Category: publishing

The Bodleian Library got a £3 million gift from the National Heritage memorial fund to save a trove of Mary Shelley’s papers in one place – and save the original manuscript of a Gothic classic. The award is to be used towards the purchase of a collection known as the Abinger papers, until now in private hands.

“About 20 part-time employees in the editorial division of Maclean’s magazine vote tomorrow on joining Canada’s largest media union in what is yet another sign of the troubled circumstances of Canada’s weekly newsmagazine. It’s anticipated the part-timers will vote overwhelmingly in favour of joining the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union, which already represents the magazine’s estimated 27 full-time editorial employees.”

Are too many books being published? Well, that depends whether you’re a reader or a publisher. “The most recent figures show that in 2002, total output of new titles and editions in the U.S. grew by nearly 6 percent, to 150,000. General adult fiction exceeded 17,000 – the single strongest category. Juvenile titles topped 10,000, the highest total ever recorded. And there were more than 10,300 new publishers, mostly small or self-publishers. No wonder we’re all running out of shelf space.”

London book stores are slashing prices as Christmas approaches. “The stores usually try to restrict discounting to slower-selling books, keeping chart-toppers at the full price, particularly in the peak month of December. But this year they have been forced by competition from supermarkets to slash prices of their most popular titles.”

JM Coetzee is the kind of author you can feel good about being enthusiastic, writes Lynne Coady. “This is an author whose work one can celebrate unreservedly, who refuses to be anyone’s public platypus, whose recent winning of the Nobel Prize for literature is the kind of thing that makes readers feel really, really good about whoever’s keeping shop over there in Stockholm, and really, really contemptuous toward the Man Booker Prize judges, who neglected to shortlist Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello.”

JM Coetzee turns up in Stockholm to accept his Nobel. “Although he did not turn up to collect either of his Booker Prizes in 1993 and 1999, he delivered this year’s Nobel Lecture last night and will receive the prize itself on Wednesday. What Coetzee will not do is make himself available for interview. He belongs to that small band of heroic writers who – without being as reclusive as Pynchon or Salinger – have declined to make themselves available for publicity purposes.”

Ah yes, what writer doesn’t dream of an instant bestseller – prfereably for one’s first novel. But “the truth is that the jackpot theory of literature only works up to a point, and, particularly, in an impressionable marketplace like America where barrow-loads of fashionable books are bought but not read. Most of the time, in Britain, the so-called ‘overnight success’ usually turns out, on closer inspection, to be the well-deserved fruition of a painstaking apprenticeship.”

“While initially hailed as a blessing, the $100 million gift from drug-company heiress Ruth E. Lilly is sowing discord in the normally harmonious realm of verse. Poetry is embroiled in a lawsuit with a bank over alleged mismanagement of funds. The journal’s editor of 20 years, Joseph Parisi, quit over the summer amid a battle with a newly assertive board. Rival poetry groups complain the magazine is gaining too much influence and will stifle the more-creative elements of the craft. Even Poetry’s staunchest supporters wonder how the monthly journal will survive its sudden windfall.”

A sophisticated book-stealing ring in Edinburgh has been busted. The kingpin of the operation had accomplices steal the books, and he removed anti-theft identifiers before selling them at a discount to retail prices. “Undercover police kept watch as he took regular deliveries from thieves targeting W H Smith, Waterstones and other outlets, said Marc Gadsden, prosecuting. He was so successful that in just eight months he made an estimated £240,000, the barrister alleged.”

YiLing Chen-Josephson wonders which dictionary is best, and designs a test. “I restricted my testing to seven of the relatively affordable and frequently updated college dictionaries (the type of dictionary used not only in the most dormitory rooms but in the most homes and offices as well). To determine my rankings, I looked up seven times over words that I knew but wanted to understand better (like regret, jealous, and overdetermined); words with disputed usages (including aggravate, disinterested, fortuitous); words with potentially interesting etymologies (e.g., chauvinism, juggernaut, lagniappe); neologisms and slang (e.g., blogger, booty, yay); anything friends had looked up recently (e.g., Panglossian, condominium, alembic); as well as the words I didn’t know in the last book I read, J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello.”