Category: publishing

In an attempt to revive itself, Publishers Weekly hired a new top editor. “After decades of enjoying a near monopoly on coverage of the book publishing business, Publishers Weekly in recent years has often lagged in competition with Internet sites, e-mail newsletters and daily newspapers. The consolidation of the publishing business and the demise of many independent booksellers has eaten into the magazine’s pool of potential subscribers. Its paid circulation of 25,000 is down about 3,000 from the peak in recent years. Perhaps worst of all for a publication focused on a single industry, even subscribers are not certain about where the magazine is aiming.”

“California is in the market for a new poet laureate. With an official state dirt, a state fossil and a state tartan, we need a state bard. And as a blue state, it’s our obligation to demonstrate that airport bookstore thrillers and bodice-rippers are not the alpha and omega of literature and that just because poetry usually comes in slim volumes with even slimmer royalty checks doesn’t mean it don’t kick heinie.”

“One wonders: Would Don Quixote pass the test and be published in New York today? I frankly doubt it. It would be deemed what editors call “a trouble manuscript”: too long, the story line problematic, the plot stuffed with too many adventures that do too little to advance the narrative and too many characters whose fate the reader gets attached to but who suddenly disappear. And that awkward conceit of a character finding a book about himself! The style! Those careless sentences that twist and turn!”

Reading is king of course. But there are those among us who develop an addiction for hearing the spoken word read to us. “Perhaps there is something psychologically reassuring about listening to someone read a story. Hardly a day has passed in the last 30 years in which I have not heard a spoken-word recording of one kind or another. I go to sleep every night with the soothing sounds of a recorded book.”

“The lives of 195 people who died in 2001 – including Beatle George Harrison – have been added to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. The book includes biographies of kings, queens, celebrities, philosophers, assassins, builders and scientists.”

Beatrix Potter’s “Peter Rabbit” has been translated into hierogyphics. “The translation turns the story of a mischievous rabbit into symbols of the Egyptian world, shapes and squiggles. Peter Rabbit becomes a square, a semi-circle, an ellipse and a rabbit image. The “time seemed appropriate” for the hieroglyph version, due in April, translators said, as the story had already been published in 35 languages.”

The Modern Language Association has been meeting in Philadelphia this week. “Founded in 1883, the association was little noticed until the 1980s, when teachers of trendy new disciplines – African American studies, women’s studies, queer theory – challenged traditional scholarship and brought the ‘culture war’ into the ivory tower. Ever since, the group has been criticized for pushing the envelope too far, for being too leftist, too socialist, too orthodox, for generating reams of scholarly papers with little practical application. There’s a reason it tilts progressive: Humanities professors tend to be liberal and to push at boundaries. Conservatives and libertarians are more likely to go into business administration, economics and the law.”

John Steinbeck’s hometown of Salinas, California has decided to close down its libraries. “Earlier this month, council voted to shut down its three libraries by spring 2005, after residents rejected in November a number of tax increases aimed at funding city services.”

A California lawyer has published a major new edition of the 56 Sherlock Holmes stories, heavily annotated with his exhaustive footnotes. “The collection, published last month by W. W. Norton is being hailed as the definitive exegesis of Holmes and his times. As a single reference work ‘The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes’ seems unlikely to be superseded for some time.”

A new tour of Rome takes in the sites mentioned in the Da Vinci Code. “We have noticed in the past few months that lots of tourists, mainly American and British, have started coming to Rome just to see the sites in Angels and Demons. The four-hour tour, which costs €35 a head for groups and €75 for individuals, whisks tourists in a minibus around many of the sites. Participants need not have read the book.”