careers.” And most of them are women.

“What’s notable about the list is that along with many three-dollar words that seem rather difficult to pronounce (witenagemot), DFW also marked up more run-of-the-mill entries like the ones for bisque and tennis. … Did he circle bisque while writing ‘Consider the Lobster’? We’ll never know.”

“I love the typefaces and the bindings and the feel of well-made paper. But what I really love is their inertness. No matter how I shake ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,’ mushrooms don’t tumble out of the upper margin, unlike the ‘Alice’ for the iPad.”

“Tactile Mind is half art object, half artisanal concept book. It contains explicit softcore images that are raised from its pages, along with Braille text and photos. The effect of the tactile, plastic ‘images’ is a bit like that of an ancient Greek bas-relief. Or, somewhat less precisely, a smutty pop-up book.”

“[S]hopping for books using iBooks, which essentially applies the maddeningly blunt tools of iTunes to a collection of some 30,000 idiosyncratic titles (even more will be added later), is like being asked to dismantle a wristwatch with a butter knife. I love reading on my iPad, but that doesn’t blind me to the abject inadequacy of the iBooks store.”