Category: words

“All writers will fail, routinely, to live up to Dubliners. But there are specks of light on the horizon.”

“The cottage campaign … would see the building made into a public centre celebrating Blake and welcoming visitors, poets and artists to continue his legacy.” (But it’s more than £400,000 short right now.)

“Clitheroe’s Stonyhurst College began as St Omers College there in 1593. A spokeswoman said the “dog-eared” book must have been “overlooked” when the college was ordered to leave in 1762. The Folio collects 36 of Shakespeare’s 38 known plays for the first time, and was originally printed in 1623, seven years after the playwright’s death.”

“All-you-can-eat Internet services such as Netflix and Spotify have been rewriting the rules for the consumption and production of movies and music. If Oyster and its kin do the same for books, they will only be reprising a role that their commercial ancestors played 200 years ago.”

“The book was discovered this fall by librarians at a public library in St.-Omer, near Calais, who were sifting through its collections for an exhibition on English-language literature. The title page and other introductory material were torn off.”

“Though there are signs of life in the independent-bookseller business — consider the success of McNally-Jackson — few secondhand-book stores are left in Manhattan. Only two survive in midtown, and the necrology is long. Skyline on West 18th Street, New York Bound Bookshop in Rockefeller Center, the Gotham Book Mart on West 47th — closed. Academy Books is now Academy Records & CDs. So, then: Why is there still a Strand Book Store?”

“Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. … Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. … And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this – letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.”

“Richard Walker, editor of The National, said the first day’s 60,000 print run was a sell-out, and digital subscribers were joining up on Sunday at the rate of 20 a minute.”

“We used to sell books,” Cecilia Ng says. “Now we’re more like 7-Eleven for Chinese people.”

Irony: “Gabriel García Márquez, who died in April at 87, was a strong critic of American imperialism who was banned from entry to the United States for decades, even after ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ vaulted him to international celebrity and, in 1982, the Nobel Prize in Literature.”