Something for the Weekend, Jan 16th, 2009

David Mirvish Books, the best fine art bookstore in Toronto, is to close. Damn. At least the Art Gallery of Ontario’s bookstore has re-opened with a decent selection of art books.

“It’s not something you should really do unless you feel really compelled to do it” — An interesting interview with Doug Seibold about founding Chicago-based publisher Agate over at Slate’s Bizbox:

As in a lot of other businesses, there’s a bunch of giant multinational conglomerates that are the big players, and they leave a lot of waste behind them. My feeling was a company that functioned efficiently at the appropriate scale could do a lot of business by being cost-effective and opportunistic. Not too little, but not too grandiose: growing at a careful, natural pace.

Attack of the “renegade cybergeeks”: New York magazine meets the team behind the New York Times’ online operation:

[T]here is something exhilarating about watching web innovation finally explode at the Times, with its KICK ME sign and burden of authority… Despite the effectiveness of blogs, the majority still mainly provide links and commentary. The Times Online suggests what might happen when technology fuels in-depth reportage

A little up it’s own arse and not short on hyperbole (“the New York Times is less a newspaper and more an informative virus”? Really?), it’s still definitely worth a read. Gawker’s predictably acerbic response can be found here.

“Poetry is both flourishing and floundering” — Neil Astley, editor of Bloodaxe Books, argues poetry must be responsive to readers not academic cliques, in the New Statesman:

The producers of poetry aren’t in tune with the lovers of poetry. Many poets and publishers are actually hostile to the promotion of poetry… They see marketing as a dirty word instead of simply the means by which their books are made available to more readers.

“Publishers… lost control of their industry” — a somewhat melodramatic (and therefore much-linked to) “autopsy” of the book business by Jason Epstein in the Daily Beast. I have a lot respect for Epstein, who is indeed a “publishing legend”, but it is worth keeping in mind that he said most of this in Book Business, published in 2001, and in an article for  Technology Review from January 2005. He’s also the man behind the futuristic-yet-seemingly-redundant (is there a word for that? Apart from ‘segway’?) Espresso Book Machine, so he’s not an entirely dispassionate observer.

Grant Morrison talks Batman with Publishers Weekly:

I wanted to assemble all the classical tropes of the pulp noir crime genre: the diabolical mastermind, the femme fatale, the inescapable traps, the secret societies of evil…and push them beyond all reasonable limits to a kind of screaming Death Metal crescendo.

Nice.

The Pelican Project: A collection of Pelican Book covers from the 1930’s through to the 1980’s (pictured). (I was reminded of this wonderful project by the eclectically brilliant FFFFound)