Category: words

The tumult is extraordinary at the Athenaeum, an elegant private library on Beacon Street whose five galleried floors house a valuable collection of more than 750,000 objects, including paintings by John Singer Sargent, a first edition folio of Audubon’s “The Birds of America,” and sections of the personal library of George Washington, among other rarities.

“In the summer of 2016, Curtis Dawkins, a felon who is serving a life sentence in Michigan for murdering a man during a botched robbery, got some unexpected good news. Scribner, one of the top literary publishing houses in the United States, wanted to publish his debut collection of short stories, and offered him $150,000. … But his surprising literary debut also caught the attention of Michigan’s attorney general, who now wants Mr. Dawkins, 49, to use his financial windfall to pay for his incarceration.”

At one level, few things are simpler than a dictionary: a list of the words people use or have used, with an explanation of what those words mean, or have meant. At the level that matters, though – the level that lexicographers fret and obsess about – few things could be more complex. Who used those words, where and when? How do you know? Which words do you include, and on what basis? How do you tease apart this sense from that? And what is “English” anyway?

Widespread objective, nonpartisan media did once exist in this country, from roughly the 1950s to the late 1970s. But at the time, that was something new, too. Before that, there was no press other than the partisan press. Newspapers controlled by the Federalists branded Thomas Jefferson an “infidel,” while the Democratic-Republican press called George Washington a “traitor.” Before journalism became a “profession” in the Progressive Era, newspaper editors organized parties and held meetings in their offices. So if the passage of modern objective news is lamentable, it is also not all that surprising.

Fantasy author Terry Goodkind definitely does not like the cover of his latest book. “Offering 10 randomly selected readers a chance to win a hardback copy in return for their thoughts on the cover, Goodkind published a poll that included the voting options ‘laughably bad’ or ‘excellent.’ While almost 12,000 readers took part in the vote, some pledged to never buy another book by Goodkind again.” Even his apology was … well, some might call it laughably bad.

Yes, it was partly about European colonial greed. “In Istanbul, the buying of books by foreigners eventually got so out of hand that in 1715 or 1716 the grand vizir, Şehid Ali Pasha, himself a book collector, ‘enacted a law … banning the sale of books to foreigners.’ This protectionist measure was designed to prevent the disappearance of valuable intellectual resources from the capital.”

No, not every book is good. “An appeal for the revival of the negative book review, then, is a remonstration against forced and foppish praise, where everything is good and so nothing at all is good. It is an appeal for a greater investment in the context and content of a book, a task far different from the casting about for bits to extol.”

Publishers might want to phase them out – they’re more expensive, of course – but they’re worth 20 percent of the market, and more than that: “The hardback is a mark of quality and a demonstration of intent on behalf of the publisher: it shows booksellers and reviewers that this is a book worth paying attention to. In fact some literary editors will still only review fiction (on first publication) if it’s published in hardback.”

The author of Housekeeping and three other novels has just published a new book of essays. “One thing I cannot understand about contemporary society is that, as we learn more, and become more aware of the incredible singularity of our Earth, we cannot seem to allow ourselves to recognise it. And even if one day we were to discover there is another planet out there, just like ours, that fact would just mean that, in all this universe, there were only two things so absolutely extraordinary.”

Two words: Michael Wolff. “Roughly nine years ago, when [Rubin] left Random House — where over the years he had made the authors Dan Brown and John Grisham into household names — for the less-glamorous perch of Henry Holt, some in the industry speculated that his once-powerful career was all but over. But Mr. Rubin now finds himself with a book that has arguably matched the heights of ‘The Da Vinci Code’ and ‘The Firm.'”