Skip to content

Midweek Miscellany

McGraw-Hill paperbacks designed by Rudolph De Harak — A nice Flickr set of vintage covers from Joe Kral, who apparently has an amazing book collection (via Words & Eggs).

Free Libraries Are Full of Books That No One Reads — Author Paul Theroux talks to The Atlantic about e-books (via The Second Pass):

I don’t think people will read more fiction than they have in the past… but something certainly is lost—the physicality of a book, how one makes a book one’s own by reading it (scribbling in it, dog-earing pages, spilling coffee on it) and living with it as an object… I can’t predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive—no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer’s life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels.

Not Dead Yet — An interesting post at Personanondata on what the resilience of the CD format means for books:

Many believe the physical book will disappear within in the next ten years yet the example of the music CD suggests the future of the book may be more nuanced. The availability of electronic versions of trade content will approach 100% in less than ten years… Despite the availability however, electronic content is likely to represent only one of a number of ways consumers will engage with book content…  Rather than disappear, the lowly print book may retain a position of wide distribution… and become the focal point of a facilitated interaction with numerous content acquisition options for consumers.

The information on CD sales in the post comes from a recent report in The Economist, which also ran an interesting article about the future of copyright on the same day:

The lawmakers intended… to balance the incentive to create with the interest that society has in free access to knowledge and art… Over the past 50 years, however, that balance has shifted. Largely thanks to the entertainment industry’s lawyers and lobbyists, copyright’s scope and duration have vastly increased… They are now calling for even greater protection, and there have been efforts to introduce similar terms in Europe. Such arguments should be resisted: it is time to tip the balance back.

The New York Times obituary for publishing executive and copywriter Nina Bourne:

The campaign she created for “Catch-22” is now regarded as a classic. Ms. Bourne was the most passionate in-house champion of the book, a darkly comic tale of World War II by a first-time novelist. Pleading for an increase in the initial print run, she turned to her colleagues during a production meeting, tears in her eyes, and asked, “If I can’t get this, why am I here?”

And finally…

Architecture Under Construction — a beautiful set of photographs by Stanley Greenberg from a new book published by the University of Chicago Press. Pictured: Untitled, Toronto, Ontario, 2005 — Royal Ontario Museum, Studio Daniel Libeskind (via PD Smith).