Category: publishing

So debt-ridden Antioch College is closing. What’s to happen to the school’s books? “The stolid-looking brick building on the serene campus in west-central Ohio houses some 325,000 books. Yet its irreplaceable heritage is its special collections, including the papers of Horace Mann, Antioch’s first president, and those of Arthur Morgan, who ran the school in the 1920s and pioneered the idea of co-op education: Antioch students spend several semesters off campus, working in their chosen fields.”

“Protests about author Salman Rushdie’s knighthood have been condemned by the Man Booker International Prize judges as they honoured this year’s winner. They said the ‘appalling reaction’ from religious extremists threatened ‘the principle of freedom of expression as a basic tenet of justice’.”

“Getting published by a mainstream company is great, but in all honesty, how many of us can really afford to give up the day job, even when we’ve signed that contract? Such a long, heartbreaking haul for what? The joy of writing should be just that – the writing,” children’s author Beth Webb argues. “Define your audience and publish yourself.”

“Nowadays, thanks to the internet and its many search engines writers can conduct their research at a much-accelerated pace. Chief among the millions of web resources is its most frequently-visited encyclopedia, Wikipedia. … Research has now been boiled down to a few hours on a laptop at a crumb-flecked table in an overpriced coffee shop. This may not necessarily be a good thing.”

“What novelist with a big record collection wouldn’t be excited at the prospect of writing about rock’n’roll life: the internal politics, the heartbreak, the potential for myth-making? Nonetheless, the rock-novel genre contains some of history’s most misguided books. Bad fake music journalism disguised as fiction for people who don’t read fiction? Literary slumming from writers who really should know better? Overexcited fan-boy ramblings? It’s all here.”

Antidote International Films won its lawsuit against J.T. LeRoy creator Laura Albert, but should it have? “The value of the novel, in Antidote’s view, depended not on what was between its covers, but on who the producers thought the author was (and on their belief that the novel derived directly from events in his life). Almost all the press around Albert’s deception … has treated ‘LeRoy’s’ fiction the same way, as something akin to falsified autobiography. That’s a shame, and not just because Sarah is still a good read.”

In the category of Things The Advertisers Already Knew is this bit of now-scientific fact: “Kids believe what they read — even if it’s wrong. This may seem fairly obvious (don’t adults do this too?), but it’s now been statistically confirmed by scientists, who say that parents and teachers should use care in choosing books for their kids.”

“Whatever its actual merits, Tina Brown’s Diana Chronicles has been the most talked-about book of the season and Sarah Bradford’s its most talked-about review – even though, until today, it had not been published. It remains unclear why the Spectator refused to print Bradford’s piece, given that she is widely considered to be this country’s foremost authority on Diana. But here it is, abridged and edited.” (And, um, it’s not exactly a rave.)

“When politics gets mean and dumb, you can cheer yourself up by walking into a public library, one of the nobler expressions of democracy,” Garrison Keillor advises. “The library is the temple of freedom.”

“O stalwart Sussex postman, who is / Delivering the post from Lewes, / Cycle apace to Charlton Firle / While knitting at your plain and purl / Deliver there to good Clive Bell / (You know the man, you know him well / He plays the virginals and spinet) / This note – there’s… nothing in it.” That’s T.S. Eliot in a 1948 postcard to Clive Bell, two of the many boldface names in Swiss lawyer Albin Schram’s soon-to-be-auctioned collection of letters.