Category: publishing

A prominent British biographer is duped into using a faked letter in a new biography. Yes, there’s embarrassment to have been taken in by a clever hoax. But who perpetrated it?

The number of books threatened with removal from American library shelves dropped to an all-time low last year. “Challenges have gone up and down over the past few years, but overall have dropped by more than half since Banned Books Week was started. Judith Krug, director of the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, cited a couple of possible factors for the decline: Librarians are better prepared to organize community support on behalf of a book, and would-be censors are focusing more on online content.”

“The British publisher announced yesterday that classics such as Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Oliver Twist, Crime and Punishment and Moby Dick would be translated into Mandarin and sold under its logo in the world’s fastest growing book market.”

“The role of a 21st-century publisher is making books available offline and on. Blurb.com, a self-publishing startup, will invite 600 bloggers this week to test out its new service by creating a free bound copy of their blog. It’s a fresh shot across the bow to traditional publishers in an industry already facing disruptive changes from digital giants Google and Amazon.”

There was a lovely little fundraising party last weekend in New York for the literary magazine n+1. Then someone made off with the money. “We’ve been much drunker than this, but the party was so nice that we were lulled into a false sense of security. Everybody was wearing jackets; there was classical music. We didn’t think anyone was going to steal our money. Also, our office manager got into a fight with his girlfriend and had to leave the party, and he’s usually the guy who watches the cash box.”

Frank Kermode is England’s foremost literary critic. “I don’t at all think that the time we spent on Theory was wasted. One of the great benefits of seriously reading English is you’re forced to read a lot of other things. You may not have a very deep acquaintance with Hegel but you need to know something about Hegel. Or Hobbes, or Aristotle, or Roland Barthes. We’re all smatterers in a way, I suppose. But a certain amount of civilisation depends on intelligent smattering”.

“Imagine being the parent of a small child who wants to read a bedtime story, but you’re just learning English and you can’t find children’s books in your native language. That has been the plight for many Somali parents new to [Minnesota], but the Minnesota Humanities Commission hopes to change that with the publication of four children’s books with both English and Somali text. The first, ‘The Lion’s Share’ (‘Qayb Libaax’), will be available in October.”

“For more than 120 years Alexander Pushkin has seen off every threat. Joseph Stalin deported him (if only 100 metres), McDonald’s first outlet in Russia opened nearby and Chechen militants allegedly detonated a bomb not far from his left foot. All along, the statue of Russia’s most famous poet preserved a bubble of calm in the centre of Moscow. Now, finally, it seems the killer blow is at hand. If the city government gets its way, a four-storey shopping mall and traffic tunnel will soon be built on the square where Pushkin stands on his pedestal.”

Hyperion is planning to start an imprint aimed at women. “Called Voice, the imprint, which will publish its first title in April, is the brainchild of Ellen Archer, Hyperion’s publisher, and Pamela G. Dorman, a 19-year veteran of Viking. It will be just one of a number of new imprints aimed at female readers: Warner Books already has a women’s imprint called 5 Spot and in the fall is starting the Springboard Press, for baby boomers, with a large portion of its titles catering to female readers.”

“Andrew Dalby, author of Rediscovering Homer, argues that the attribution of the poems to Homer was founded on a falsehood. Homer’s link to the poems, Dalby writes, stems from an ‘ill-informed postclassical text, the anonymous Life of Homer, fraudulently ascribed to Herodotus,’ a respected Greek historian who lived from around 484-425 B.C.”