Category: publishing

“What was the most influential book of the 20th century? Perhaps you’d vote for ‘Relativity,’ by Albert Einstein. But for my money,” Pagan Kennedy writes, “the book that blew the lid off the century could only be ‘The Joy of Sex.'” British sexpert Susan Quilliam talks to Kennedy about her unusual commission: updating the 1972 manual for a 2009 edition.

“For centuries scholars from around the world have flocked to the Stiftsbibliothek — literally, the abbey library — in [St. Gallen, Switzerland,] to pore over its vast collection of manuscripts, many written and illustrated before the year 1000.” Now, a grant from the Mellon Foundation will allow the library’s holdings to be scanned and made available online.

“It is a commonly held assumption that Americans don’t like to read authors who write in languages they don’t understand. It is left mostly to small publishers… to scavenge for hidden treasures outside the United States.”

The Guardian‘s Books Blog considers works that exist only in the pages of other works: Bacon Death and Your Clothes Are Dead (in Brautigan’s The Abortion: A Historical Romance), the novels of T.S. Garp, the many books mentioned in Borges’s Ficciones, and, of course, the titular travel guide in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

“Western publishers are launching a drive to tap the Arab world for new stars, hoping to bridge the language gap with more than 200 million native Arabic speakers – and make money from selling books.”

“Pamuk, like many of Istanbul’s most liberal and cosmopolitan artists, is not as worried as outsiders about how deep the [ruling party] AKP’s pluralism really runs. For them, the real threat still lurks among the hard-line secular chauvinists in the army and judiciary who have for decades banned and jailed authors and journalists.”

Rizzoli and the new Duomo Ediciones “will release their own local language editions of Granta under license from the magazine’s head office in London starting in 2009.” (The renowned literary journal already publishes an edition in Brazil.)

“Did anyone expect The White Tiger to win? Certainly, it struck me as a choice that came from way out of leftfield. I’d also suggest that the consensus in the publishing world seemed to be bemusement as much as disappointment….”

“Hundreds of unpublished poems, letters and notebooks by former Poet Laureate Ted Hughes have been acquired by the British Library. The archive focuses on the poet’s final collection, Birthday Letters, which explored his tragic marriage to Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide in 1963.”

The son of ur-conservative William F. Buckley has resigned his freelance gig with the magazine his father founded, National Review, after publishing (elsewhere) a column endorsing Barack Obama and receiving a ferocious backlash. “In fact, the only thing the Right can’t quite decide is whether I should be boiled in oil or just put up against the wall and shot. Lethal injection would be too painless.”