Category: publishing

“Art experts and conservative clerics are holding an unusual ‘trial’ in Leonardo da Vinci’s hometown aimed at sorting out fact from fiction in the book The Da Vinci Code after many readers took the smash hit novel as gospel truth… The novel’s contentious allegations — namely, that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and sired a bloodline — have provoked unprecedented protest among Roman Catholic and Protestant conservatives.” The trial is being organized by the director of a Leonardo da Vinci museum, and is being backed by several Catholic officials,

Time was when Cahners Publishing was the king of trade publications, owning such titles as Publishers Weekly and Variety. No more. The company has been piecemealed to death into a shadow of its former self.

Book sales are down? Maybe books are too small? Or at least the type (think of the oldsters)? “The answer is obvious: publishers are to make books bigger, thereby making space for larger print on the page and solving the malaise affecting literature. Penguin launches its Premium range in the US in the northern summer. ‘We think it will be a more comfortable reading experience, but still at an affordable price’.”

“The First Annual TMN Tournament of Books, presented by The Morning News (TMN), a daily online magazine (themorningnews.org/tob), and Powells.com, an online bookstore, is under way. The writers aren’t hacks and they aren’t in a stadium. The fans don’t roar and they don’t judge. But the Web tournament is set up exactly like an N.C.A.A. basketball tournament, with ladders, seeds and head-to-head contests. Round after round, novels from 2004 are pitted against each other until only one of the original 16 is standing. The champion will be announced on Feb. 28. At that point its author may receive a live rooster, which has a cryptic connection to the brother of the writer David Sedaris.”

“Its gradual demise lacks the éclat of the Gillette takeover, the disappearance of Fleet Bank, or the offshoring of John Hancock, but Cahners Publishing Company’s death by a thousand cuts has had a significant impact on civic life in Boston. The name of Norman Cahners, the hustling young Harvard grad who turned a Navy inventory newsletter called ‘The Palletizer’ into a trade publishing empire, was quietly removed from the company’s signature Newton Corner headquarters a while back. Now the Boston-area staff is leaving the building entirely… The purge of the Cahners name was completed two years ago, when the founder’s daughter Nancy was summoned to Newton to remove her father’s portrait.”

“Mass market paperbacks, those pocket-sized best sellers available everywhere from airports to drug stores, are on the decline, apparent victims of increased competition and the squints of baby boomers who value larger print over lower prices.” So publishers are experimenting with a larger format. “The new paperbacks will be at least a centimetre taller than mass market books — big enough to make the books more readable, but small enough to fit into pockets and existing store racks. In both size and prize, they will stand midway between mass market books and “trade” paperbacks, which are the same size as hardcovers.”

Random House is suing P. Diddy to get back a $300,000 advance for an autobiography the rapper never wrote. The book was contracted for in 1999 and no manuscript is yet forthcoming. “Random House has seldom resorted to a legal course of action with its prospective authors who don’t write the books we have contracted for, but Mr. Sean Combs has left us no choice.”

Foyles, London’s much-beloved book shop, has announced that it will expand worldwide, in its first expansion since the 1930s. “The privately owned group will target cities where it can establish as authoritative a presence as it has in London, where its business has been based since 1906.”

Neighbours in the town of Ketchum, Idaho fear that plans to open to the public the house in which Ernest Hemingway killed himself will “bring scores of tourists who will disrupt their peace and clog up their drives. They want to buy the property – which could have a price tag of more than $500,000 – from the conservancy that owns it, and move it down the road. But the plan has run into opposition from the Idaho Hemingway House Foundation, which counts the Hollywood luminary Tom Hanks and the writer’s granddaughter Mariel Hemingway as board members.”

Organizers of World Book Day want to harness the power of word of mouth to promote reading. They plan to distribute 8 million postcards which would “enable one in seven people in the British population to recommend a book to a friend, or enemy. The card, due to come tumbling out of virtually every publication in Britain until World Book Day on March 3, are designed by artists ranging from the Guardian’s Graham Rawle to Peter Blake and Simon Patterson. The organisers, whose mission is to raise the profile of reading and book buying and borrowing, call this harnessing the power of recommendation, and are focusing it on a single day.”