Publisher hype from Paul Ford, who despite being only slightly more prolific than this nearly lapsed blogger, remains on my A-list:
We thrill as she casts off her grim past to join a Wall Street investment firm, finds love, and indulges in fine sweaters.
A cut-up experiment in The Stranger brings to my attention The Galosh, a recent collection of Mikhail Zoshchenko’s stories. I loved the Zoshchenko collection Nervous People and Other Satires when I read it a couple of years ago, though I found some of the humor puzzling. I was never sure which jokes came out off key because of (what seemed to be) a sometimes awkward seeming translation and which were just posed in some higher level of irony that someone who never experienced Soviet Russia could know.
There’s a more sober review of The Galosh here. This is one that I’ll want to read unless I’m hit by a bus tomorrow.*
Found while digging for reviews of The Galosh: Elephant Walk, The Overlook Press weblog
* My attempt at a Zoshchenko ending
I wanted to make note of this article on Jackson Street Books from the Seattle Times’ Sunday magazine section. Jackson Street Books is one of those places that I saw and wondered, How did that get there? The answer, of course, is Because someone wanted to open a bookstore, dummy. One of the store’s owners also manages the Seattle Mystery Bookshop.
As Alibris is acquired, blogging CEO Martin Manley is reflecting on the company’s failed IPO. He’s posting the daily journals that he emailed to Alibris employees in May 2004, as he shopped the company around to investors:
Day One: London
Day Two: Stretchin’
Meeting three. Smart investor. Understood ecommerce, understood Amazon. I was about unveil my Levi-Strauss theory of used books (”this category is so hot, publishers are gonna print ‘em to look used when they are brand new - like blue jeans”!). Blessedly, our time expired.
British writer John Barlow writes about being hired by a book packager to write a children’s book:
The guy at 17th Street had seen my novella collection Eating Mammals, and he wanted to know if I’d be interested in doing some writing for them. To put this in context, my writing is a bit like T.C. Boyle’s, a tad wild, but controlled at the same time. Eating Mammals is about a man who eats furniture and dead dogs. My new novel is about a soft drink made from rhubarb and cocaine. If only you could reproduce that kind of thing for kids, they said.
I’ve run across a number of new (or previously unknown to me) bookseller blogs in the last few weeks. So I’ve put together a list. Our bookseller blogosphere is comprised of owners of open shops, basement sellers, rare book dealers, dedicated handsellers at chain stores, and the giant Powell’s City of Books. Some write about the business of bookselling, everyday aspects of a bookseller’s life, others gush about their favorite books, track general book news, or wander off to non-book topics. (I’ll also point out that most of the blogs are more interesting and more consistently updated than the Using Books Weblog. I’ll take that as inspiration.)
Here’s the list:
Two lapsed bookseller blogs:
Do you know of others?
The Seattle Weekly profiles eleven lower profile local writers.
A Japanese paper reports on reservation-only bookstores. Browsers pay by the hour, but that’s not the only innovation:
“Most of the 2,500 books at the store are used copies. Each is contained in a paper bag so they cannot be read without opening the bags. Should a potential customer decide not to purchase a book in a bag he or she opened, the customers must leave a brief message about the book for the next person.”
(via Shelf:Life)
Anna of little.red.boat gets to know people on the bus from their reading material:
I know their ringtones, I know the voice they answer their mobile phone with in public, and the difference when it’s work or someone else. Some of them, I know their favourite deoderant, but that’s London for you.
Mostly, though, I know them by their books. See, I’m not too tall, and sometimes (only sometimes, mind) manage to fight my way to a seat, which either way, puts me about the same level as most people’s tightly-clutched chesticular reading matter. We bump along the London streets, and, listening to endless tunes on shuffle (it’s mainly classic Bollywood hits at the moment, I confess) I stare at the crumpled covers and pages, and get to know my bussie book club.
Here’s a Boston Globe story about notes and personal ephemera found in books at used bookstores. (Link may require free site registration or bypass) (via Bookdwarf).
Lorem Ipsum Books, one of the shops mentioned in the article, has a nice blog. It’s RSS feed is difficult to find, so I’ll point to it here.
The Boston Globe Books section also has an RSS feed by the way.
From The Seattlest, here’s an interview with the proprietors of the Seattle Mystery Bookshop (one of my parents’ favorite shops, I think):
“I think in order to succeed these days as a small shop, you have to specialize. My wife and I had a general bookshop some years ago, and we found that there were just too many subjects. We found that we couldn’t possibly be knowledgeable in all those fields.”
Here’s the Scotsman’s list of the 20 Scottish books everyone should read, heavy on mystery novels.
With the simultaneous arrival of the holiday rush and some unrelated projects, posting here will remain infrequent.
Over on the commerce site, I’m running a series of specials through the end of the year. The current sale is “Buy 1 Book, Get a 2nd Book of Equal or Lesser Value for 1/2 Price”. It’s a good deal, if awkwardly phrased. The details are here.
To soften that blatantly commercial plug, I’ll pass along this link to an archive of recordings of writer interviews by CBS Radio’s Don Swaim. These are 20-60 minute recordings from 1982-1993 that were originally edited down to little two-minute radio segments, so they include some ice-breaker questions and occasional unguarded comments. I haven’t heard anything too controversial though, unless you count Jonathan Raban loading his pipe.
Did I mention free Gift Wrap Service?
It seems that HarperCollins doctored the photograph of illustrator Clement Hurd on a recent printing of Goodnight Moon. They removed a barely visible cigarette from his hand. One children’s bookstore launched the site Goodnight Reality to campaign to have the original photograph reinstated.
