Category: publishing

This winter’s blockbuster book in the UK? A book on punctuation – Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. “Demand for the book has been so great it burned through six printings in the first three weeks of publication. The initial print run of 5,000 ballooned to 510,000; in the second week of December alone, 67,000 copies were sold, beating sales of John Grisham’s new book by more than 40 per cent. Seems correct punctuation isn’t just for your pedantic parents any more.”

“This was a year in which the publishing industry kept its literati tendencies in check and infused a Hollywood-style razzle-dazzle into contests and other promotions intended to nudge books into at least a glimmer of the popular culture spotlight. With book sales down from last year, publishers are being forced to abandon their high-brow position above the fray and dive right in with movies, TV and other competing forms of popular culture.”

“Saddam Hussein spent the final weeks before the war writing a novel predicting that he would lead an underground resistance movement to victory over the Americans, rather than planning the defence of his regime. As the war began and Saddam went into hiding 40,000 copies of Be Gone Demons! were rolling off the presses.”

“While American librarians — whom John Ashcroft calls “hysterics”—deserve credit for being on the front line against this secret fishing for subversives, none have been threatened with prison time by Ashcroft. But 10 librarians in Cuba have been put away for 20 years and more for not going along with Castro’s endless Banned Books weeks.” So why aren’t American librarians protesting that?

“What’s your favorite book?” is a stupid question. “Really, it’s not about books at all, it’s about distinguishing yourself through your distinctions, choosing a work that gives the fullest picture of the person you’d like the world to consider you to be. That’s why everyone always says Catch-22 – not because they think Heller to be easily as good as Roth, Mailer, Updike and Vonnegut rolled into one. No one thinks that. It’s because of the myriad excellent messages enjoyment of this book gives off – I have a fine sense of humour; I’m anti-war and probably broadly leftwing; I have a healthy, questioning disrespect for authority; I like a bit of nooky, but not in a mean way, not like that Rabbit or that Zuckerman; and I’m highly intelligent, but I won’t get all in your face about it. You probably want to go out with me, it says, and you’re dead right.”

Sessalee Hensley is in charge of buying fiction for Barnes & Noble. “How many copies will be bought – of Proust, McMillan, John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen and Ms. Hensley’s favorite, Barbara Kingsolver – how they’ll be apportioned among the 652 Barnes & Noble branches and 200 B. Dalton Booksellers in her fiefdom, how they’ll be placed and positioned–this is all part of the gig. ‘There are some books that I’ve gone through three, four, five revisions of how I’m thinking about them,’ says Ms. Hensley, 48. Concern that she’s decided wrong sometimes keeps her up at night. Concern that she’s decided wrong keeps publishers up as well…”

A French tribunal has ordered a company to pay a former employee who was wrongly dismissed after he wrote a novel that portrayed his co-workers in unflattering light. “The computer pervert, the dumb blonde secretary, the alcoholic and the boss with “the bloated face and the little black eyes of a pig” were among the characters described by Bruno Perera in his first novel, Petits Meutres Entre Associés (Little Murders Among Colleagues).”

“If books are not the most perishable products of human civilization, they have, throughout recorded history, attracted the homicidal attentions of every conquering army. In large-scale versions of the penalty the Romans called damnatio memoriae, a punishment for individuals found guilty of committing crimes against the state which involved erasing every reference—whether on stone, in a monument or on parchment— to the person in question, invaders have settled not just for mass murder of the local citizenry, but have indulged in the wholesale disappearance of every written trace of a culture (as the Taliban did to non-fundamentalist Afghans), a language (as the Normans did to the Saxons), a people (as the Romans did to the Etruscans).”

Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings has won the BBC’s Big Read poll for the UK’s most popular book. “The trilogy won 174,000 votes, 23% of the poll. The other main contender going into Saturday night was Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, which won 135,000 votes. Philip Pullman’s metaphysical trilogy of children’s books, His Dark Materials, came third with 63,000.”