Category: publishing

After the success of its “Great Britons of all time” poll, the BBC is going to apply the formula to books. Viewers will nominate 100 books. “In November, the top 10 books will be announced – and the case for each one will, as with Great Britons, be made in a one-hour special programme, presented by a celebrity, or at the very least a personality. Finally, before Christmas, there will be another giant vote. The result? It’s almost certain that ‘The Lord of the Rings’ will triumph over ‘Harry Potter’, in a tightly fought contest. Or vice versa.”

Are kids losing touch with the literaryt kids’ classics? A survey in Britain reports that only three percent of children had read “Little Women.” “Only 12% had actually read Alice in Wonderland, only 2% ‘Swallows and Amazons’, and only 6% ‘The Secret Garden’. By contrast, 81% had read ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’. ‘The Lord of the Rings’ scored 31%.”

Did HG Wells plagiarize his “The Outline of History,” published in 1920, from a 50-year-old Toronto woman named Florence Deeks? Deeks spent a good part of the the middle and later part of her life trying to prove that Wells had based his work on a manuscript she had sent to Macmillan publishers in 1914. A new book takes up her case in an attempt to win justice…

Should we be surprised when a major publisher ousts a popular literary editor when sales goals aren’t met? “In the fat times of the late ’90s and into 2000-2001, publishers signed up the biggest author names for mega-millions in much the same way major-league baseball owners paid superstars in amounts equating to Monopoly money. The tough economy caught up to major-league baseball, and it’s apparently hit the book business, too.”

Last year Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” sold 2 million copies, big business for a book that has been around for a long time. The classics are big business for publishers, and classic editions of those books are getting facelifts. “The classics ain’t what they used to be – in some cases, they’re New and Improved. All this ‘re-branding’ activity, all this new ink and paper, is going on in a corner of the bookstore that is widely seen as deservedly stuck somewhere behind the coffee bins. Who, after all, gets excited about a new edition of Herodotus?”

The White House “postponement” of a planned poetry event in February because of a planned protest by some of the invited poets is rousing lots of speculation. Some poets wanted to protest the war and resented the possible appearance of their support for war policies by their attendance. Plans to speak out againt a war with Iraq worried the White House and so the event was put off. Says one poet: “It tells you how little they understand poetry and poets, including the poets under discussion. It’s a way to co-opt people, makes them look like they are interested in the arts without bothering to understand the arts.”

“Most of the invited poets are vocal opponents of the Bush administration, including [protest organizer and Copper Canyon Press founder] Sam Hamill, an award-winning poet and publisher with a long history of protesting against U.S. military aggression.”

Former American poets laureate Stanley Kunitz and Rita Dove characterized the decision to postpone the event as “an example of the Bush administration’s hostility to dissenting or creative voices.”

It was to be a poetry forum featuring some of America’s top poets, the latest in a succession of literary and educational events hosted at the White House by former librarian First Lady Laura Bush. Past forums hosted by Mrs. Bush have been lauded as serious literary discussions, “often turning into lively debates.” Apparently, though, executive branch officials thought this debate might turn a but too lively, and have cancelled the event after learning that several of the participants planned to use the spotlight to protest the Bush administration’s Iraq policy.

An Australian writer has penned a novel in which the shoe company Nike develops a marketing plan which includes the murder of 10 teenagers “who buy the company’s latest shoes, to make it seem as though people are killing each other over the new product. The result is instant street credibility and record sales.” Astonishingly, a major publishing house was willing to put out the satire, and perhaps even more shockingly, the real-life Nike swears it has no plans to sue the author.