Category: publishing

“[As] the battle over the creation of the Jewish state raged, teams of Israeli librarians and soldiers were collecting tens of thousands of books from Palestinian homes in Jerusalem, Haifa, Jaffa and elsewhere … For Israel, the effort was a way to preserve books which would eventually be returned to their owners.” Yet the books remain, even today, in the stacks in Jerusalem.

“Some guy on TV is describing how he fitted his automobile with a new skin: gluing them one by one, he has blanketed every inch of its exterior with beer-bottle caps. … Or he’s displaying the dozens of photo albums that catalogue, exhaustively, the individual stacks of pancakes on which he has breakfasted daily for the past six years. And as I sit watching, one of my daughters ambles by, glances at the screen, and mutters, ‘Whoa, free time’.”

“There are, from time to time, proposals to stop teaching cursive, usually motivated by the conviction that handwriting is passé in the digital age. The outraged response is that handwriting is an art; there is an intrinsic value in beautifully formed script and to lose it would be a step towards barbarism.”

“Discovered by the American scholar Thomas Pinney in an array of hiding places including family papers, the archive of a former head of the Cunard Line and during renovations at a Manhattan house, more than 50 previously unpublished poems by Rudyard Kipling will be released for the first time next month.”

The new director of the State Museum of Literature in Moscow wants to begin a campaign to market the most promising writers of today – and to encourage readers to use their work as a lens for viewing the great Russian classics.

“The kind of deal Leonard Riggio is proposing for Barnes & Noble is known on Wall Street as a “management buyout”, in which a current CEO or executive makes a deal with banks and private equity firms to take over his own company.”

“In a word, protectionism. The legacy publishers will tell you that they can’t make digital textbooks both high quality and affordable, but that’s not the issue. It’s that they don’t want to.”

“Oxford Dictionaries has dropped references to ‘long hair’ and ‘dirty denims’ in its definition of ‘bikers’ after motorcylists complained.”

Think postage: “The Royal Mail has announced the release of a stamp collection commemorating Jane Austen’s six novels.”

Oh, hurray: “The technology turns book covers, print catalogues, and magazine ads–any physical product that’s flat–into online storefronts by superimposing online buy buttons onto each product.”