Category: publishing

“Distributors used to deliver a bunch of comics to every newsagent every week, and many kids who had trouble with books got into reading that way. Now newsagents have to place a special order to get a comic, and most of them don’t bother. Even if they see a comic like The Simpsons or Archie, a lot of parents think $6 is too expensive. Result: kids are playing video games instead of discovering the pleasure of print. The few hundred comics that sell in Australia each week are mostly bought by collectors over the age of 16.”

It’s long and it’s expensive, but the new Harry Potter book, due to be released in a few weeks, has racked up bigger advance sales than any book in history.

The burning of Iraq’s National Library destroyed records of much of the country’s intellectual life. “Even if alert curators and librarians succeeded in moving significant numbers of books to safety, Baghdad’s most recent bibliographic losses are enormous. The National Library was the country’s copyright depository, like our own Library of Congress; as such it contained copies of all books published in modern Iraq. Although Cairo and Beirut are the traditional centers of Arabic publishing, Iraqis have long been recognized as great readers-and in the 20th century, particularly before Saddam Hussein took power, the country’s book trade flourished. But the library’s holdings reached back to long before the rise of the Ba’ath Party.”

George Orwell’s 1984 has longe been interpreted as an anti-communist tract. But that’s not entirely accurate, argues Thomas Pynchon. “Though 1984 has brought aid and comfort to generations of anticommunist ideologues with Pavlovian-response issues of their own, Orwell’s politics were not only of the left, but to the left of left.”

During 2002, Eric Schlosser’s history-cum-polemic Fast Food Nation sold almost 200,000 copies in its UK paperback alone. His next target? America’s underground vices: “Today, revenues from porn match Hollywood receipts and exceed sales of rock. Some 20 years after Reagan’s ‘War on Drugs’ began, marijuana cultivation has probably overtaken corn ? worth $19 billion annually ? as the nation’s most lucrative cash crop. In Los Angeles County, 28 per cent of all workers are paid in untraceable cash: ‘a triumph of underground practices and values’. Everywhere you look, the underground has flooded the mainstream. Together, these essays build into a secret history of America’s favourite vices.”

“The Hmong had a purely oral culture, with no form of writing until the 1950s, when Christian missionaries developed one using the Roman alphabet.” But for Mai Neng Moua, “raised and educated in the United States, it is the permanence and durability of words fastened into sentences and placed on a page that make sense of her life, her family’s history and a culture at a crossroads. Mai is among the first generation of Hmong to write about the history and give voice to contemporary Hmong experiences.” And she’s collected Hmong stories for a book, the first-ever anthology of Hmong-American writing.”

Grammer hasn’t been consistently taught in schools for years. “Studies from as far back as 1963 have told teachers that it is useless and even “harmful” to teach diagramming, or for that matter any formal lessons on grammar. Students, according to the studies, retained little from old-fashioned grammar lessons, which stole time better spent on reading and writing. What’s more, they suggested that focusing on grammatical errors would inhibit the students’ creativity. As a result, grammar textbooks were long ago trashed and teachers were instructed to deal with usage problems one on one, when there was time. College education programs gave short shrift to grammar – and so, some veteran teachers say, many teachers don’t know it well themselves. But grammar, once the meat and potatoes of any child’s education, is back on the table.”

“Will National Poetry Month never end? I can’t thing of any trumped-up, tricked-out, fake ‘celebration’ that has done more to rekindle my latent disdain for poets as worthless malingerers angling for the main chance… As if on cue, Hallmark Cards just dumped samples on my desk from Maya Angelou’s ‘Life Mosaic’ line of Mother’s Day kitsch. Hallmark is peddling gift cards bedecked with empty little maxims penned by the prolific hack and landfill-ready gifts such as a microwave safe, ceramic ‘Giving’ bowl, stomach-churning sentiment included: ‘Gather around the table to pass this bowl of nourishment. And to serve a portion of healing … .’ What happened to this woman’s dignity?”

There are lots of reasons to embargo releases of books. “But more and more, embargoes are about creating hype for books that would have gone unnoticed. Maybe, as publishers will tell you, controlling the publicity increases awareness and sales. But it seems to me that, like all weapons of mass dissemination, embargoes should be used very, very sparingly.”