Category: publishing

“Nearly 30 percent of German children’s books use pulp from rainforest wood harvested in Sumatra and elsewhere in the region.”

“No wonder the stacks seem like fair prey; they occupy 38% of the library’s gross area. The buzzwords are “outmoded” and “obsolete.” The fact is that they require substantial upgrading of climate control systems for proper preservation. But what no one seems to have noticed, or mentioned, is that the stacks are the structural support of the reading room. They literally hold it up.”

This past July, founding editor Marc Smirnoff “was fired after being accused of sexual harassment. Also, he admitted that he gave alcohol to under-age interns. … Four months later the air has cleared a bit. The Oxford American has installed a new editor, Roger D. Hodge, formerly the editor of Harper’s Magazine … But it’s worth pausing to revisit why this quarterly matters, and why so many people, not just in the South, will be paying attention to the changes there.”

“Booksellers tell me that 90 per cent of their overheads arise from their shops, and 90 per cent of their sales from the internet. Except for the true antiquarian dealers, whose customers are aficionados of the first state and the misprint on page 287, second-hand bookshops make less and less economic sense.”

“It has been an interesting project, particularly when translating some of [Roald] Dahl’s unusual words into new Gaelic words. … We have also been able to keep in the sketches of the original books done by Quentin Blake, which will be great for the children.”

“The internet is a permanent fixture in modern life, and that it influences the way we read, write and think is simply fact. So instead of lamenting how digital ubiquity is nibbling away at the novel’s purview, what if a novel were to pull a fast one and swallow the internet whole? What if, rather than putting novels online, we downloaded the internet into a novel?”

“The Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation awarded its 2012 Fiction Prize to Helen Oyeyemi for “Mr. Fox,” a novel about a writer who can’t stop himself from killing off women in his fiction until he meets his muse, who challenges him to confront trite fairy-tale endings.”

Probably not, say critics of the Library of Wales series, which costs the Welsh government 50,000 pounds a year. (The Library of Wales people disagree.)

The art magazine . . . might be good “strove to place Texas’ art scene into a larger national and international context, publishing earnest, academically-oriented reviews, interviews, essays and artist projects.”

A 1917 letter to Churchill: “I hear that a new order of Knighthood is on the tapis – O.M.G. (Oh! My God!).”