Category: publishing

“The designation of April as ‘National Poetry Month’ suggests special pleading and a strategy of containment-as if all other months were thereby declared poetry-free zones. For poets, readers, and even inadvertent overhearers of poetry, however, there is a constant stream of poetic activity, private and public, involving poets both new and old.” But “if National Poetry Month can offer something other than hype, let’s make it an opportunity to give our national discourse the scrutiny our best poets have always given to language.”

Some 3,500 new words have found their ways into the new Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. “Browsing in their latest verbal treasurehouse is not only a welcome escape. At around seven pounds a volume, it’s also good for those pecs.” And it’s got great new words – like “newzak” for those burned out on the 24-hour news cycles…

Dame Catherine Cookson, who wrote more than 70 books and died in 1998, has been the ‘most borrowed author’ for 22 years in British libraries. In 1988 a survey found her books accounted for a third of all British library borrowings.” But her grip on the fiction hearts of Britons is waning – this past year, her books were checked out fewer than 3 million times for the first time.

Business analysts say that small publishers are sometimes a better business than the big publishing houses. “If these companies are publishing for the professional or children’s book market, they don’t need one big hit a year. They might publish hundreds of books that sell 10,000 copies each, and that’s fine. They can make a profit because the books tend to be pricier than other kinds of books and because, particularly with universities and other professional markets, institutions have to buy large numbers of these books, whether they want to or not.”

After long debates and threats to leave town, “the Frankfurt Book Fair, the world’s largest publishing trade fair, will stay in Frankfurt. Threats to relocate to Munich have lost currency and that’s the end to all that. This decision was made public Tuesday following an extraordinary meeting of the publishing association’s management board.”

Who is Dan Rhodes? “At 30, he is one of the youngest authors to be chosen for Granta’s reputedly generation-defining Best Young British Novelists list. His first novel, ‘Timoleon Vieta Come Home,’ has attracted a flurry of plaudits.” But there’s a catch on the way up the literary ladder. Rhodes declared that he will never write again.

Looters emptied the house of Iraqi vice-premier Tariq Aziz, “stealing everything from paintings to curtains, kitchen units, and even stripped the electrical wires from the villa’s main switchboard. But what they left behind in his library was politically notable: the complete works of Saddam Hussein in Arabic, the mafia novels of Mario Puzo, author of the Godfather, and a book on geopolitics by Richard Nixon, former US president.”

On the streets of New Orleans you can sell candles, razor blades, toiletries, pencils and shoelaces. You can sell photographs, weigh people, stage art shows and hold cooking demonstrations. What you can’t do is sell books. Now a move to sue to get the ordinance changed to allow bookselling.

“RosettaBooks, which in 2001 angered Random House by putting out digital versions of William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice and other titles without the publisher’s consent, announced Wednesday it had agreed with Random House on the release of 51 e-books… Under an out-of-court settlement reached last December, Rosetta was allowed to keep publishing Sophie’s Choice and the other books and collaborate with Random House on additional releases.”

In recent weeks, a new magazine has begun to creep quietly onto the racks at a few select independent bookstores in the Midwest. It seems to be vaguely literary in nature, but also appears to flout a great many traditional rules of literary navel-gazing. It’s called The Believer, and yet it’s a bit unclear what its publishers might believe in. It has a manifesto instead of a title page, and makes no effort to stand out in any way, despite a clear attempt to appeal to a young, hipster literary crowd. So what is The Believer, and who is behind it? Let’s just say that the new mag is a heartbreaking periodical of staggering marketing savvy.