Category: publishing

The Cooperative Children’s Book Center has been tracking diversity in children’s books in America. “Of the 5,000 children’s books published in 2002, the center looked at 3,150. Of those, 235 were by and/or about African-Americans, 94 by and/or about Latinos, 91 by and/or about Asian/Pacific Americans and 64 by and/or about American Indians. While those numbers are really shockingly low, they are still higher than they were 15 years ago. In 1985, the center found that 18 books of the 2,500 published that year were created by African-Americans.”

A first-ever meeting of American states’ poets laureate gathered in New Hampshire. “There was an aura of self-congratulation about the conference, with many of the poets extolling what they said was poetry’s newfound power. Many said the best thing that ever happened to them was the postponement by the first lady, Laura Bush, of a White House poetry conference this year after she learned that the invited poets were sending antiwar poems to one of the scheduled participants, Sam Hamill, who was organizing a protest. “Ever since Laura Bush, my readings have been crowded,” said Grace Paley, poet laureate of Vermont and, at 80, a rabble-rouser. “Even if they’re not about the war, they’ve been crowded.”

Dennis Loy Johnson has noticed that Barnes & Noble seems to be less interested in selling new books these days. It follows the B&N formula: “Remember the scenario? It was enacted across America — B&N comes to town and builds a super store right next to the best independent bookstore around. They promise to enhance the local book culture, to spawn a local literary café society, by letting people making all kinds of periodicals available in the entrance way, where people can also post notice of literary events and reading groups. The store also hosts lots of readings by local writers, and organizes reading groups. It’ll be good for all the bookstores and book lovers around! they proclaim. Meanwhile, they sell books at a drastic discount until all the local competition has gone under. Then they stop discounting, prevent anyone from putting free periodicals in the entry way, take down the bulletin board and stop hosting readings and reading groups.”

The Orange Prize is holding a vote on the best books of all time by women writers. “But 50 Best Books by women? The old arguments that greeted the establishment of the Orange Prize itself are immediately unrolled for another airing: chiefly, that women are not a minority group and good writing transcends boundaries of gender, therefore to treat women writers as belonging to a separate category serves to perpetuate divisions rather than address and erase them. The notion of a literary prize exclusively for white writers or, indeed, for men, is untenable, so the defence for a women-only prize must be that we consider ourselves sidelined. Is it still true that women writers are undervalued?”

Big names dominate the shortlist of six for this year’s Orange Prize. “The triumvirate of Donna Tartt, who shot to worldwide fame with her debut novel The Secret History, Zadie Smith, another novelist who struck gold first time with White Teeth, and the grand dame of Canadian letters, Carol Shields, are the favourites for the £30,000 award, which is for women writers only. The Scottish novelist Shena Mackay, nominated for the Booker for her bestseller The Orchard On Fire, is the fourth heavyweight on the list with her book Heligoland.”

The London Review of Books is opening a small bookstore in London. The venture “poses a large question about the way we buy books in this country. Are we ready to break the chains of corporate bookselling, which have strangled so many independents? The shop, on Bury Place, will stock the kinds of books that the LRB reviews – political polemics, biographies, philosophical tracts, slim volumes of poetry and literary novels. Whereas most big stores now carry 60-70,000 titles, the LRB shop has only 20,000. And while chains like Borders and Waterstone’s stock multiple copies of most books, the LRB shop has only one of each.”

A CBC radio panel has chosen Hubert Aquin’s controversial “Prochain Episode” as the book it would most like Canadians to read in this year’s Canada Reads program. Over several programs the panel voted off other books under consideration. The final two books for the winning slot were the Aquin and Wayne Johnston’s The ‘Colony of Unrequited Dreams’. In previous days, they had debated the merits of, and had voted off, Paul Hiebert’s ‘Sarah Binks’, Yann Martel’s ‘Life of Pi’ and Helen Humphreys’s ‘The Lost Garden’.

A judge has ruled that an Arkansas school district must return Harry Potter books to its shelves. The Cedarville school district had voted that children wanting to check out the books had to get parental permission. “The Harry Potter books have been assailed by some Christian groups for their themes of witchcraft. The American Library Association says the books were the most frequently challenged of 2002, but rarely did those challenges lead to restrictions or bans.”

The “fastest book in the world” – conceived, written and printed in 12 hours by a group of 40 German writers this week, has immediately sold out of the 1000 copies printed.

The SARS scare in Toronto has the book industry wondering about cancelling two major gatherings – the annual American Library Association Show and BookExpo Canada, the country’s biggest bookseller event.