Slate critic Bryan Curtis wants to reclaim Ray Bradbury from literary respectability:
To these eyes, many of Bradbury’s most garishly “literary” achievements are his least impressive. When the McCarthyite gloom of Fahrenheit 451 fades, it’s the pulpy, childlike terrors that stick. Bradbury nudging characters into his ingenious hells; Bradbury the fabulist of the Space Age (morals in 10 pages or less!); Bradbury the dinosaur nut who confessed an urge to “run and live” among giant reptiles.
The new Using Books logo was designed by Phil Scroggs, a talented designer and illustrator whose work can be seen on his website, Phillustrations.
Over at The Book Standard, writer Adam Langer tours the Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania plant where his novel is being printed:
There are machines with gigantic robotic arms, huge vats, or “totes,” of ink and glue, the latter of which comes in little yellow pearls called “hot melt adhesive.” Fifty-foot-high rolls of paper are stacked to the ceiling of the factory’s paper warehouse, which, on the day that I visit, contains 14,211 rolls of paper; they weigh in at approximately 12,228,270 pounds.
The Guardian today traces the life of a book — The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists by Gideon Defoe — from inception to publication.
Anirvan Chatterjee follows up one attendee’s notes on a Book Expo America panel called “Toward Quantifying the Used Book Conundrum” with his thoughts on the attitude of some segments of the publishing industry toward the used book market:
“The words “Used Book Conundrum” remind me of historical terms like the “Chinese Question” or the “Jewish Question,” in the way that the concept is defined as being inherently problematic, so as to confirm the interests and prejudices of relatively powerful or entrenched interests.”
For future reference, here is a student-compiled list of writers and works recommended by Lawrence Weschler to his Literary Nonfiction class, care of The Millions.
Two editorials today on the theme of the dumbing down of literature:
First, Gail Armstrong of Open Brackets records her conflicted reactions to a Wall Street Journal article (WSJ link susceptible to linkrot) about Barnes & Nobles’ line of simplified classics for younger readers and literacy programs.
Next up, in the Guardian, novelist DJ Taylor frets about the effect that expanded book sales in UK supermarket chains is having on the publishing industry:
Cheap books are apparently the spiritual equivalent of universal suffrage, and by offering works by Dan Brown, Patricia Cornwell and Tony Parsons for a pound or two below the prices levied by traditional outlets, Tesco and its friends are “democratising” the book trade. This is not to lament the vast sales racked up Dan and Tony, merely to suggest that there are other books lingering in the publishers’ catalogues whose chances of straying into the public’s line of vision are proportionately reduced every time another supermarket deal gets struck.
The Guardian article was posted to the Bookfinder Insiders list. The poster there mentioned that Tesco — the supermarket chain mentioned in the editorial — is rumored to be buying the UK bookstore chain Waterstone’s.
Erik Benson has passed ongoing maintenance of his book tracking/networking site All Consuming along to his company, The Robot Co-op (makers of 43 Things, a personal motivation networking site). This is great news for All Consuming, which has never really had the resources or support to reach its potential.
A MetaFilter poster has gathered a collection of links to works inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.
In Slate today, academic David Greenberg begins a series of articles on the tension between pop history publishing and the world of highbrow history writers:
At one point, many academics seemed to consider popularity a first step into the Hades of commercialization and dumbing down. But today, most of my peers, myself included, seem eager to publish with trade presses, to write op-ed pieces about our research, or to appear on NPR and Charlie Rose—not just because we want the ego boost (though who wouldn’t?), but because we enjoy discovering new audiences who respond intelligently to our ideas.
TomFolio.com launched a polished new site design today. It looks great.
The front page is a litte richer in rolling content than the previous site. The right sidebar is now dedicated to featured items. The Authors Born on This Day list is supplemented by a list of the day’s celebrations, observances, and historical events with links to loosely related categories.
A more subtle, but still important, change is the new emphasis on the fact that the site is a member-owned co-op. (Using Books is currently a non-owning member.) It says prominently, at the top of the screen, “Shop Co-Op!” and “An International Co-op of Independent Dealers”. This is a stronger and more specific identity for TomFolio than the one encouraged by the old tagline, “Your Corner Bookstore on the Internet”.
Kudos to Laurie and the TomFolio members who made the redesign happen.
This review of a Jonathan Safran Foer reading that was held at Chop Suey — which is usually a music venue — is worth reading for the first paragraph’s spot on description of canned bookstore-based readings.
This news is a couple of weeks old, but I only just noticed that All Consuming is back online. Erik Benson writes a little about the relaunch here.
All Consuming combines bibliographic data from Amazon Web Services with on-site reading journals and references to books drawn in weblogs. The site’s new incarnation is a work in progress and many of the old features are gone or on hold (weblog links and Trackback). But there are already some new features, including Flickr-style tags and support for movies and music products.
Steve Himmer of onepotmeal has an interesting entry today about the reliability of Frankenstein’s narrator and the expectations of readers from different periods. His comment on the layers of narration in Frankenstein reminds me of Paul Auster’s City of Glass and the questions about the true author of Don Quixote raised there.
Speaking of unreliable narrators, as someone who switched to a junior adaptation of Frankenstein as the deadline of a high school book report on the book was approaching and as someone who hasn’t read beyond the first 100 pages of Don Quixote, I probably have less to say on the subject than I’ve already tried saying.
Gail Armstrong of Open Brackets posted a very funny and pointed post on Maugham, skipping chapters, and book reviewers today.
Comments(1)