Category: publishing

Poetry fans are protesting that the jury for the new $10,000 Trillium Prize for poetry in Canada were unable to come up with a shortlist for the prize. “There were very few titles published in 2002 that met the criteria of a first book of poetry by a poet resident in Ontario for three of the last five years.” Only ten books were submitted, but protesters want a new jury to be chosen and the deadline to be extended.

Some employees at the Minneapolis Public Library have filed a complaint against the library for allowing free access to porn sites on public computers. The say that “the library’s policies have attracted hard-core pornography users who monopolize the library’s computers and ‘would react angrily and at times violently if any effort was made to interfere (with) or halt their access to pornographic materials’,” in a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis.

“We’re living in a golden age of Dante translation. Former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky touched it off when he published an excellent, widely acclaimed verse translation of the Inferno in 1995. In just the last year, five new editions of the Inferno have appeared, including a reprint of Longfellow’s landmark version. Still more surprising, there are three new translations of the much less popular Purgatorio, the second of the Comedy’s three ‘canticles.’ And the torrent doesn’t stop there.”

“The weak economy and the growing availability of books at discounted prices have made this an especially difficult retail climate for publishers.” In addition, war coverage is pushing everything else off the usual publicity circuit. But publishers have high hopes for two books about Iraq due to come out this week…

Which children’s books sold in 2002? A list of the top titles shows Lemony Snicket on top. But clocking in at No. 3 is former NEH chairman and present vice-presidential wife Lynne Cheney with “America: A Patriotic Primer.”

Why is it that some books travel well and others can’t at all? There seems to be no pattern, no formula that predicts books with an international appeal. Indeed, some books seem to do better abroad than they do at home…

Did Wallace Stegner, the “dean” of American Western writers, get “more credit than he deserved for a book he wrote based on the life of fellow Western writer Mary Hallock Foote? Stegner had lifted large amounts of Foote’s writing nearly verbatim from her lifetime of correspondence for his most famous novel, ‘Angle of Repose.’ Stegner’s biographers and others long ago conceded his heavy reliance on the Foote material, but for the most part they dismissed the concerns as misplaced. Recently, though, the issue has again begun seeping into public debate. Many new voices are not so forgiving.”

So you love Harry Potter, but you feel kind of funny toting around a kid’s book? Harry’s publishers have the solution – two covers – one for kids, the other for adults. “Bloomsbury Publishers unveiled the designs Thursday. The adult edition of ‘Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix’ features a somber black and white picture of a phoenix, while the children’s version of the boy wizard book is illustrated with a more vibrant red and orange bird rising from flames.

The book business is good. At least good enough for superstore Barnes & Noble to earn $111 million profit in the fourth quarter of last year. But though that’s up 32 percent from the previous year, the company’s spin makes it seem like the company is barely getting by. “Barnes & Noble store sales were $1.2 billion for the quarter, an increase of 4 percent. Sales at stores open at least a year, known as same-store sales, fell 3 percent.”