Category: publishing

“Biography is the least naturalistic of literary genres. Poetry and fiction, in comparison, are pure documentary. Think about it: the experience of living a life is nothing at all like writing or reading a Life. In real life, memory is patchy, with some scenes and events standing out in neon and large blanks of time about which you can not remember a thing. There does not seem to be any pattern to it. We live in the evershifting present, and the future is uncontrollable. The whole thing is chronically unstable.”

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, the “most widely circulated of all word books”, has “added a dozen or so new words this year, including blunt (a cigar hollowed out and filled with marijuana), booty (buttocks) and gearhead (a computer guru).”

Do some books cause more harm than they’re worth? Critics are asking the question in regards to a Canadian book that resurrects details of horrible crimes committed a decade ago. “Karla Homolka, a diabolical criminal will be a free woman in 2005, after serving only 12 years for heinous crimes against schoolgirls in a quiet Ontario town.” Should the public know more about Homolka “before she disappears into Canadian society, perhaps to commit more crimes under the camouflage of a new name and an altered appearance?” But in dredging up details, “the families of the victims are publicly traumatized once again” and some booksellers have declined to carry the book.

As thousands of poets protest a war with Iraq, some wonder why poets have taken a lead on the issue and what effect their art might have on the issue. Robert Pinsky: “What poetry does have is the ability to speak memorably in the breath of each reader. Poetry’s strength was the inner universe. The power of poetry has to do with its intimacy and human scale. The poems that were presented to the President were an idiosyncratic mix: wildly various in content, point of view, cogency, literary distinction… That variety represents a certain power, more than a weakness. It reflects something profound about both American culture and the art of poetry”.

Students aspiring to be writers have too little knowledge of classical writing, says England’s Poet Laureate Andrew Motion. “We turn out students from schools and into universities who have not been educated in a rounded way. There is incredibly little time allowed for reading. It’s the fault of the structure of the curriculum. They bone up on their texts, thinking they will only get questions on those.”

On average, books made in the UK are physically inferior; they discolor, warp and fall apart more easily than American books. Why? “England should be the very last country making bad books. In terms of its capabilities, the British print industry may be the most technologically advanced in the world, having assimilated all the tricks of the computer age by the 1980s, a decade before any of its American counterparts did. If the problem is not a technological one, what is it?”

So UK voters in an online poll vote American Bill Bryson as the author who has best defined contemporary England. “What makes Bryson a curious choice is that, if there is one thing the English enjoy more than a bit of self-mockery, it’s laughing at foreigners, especially Americans, whom we’ve traditionally considered as lacking our refined wit, culture and learning. But one of the claims made repeatedly for Bryson, as if it’s the greatest compliment he could hope to receive, is that, having lived in England for 20 years, he – and his humour – have become sufficiently anglicised to give him honorary status and a licence to laugh at us. But is it true that, as Bryson suggests, England spent the twentieth century ‘looking on itself as a chronic failure’?”

The book business is suffering in the economic downturn, just like everything else. But there are signs that independent booksellers are weathering the downturn better than they have in the past. “Before stores might have had five employees and now they have three. People who leave aren’t being replaced.”

Borders chief Greg Josefowicz suggests that it is time to stop the practice of book stores being able to return books they haven’t sold to publishers. “This practice arose during the Great Depression when publishers needed a way to reduce the risk of buying books, so they gave retailers the opportunity to return unsold orders for a full refund. Today, nearly seven decades later, we’re still playing by the same rules. While this certainly offers obvious benefits to companies like Borders, I wonder if it is the best way to run the book business in 2003 and beyond…”

Pope John Paul II’s first book of poetry since he became Pope was published this week. In Poland the book has already become a best-seller. “Buyers have locked up orders for about 80 per cent of the initial printing of 300,000 copies – a publishing phenomenon in a country where literary works reach bestseller status at 50,000. ‘The Roman Triptych’ was written after John Paul’s emotional visit to his homeland last summer.”