Category: publishing

Cartoonist-and-so-much-more Art Spiegelman is leaving The New Yorker, as he has several times before, citing differences with the direction the venerable magazine has taken since 9/11. Spiegelman, who has never hesitated to express unpopular ideas in his work, praises editor David Remnick, but says that “the place I’m coming from is just much more agitated than The New Yorker’s tone. The assumptions and attitudes [I have] are not part of The Times Op-Ed page of acceptable discourse.”

Two thirds of Vermont’s independent bookstore owners have signed a letter protesting the Patriot Act. “The Patriot Act gives the government the power to seize bookstore and library records to check customers’ and patrons’ reading lists. A gag order in the legislation prevents bookstore owners and librarians from telling anyone about the seizure.”

In this day of instant information on the internet, is there still a place for the printed encyclopedia? Surprisingly, yes. “Publishers are rediscovering how to reach the customer who thinks a printed book is still the best source of knowledge. After a four-year hiatus, Encyclopaedia Britannica, based in Chicago, has almost sold out the new edition it released this year and is planning a revision for next year. Libraries remain the best customers, but there is still a core of people who want that row of books at home.”

Was 17th Century poet John Milton a terrorist? Since September, the pages of a venerable British Times Literary Supplement have rung with the charge: “that Milton’s verse play ‘Samson Agonistes’ is ‘an incitement to terrorism’ and that its hero, the blind Israelite champion, who pulled down the pillars of the Philistines’ temple, killing himself along with thousands of citizens, ‘is, in effect, a suicide bomber’.”

“According to the Pentagon, war — at least the impending war in Iraq — is Shakespeare, the 5th-century BC Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu and two modern bestsellers about heroism and wartime correspondence. Before Christmas the US Defence Department began distributing free, pocket-sized copies of these books to its troops, to ensure that soldiers are improving their minds while removing Saddam. More than 100,000 copies have been given away so far.”

The way it works is this – people get paid by publishing houses to sort through the crap and figure out which book ideas are good and which aren’t. Paid real money. To have judgment. Make informed choices. And then, books like these always seem to end up in print… What were they thinking?

Harold Bloom has written another book crusading for literature’s days of yore. “The reason he sells books in their tens of thousands is that he has set himself against the tendency of universities to talk in relativist terms about literature, to promote cultural studies and to analyse books as part of a progressivist political project. Bloom loathes all this and in the past few years has done everything he can to reclaim the classics of literature for the general reader. This has involved a paradoxical restatement of the need for tradition and literary evaluation.”

The Frankfurt Book Fair is under new management. And new management has plenty of ideas about making changes. Among the biggest would be moving the fair to Munich, in part to thwart Frankfurt hotels who gouge attendees with jacked-up rates. “A move would be revolutionary—the book fair has been in Frankfurt for more than 50 years. ‘It’s not our goal to make that move. But if it’s necessary, we would not back off from it’.”

Victoria Ocampo collected one of the finest collections of Latin American books. “Before her death in 1979, Ocampo donated her magnificent villa in San Isidro, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, and its library to Unesco to create a literary and cultural center. But the project has remained a dead letter, the villa has deteriorated into serious disrepair, and as many as a thousand books may have disappeared. ” How to save them?