Category: publishing

The destruction of Iraq’s libraries is a disaster. “While the extent of the loss is not yet fully known, two great libraries, with priceless ancient collections, have been burned, and at least two others looted. In many respects, what has happened is the complete destruction of history. Manuscripts are the main materials we use to write history – it is the evidence. Books published in the last 30 years can be replaced. But rare manuscripts can never be replaced. The looting and burning of virtually all these collections is an incalculable and largely irreplaceable loss. Just imagine the Library of Congress and National Archive pillaged and burned.”

The language police have made it a crusade to expurgate language that could be offensive to some from American schoolbooks. “On the theory that a proper K-12 education should upset no one and affirm all, elaborate protocols now exist for the content of classroom materials. Anything even remotely sexist is verboten. Banished from respectable texts are such troublemakers as ‘babe,’ ‘chick’ and ‘co-ed,’ but so too are solid citizens like ‘actress,’ ‘brotherhood’ and ‘cattleman.’ Women are not to be portrayed as frightened, indecisive or vain; men as too assertive, analytical or violent. As for race and ethnicity, perish the stereotypical thought that Asians are studious and hardworking, that blacks excel in sports and music, or that Jews ever lived in tenements…” A new book reveals how far the rewriting goes.

Is European history, as taught to Europe’s schoolchildren, being sanitized? Vikings, once referred to as “fierce raiders,” are now described as “Danes [who] besides being farmers, were much better at trading than Saxons”. Napoleon wasn’t an invader, he was “a reformer whose code of measurement was introduced throughout Europe.” “Vital pieces of history have been taken out of schoolbooks and the curriculum in the European-wide drive to pretend the union has a common identity and background.”

Though retails sales in America rose 3.5 percent in February, bookstore sales fell 4.3 percent, to $1.07 billion. “For the first two months of the year, bookstore sales inched up 0.5%, to $3.32 billion, while sales for all of retail increased 4.6%.”

Washington DC’s central library was designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and opened in 1972. Now the city wants to redevelop the area around the library, and the building is endangered. “Already, scores of District operatives are lining up for the political staring contest. The Committee of 100 on the Federal City and the Downtown Artists Coalition want the Mies building to house books—and not under the banner of Barnes & Noble.”

A new category of novel is developing, one we might well call ‘Freerider Fiction.’ In these books, the author rides the reputation of some true- to-history literary figure to a place he probably would not have reached on his own. Some recent examples of Freerider Fiction (FRF) are Monique Truong’s ‘The Book of Salt’, Kate Taylor’s ‘Mme. Proust and the Kosher Kitchen’, Helen Humphreys’ ‘The Lost Garden’ – and, of course, Michael Cunningham’s ‘The Hours’.”

Should criminals be allowed to earn money by writing books about what they’ve done? “The debate about paying criminals for their stories is an enduring one, with the slippery notion of morality at its centre.”

Madonna says the children’s books she’s writing will be “moral tales based on the cabbala”. “She condemned the shallow nature of most children’s books, explaining that the suggestion for her project came from the teacher with whom she has been studying the cabbala for seven years. She spotted the lack of moral children’s books when reading to her first child, Lourdes. ‘Now I’m starting to read to my son, but I couldn’t believe how vapid and vacant and empty all the stories were’.”

“In Iraq, and in the Arab world as a whole, public libraries are extremely under-funded and cannot even remotely satisfy the needs of those who want to read. People like me, who had to walk long distances to visit a public library only to be asked to pay huge fees which I could never afford, had no choice but to turn to the libraries of our mosques, which were even poorer than the public ones. The network of bookshops in Iraq is denser than in many other Arab countries. People know about the Iraqis’ eagerness to read. During the 1980s, Iraqi booksellers still ordered several times the volume of what their Egyptian colleagues ordered. And despite the embargo and the weak purchasing power of the past years, every new publication sold like hotcakes.”

The King James Bible, first published in 1611, isn’t just a book, of course. But it isn’t just a bible, either, reports a new book on the making of the King James. It “was composed in an English that had never been spoken in the street. This was the language of deliberate godliness, yet grounded in easy words and simple things: able to swoop in one verse from the sublimity of the eternal to the clumsiness of a fisherman jumping from a boat. There was a political purpose in this. James I, baptised a Catholic but brought up by Scottish Presbyterians, dreamed of bridging in this Bible his kingdom’s religious divides.”