Category: publishing

The new executive editor of The New York Times, Bill Keller, has promoted Adam Moss from the paper’s Sunday magazine to “assistant managing editor for features.” The position amounts to an appointment as the Times’ new ‘culture czar,’ and will give Moss control over the “Book Review, Culture and Style sections, Travel, Circuits, Real Estate, Escapes and special sections of the magazine.” Moss was previously offered a similar position by former Times editor Howell Raines, but declined.

The venerable Chicago Manual of Style comes out with a new edition – its fifteenth. “Still decked out in the familiar, tomato-orange wrapping, and spiffed up inside with two tones of ink and an antic sans-serif font for the examples, the Manual has been launched into the Internet Age. It wants to be as relevant to mainstream publishers of books and magazines, both on- and offline, as it has always been to academic presses. The nine selling points listed on the back cover have been phrased, thank goodness, in tidily parallel form. And most important, the Manual has at last given us a chapter on grammar and usage. At 93 pages, the chapter is by far the longest in the book.”

“Heads are spinning among those authors, editors and publishers who regard the Chicago Manual as the bible of printing style, grammar and punctuation. Well, not everyone’s head. But still, it has been 10 years since the last edition of the manual, which is published by the University of Chicago Press. That one has sold 500,000 copies. The new one is the most significant revision since the 12th edition in 1969.”

A new era is beginning at Chicago-based Poetry Magazine. “After twenty years as editor, Joseph Parisi is stepping down to become executive director of the new Poetry Foundation, established through a recent bequest of around one hundred and fifty million dollars from pharmaceuticals heiress, Ruth Lilly. Poetry’s new editor is Christian Wiman. He’s 36 years old and his poems and essays appeared frequently in the magazine.” The magazine gets 90,000 poetry submissions each year.

“Graphic novels aren’t new – Will Eisner created the first one in 1978. What’s new is their audience and influence. In last year’s flat economy for books, sales for graphic novels leapt by one-third. Of the $400 million in annual comics sales, graphic novels now make up $100 million. Publishers Weekly, the book industry bible, calls them ‘one of the fastest growing categories in publishing’.”

Dan Brown’s thriller “The Da Vinci Code” has captured the popular imagination. But interesting as it is, it fails the test of historical accuracy. “Controversial in life, Leonardo still provokes a bewildering range of admirers and detractors. No other artist is burdened with such baggage, but then, the ambiguity and gaps in our knowledge render him a blank sheet onto which almost anything can be projected.”

Greg Gatenby’s life was a series of paradoxes and contradictions, says Philip Marchand, and that’s exactly what made him such a valuable figure in Canada’s literary society. “Like many amateur scholars, Gatenby resented what he felt was the cushy life of professors blessed with sabbaticals and tenure who didn’t do nearly enough, in his view, to advance the cause of Canadian literature… He was certainly an elitist — but within the bounds of his elitism, he was remarkably democratic. Every writer was treated the same way at Harbourfront, whether he was Saul Bellow or a poet from Tonga.”

“Writers are usually unabashed about claiming authorship for their work. So it’s curious that many of the alumni of one of the most significant American literary projects of the 20th century were ashamed of it: the Federal Writers’ Project, a program of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration. Created in 1935, in the heart of the Great Depression, the Writers’ Project supported more than 6,600 writers, editors and researchers during its four years of federal financing.” Still, many of the writers involved in the WPA project were ashamed of their participation, and so their work has gone largely unnoticed in the years since the program’s demise. A new exhibit at the Library of Congress aims to change that.

The University of Texas is the latest to digitize and post a copy of the Gutenberg Bible on the internet. “Just as Johann Gutenberg made knowledge more accessible with the invention of the printing process, this digitization project continues that legacy.”

“A generation of ambitious, serious artists and writers have been applying vast amounts of their creative energy into a milieu which is essentially the visual equivalent of the rock opera: the “graphic novel”—that is, a full-length book in comics format (cartoon drawings with word balloons for dialogue) printed between hard covers or glossy soft-cover. The idea is not new.”