Category: publishing

The world’s oldest surviving printed book is now on display in the British Museum. “The Diamond Sutra, which bears the date 868 AD, was found in a walled-up cave in Dunhuang, north-west China, in 1907, along with other printed items. It consists of a scroll of grey paper printed with Chinese characters, wrapped around a wooden pole.”

“International editors and publishers warned Friday that nontraditional communications — such as cell phone text messages — are rapidly outflanking radio, television, and print media because of their immediacy and proximity to the public.”

Is there a gender gap in what we read? “The publishing flurry that surrounds Mother’s Day means a spate of books with conspicuously feminine points of view. Fitness, gossip, middle-aged romance, the dating woes of bright young things and anything about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: these are standard subjects in the parade of Mother’s Day titles. They are not to be confused with the sports lore, war stories and tough-but-fair paternal advice that arrive for Father’s Day.”

Esquire and The New Yorker were the big winners Wednesday at the National Magazine Awards, taking home seven awards between them. Other honorees included Chicago Magazine, Newsweek, and The Oxford American.

Pulitzer-winning poet Franz Wright on poetry in America: “Devoted and discerning readers with a genuine love of poetry will find, in this country, an astonishing wealth of wonderful poetry being written and freely offered—it is one of the finest things about the United States, though I’m afraid far too few people have the skill, patience, or the opportunity to benefit from it. I am always haunted by Walt Whitman’s remark to the effect that there will be no great poets without great readers. And there is, of course, a considerable audience for all this and always has been—there is a longing for poetry that can never be eradicated by the more glaring, consumer-oriented forms of popular culture; that’s pretty obvious.”

“Non-fiction is finally triumphing over its traditionally sexier cousin, fiction, evident yesterday when non-fiction books swept the Trillium Book Awards, Ontario’s pre-eminent literary honours. In the English-language category, Thomas King’s series of Massey Lectures, The Truth About Stories, beat fiction favourites such as M. G. Vassanji’s Giller Prize-winner The In-Between World of Vikram Lall and Barbara Gowdy’s The Romantic, which made the long-list for last year’s Man Booker Prize.”

“The problem may be that the section seemed blithely uninterested in wooing the kind of readers who seemed most likely to want to devour it every week.” Editor Patricia Cohen: ‘From the beginning, I didn’t want to approach the stories with an agenda. The point was not to publish my idea or your idea about a subject, but to cover the intellectual world with the same sophistication and detail that the paper covers other subjects.”

Lynne Truss on her best-selling grammar book “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: A Zero Tolerance Approach To Punctuation”: “I’m not a grammarian or a linguist or a professional editor and I don’t want to pretend that I am. Punctuation was a topic that felt knowable, containable. If you get into the larger subject matter of grammar you do need to study it and I’ve always been a little intimidated by academe, although now my old college, University College London, has invited me to be a Fellow, which is nice.”

“Call it self-publishing, vanity, subsidy, or print-on-demand publishing. It’s all related, in that the author pays the publisher rather than vice versa, and with the advent of digital technology, it’s become big business.”

“The basements of Chicago have spawned a noisy, pugnacious little industry: self-published magazines. Aimed at the erudite and hip, attention-grabbing local titles from The Baffler to WhiteWalls and TENbyTEN have won small but loyal audiences from New York to Los Angeles and beyond. Now several of Chicago’s upstart journals are dealing with an unexpected state of affairs: They are encountering small signs of success.”