Category: publishing

“Vintage, an imprint of Random House, are about to enter the ‘lucrative literary classics market’, republishing some of the greatest novels ever written with new ‘simple and approachable’ covers. In other words, The Devils may soon look no different from The Devil Wears Prada. This is an outrage. Without those reassuringly stern black bars that mark out a Penguin Classic, how is anyone to know I’m communing with a noble work of art, and not just the latest from Richard and Judy’s Book Club?”

“The news from Harvard Square had rare-book collectors aflutter: Two manuscripts by the renowned Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges had vanished and were presumed stolen in an international literary heist worth $950,000.” But the pair of short stories turn out — whoops — to have been there all along, simply misplaced.

A letter written by Charles Dickens on Christmas Day, 1849, is up for sale. “In the letter to William Jerdan, Dickens blasts the British journalist for reprinting a bogus biography of him in the Literary Journal. … ‘Merry Christmas and Happy New Year,’ Dickens wrote. ‘As you reprint the extraordinary lies of the New York Herald, perhaps you may like to know something more of their authority.’ “

OJ Simpson’s book may have been scrubbed by the publisher, but already-printed copies are leaking ou. “Two major online marketplaces for new and used books, Alibris.com and Biblio.com, removed listings for the book Friday after it was offered at prices up to $5,499. And eBay, the online auction site, has removed at least eight listings, the latest Tuesday. At least one early eBay listing went undetected, and the book sold for $50.”

“The familiar observation that the Bible is the best-selling book of all time obscures a more startling fact: the Bible is the best-selling book of the year, every year. Calculating how many Bibles are sold in the United States is a virtually impossible task, but a conservative estimate is that in 2005 Americans purchased some twenty-five million Bibles–twice as many as the most recent Harry Potter book.”

“If there were a prize for authors who have had the most movies made from their work, W. Somerset Maugham would be at or near the top of the list. Jeffrey Meyers, Maugham’s latest biographer, counts 48 Maugham-based movies, and that’s not including made-for-TV movies or foreign films, in which case the total runs into the hundreds. Maugham himself felt, grudgingly, that he was better known for the film adaptations of his books than for the books themselves.”

“E-mail has long been blamed for reducing the quality of our communication to fragments filled with abbreviations and bad punctuation. But this year, in-boxes around the world took a turn toward the literary, thanks to a new breed of spam that pumps out passages from classics like ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ ‘Robinson Crusoe’ and ‘The Three Musketeers.’ “

Philip Gourevitch is bringing more reporting to the Pais Review. “We’re living in complicated and dramatic times, and I feel that our literature, especially the periodical fiction, is rarely up to the wildness and boldness of the times, that it seldom expresses the outlandishness and range of the actors and actions that are shaping our world. Without trying to run a timely publication I feel it’s exciting to see what gets thrown off at a glancing angle from the actual headlines: not only as non-fiction narrative, but as fiction, as poetry, even as interview.”

Amazon.com is betting that on-demand publishing will be a big part of its future, installing high-quality digital presses made by Hewlett Packard at several of its distribution centers nationwide so as to make on-demand orders more easily deliverable. “The Indigo digital presses used by Amazon offer quality similar to traditional offset presses, and can print maximum orders of about 5,000.”

“Should a novel end with a bibliography? And if it does, is it pomposity or an effort to come clean about one’s sources? …Even a thorough bibliography will not protect a novelist against baseless charges of plagiarism founded on a narrow understanding of how the creative imagination works. [But] the only real risk [in having] a bibliography for a novel is that it will come to be a kind of obligatory disclosure.”