Category: publishing

“Literature, like all genres, is being reimagined and remade by the constantly unfolding extravagance of technological advances. The question of who’s in charge — the producer or the consumer — is increasingly relevant to the literary world. The idea of the book as an inert entity is gradually giving way to the idea of the book as a fluid, formless repository for an ever-changing variety of words and ideas by a constantly modified cast of writers.”

That’s what two elder statesmen of American literature claim. Literature is dying. Novels will become “a footnote to our technological and advertising age,” warned Norman Mailer. “Literature is an endangered species,” intoned Lawrence Ferlinghetti. But is it?

“David Irving, the discredited British historian of the Nazis, will spend Christmas and New Year in a Viennese jail after yesterday being refused bail and being remanded for four weeks pending trial for allegedly lying about the Holocaust.”

The Library of Congress is leading a project to build a world digital libraray. “Librarian of Congress James Billington said he is looking to attract further private funding to develop bilingual projects, featuring millions of unique objects, with libraries in China, India, the Muslim world and other nations. This builds on major existing digital documentary projects by the Library of Congress — one preserving an online record of Americana and another documenting ties between the United States and Brazil, France, the Netherlands, Russia and Spain.”

Deborah Treisman feels the weight of history as fiction editor of the New Yorker. “I carry the weight of this 80 years on my shoulders. Everyone puts the magazine on a pedestal and they spend all their time staring up at you adoringly or trying to knock you off that pedestal. There’s such an engaged relationship with the magazine because it’s been around for so long. Even though I’ve only been there for 8 or 9 years, I’m accountable for 70 years before that, somehow.”

“With consolidation in the publishing industry, major publishing houses have become tougher to crack and self-publishing has become an increasingly popular alternative. Technology has fueled the trend toward self-publishing. Not only has the Internet made it easier to market and distribute books but digital technology has also made printing cheaper and given authors more flexibility in the number of copies they want. And that’s encouraged a growing number of new authors to drop the idea of distributing manuscripts and take matters into their own hands.”

“Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s energetic interior minister, somehow found time while quelling suburban riots last week to ensure an authorised biography of his estranged wife, Cecilia, is unlikely to see the light of day.” How? He called the publisher, who then pulped 25,000 copies before they could go on sale.

At each subsequent stage in the history of the modern university, English professors have repurposed literary history to suit expedient needs. When English classes were one way of carrying forward the religious mood of schools once devoted to educating a ministry, literature was made an occasion for conversion or homily.

Public access to an important trove of Robert Louis Stevenson memorabilia has been restricted because of staff shortages. “While visitors to the Writers’ Museum in Edinburgh can enjoy full access to the collections of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns on the upper floor, Europe’s finest Stevenson’s artefacts, including photographs, letters and a pair of the author’s boots, is mostly kept under lock and key in the basement because there is no attendant to keep an eye on them.”

“Two years ago, Lynne Truss was vaulted into unexpected celebrity when, after a long and quiet career as a novelist and critic, she published a short, witty book on punctuation. Initially brought out in London with a hopeful first printing of 15,000 books, ‘Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation’ went on to sell some three million copies in hardcover.” Now she’s back with another sermon: “Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door.” The book’s basic contention is that people in public places no longer bother to treat one another with even a semblance of Old World courtesy or respect.