Category: publishing

The world’s largest book has been published. It’s a book of photographs of the kingdom of Bhutan. “Opening to 1.5 by 2 metres and weighing more than 60 kilograms, the book is so big it needs its own Sherpa. The price? A cool $10,000 (U.S.), 17 times what the average Bhutanese earns in a year, although the books only cost $1,000 each to produce, with the remaining $9,000 benefiting the Bhutanese ministry of education as a charitable donation.”

The Voynich manuscript, once owned by Emperor Rudolph II in 16th-century Bohemia, is filled with drawings of fantastic plants, zodiacal symbols and naked ladies. Far more intriguing than its illustrations, however, is the accompanying text: 234 pages of beautifully formed, yet completely unintelligible script. Modern scholars have pored over the book since 1912, when Wilfrid Voynich, an American antiquarian, bought the manuscript and started circulating copies in the hope of having it translated. Some 90 years later, the book still defies deciphering.” Now a computer scientist thinks he might have an answer.

“Four months after the death of George Plimpton, the Paris Review announced yesterday that interim editor Brigid Hughes will permanently run the literary quarterly… Hughes, 30, takes on a role that Plimpton, who died in September at 76, assumed with tireless enthusiasm for half a century. In deference to Plimpton, his official title – editor – will not be filled. Hughes has the newly established title of executive editor.”

Baghdad’s Mutanabi Street has, for centuries, been one of the centers of Iraqi intellectual life, as reflected in the avenue’s bookshops. Dissidents, professors, religious clerics, and ordinary Iraqis gathered together at Mutanabi’s open-air book marts to trade ideas and debate philosophy. “In the 1970s, Saddam Hussein crushed intellectual life, forcing Mutanabi Street’s alternative ideas and books underground. Secret police informants infested the cafe tables, ready to overhear whispers of dissent. But six months after the U.S. occupation, Mutanabi is again in ferment.”

Even as gay culture continues to become more mainstream in American society, the crusades of “family-friendly” organizations to keep such themes away from children are gathering steam. In recent years, a number of children’s books have dealt with gay themes, either directly or indirectly, in an effort to find factual, non-threatening ways to introduce the subject to kids who might otherwise grow up with the same prejudices as past generations. But the authors of such books are finding that they are a tough sell to librarians, who are afraid of the backlash from right-wing pressure groups.

The Whitbread Prize for Book of the Year won’t be announced until the end of the month, but the list of finalists (one winner in each of the Whitbread’s sub-categories) is out. DBC Pierre won Best Debut Novel for his biting satire of Texan/American culture, Vernon God Little, and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was named Best Novel. A detailed portrait of George Orwell won the biography category, and the children’s book prize went to David Almond for his story, The Fire-Eaters, “a tale set in Newcastle at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

“Over the last two decades, academic titles have become increasingly cumbersome, and it is rare to find an academic book title that is not lashed together with a subtitle and its colon. Some books even boast two subtitles, glued tenuously to the title with two colons. ‘We joke about the title and the subtitle needing colonoscopies. People have gone hog-wild with colons’.”

Sensing opportunity, the big English publisher Hodder Headline opens a house in Scotland. The company’s move to Scotland was “partly inspired by the huge success of both Edinburgh publisher Canongate, whose Life of Pi won the Booker Prize, and the success of the best-selling Edinburgh author, Alexander McCall Smith.” Plans are to seek out and promote new Scottish authors.

“An Indian mob has destroyed 30,000 ancient manuscripts and rioted in retaliation for Oxford University Press publishing a book about a Hindu king. The incident was sparked by an allegedly objectionable observations by author and teacher James Laine in a book on the parentage of Maratha warrior king Shivaji.”

How did a company named after a Marx Brothers movie get to be the biggest publisher in Canada? “The company was really based on whimsy. We would publish or distribute what we wanted to and what sometimes gave us a laugh and sometimes seemed clever or worthwhile. The Marx Brothers were always able to do that, they did everything on their own terms, but were always whimsical and funny. And we continue to do that.”