Category: publishing

The largest English-language poetry collection ever amassed by an individual collector has been donated to Atlanta’s Emory University. The collection of Raymond Danowski comprises “some 60,000 volumes and tens of thousands more of periodicals, posters, recordings and other items devoted to 20th-century poetry in the English language.”

“More than three dozen U.S. authors will spend the morning of the (presidential) election phoning students attending universities in the swing states of Ohio, Florida and Wisconsin as part of an unusual voter-registration initiative dubbed Operation Ohio.”

A group of American publishers has sued the Treasury Department on First Amendment grounds, seeking to overturn regulations that prohibit the editing of manuscripts from countries under U.S. economic sanctions. The rules, they say, prevent them “from performing typical editing functions like reordering sentences and paragraphs, correcting grammar and adding illustrations or photographs.”

“A simmering row over the modern publication of a long-lost short story by Hemingway, written in 1924 while on a drunken spree in Pamplona, Spain, has revealed the American writer as a champion luncher but a poor humorist.” The story, which is a slapstick description of a bullfight, was initially intended for the magazine Vanity Fair, but was never sent. Now, the magazine stands ready to print it, but lawyers for the Hemingway estate have blocked publication without explanation.

The Brautigan Library in suburban Boston may be the only library conjured into existence by a 1960s counterculture novel. It is almost certainly the only library to consist entirely of unpublished work: “From 1990 to 1996, the Brautigan Library accepted manuscripts from all over the world, as long as the authors paid binding costs.” But like all good ’60s icons, the Brautigan collection looks likely to spend its mature years in Northern California – specifically, in the Presidio Branch of the San Francisco Public Library.

A digitally outfitted bookmobile funded by a grant from the World Bank has spent the last year traversing some of Africa’s poorest rural areas, and providing the youth of the continent with print-to-order copies of great children’s books. The project has proved wildly popular with the kids, and now that the initial grant has run out, the bookmobile is working with librarians and various foundations to keep the presses rolling.

“The organizers of the first-ever Descant Book Ball, to be held Thursday, have concocted a truly unusual fundraising scheme to support [Canadian Literature]. For a nominal fee, guests will be escorted to a private peep-show salon, where the ball’s organizers promise they’ll get ‘up-close and personal’ with their favourite artist or literary figure… For $20, fans will get five to 10 minutes of one-on-one time with their CanLit idol of choice, say, a private reading from novelist Russell Smith, a personal sketch from illustrator Laurie McGaw, or take part in a sexually liberating video and poetry experiment with Louise Bak.”

Literary journals, long a staple of university presses, seem to be enjoying a renaissance in Pittsburgh, courtesy of online publishing innovations and an influx of new writers willing to take risks. The city currently has no fewer than five new journals attempting to build a sizable readership, despite the fact that such publications traditionally bleed money. “The world of publishing is becoming so competitively commercial that there’s no room for the serious writer. And the reason journals and small literary presses are beginning to survive is that there are more and more writers.”

Ever since the mid-1990s, tech-obsessives have insisted that the printed page is on its last legs, and that the eBook is the wave of the future. So far, such bold predictions have proved to be almost completely unfounded, despite the increasingly popularity of online periodicals. “But advances in hardware, coupled with figures showing a growth in sales, suggest that more than a decade after ebooks first came on to the market the concept could finally be about to take off.”

“Like general contractors, writers are famously optimistic when it comes to estimating how long a project will take. Fortunately, publishers are more forgiving than homeowners; deadlines are routinely extended one, two, even three years. But there is another category of writer, one for whom the laws of space and time seem to disappear altogether. Years bleed into one another as file cabinets bulge with extraneous information… Only by scratching away the layers of Liquid Paper on the line of the contract reading ‘delivery date,’ as if it were an instant lottery ticket, is it possible to ascertain when exactly the manuscript was first due.”