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Something for the Weekend

Commercial Indifference — Geoff Dyer’s Zona reviewed at the LA Review of Books:

[Dyer] followed a book of eccentric travel writing with a book on photography, and then in 2009 served up a couple of loosely-linked novellas under the, let’s face it, terrible title of Jeff In Venice, Death in Varanasi. Add in Dyer’s pre-2000 offerings on jazz, D.H. Lawrence, and World War I, along with several novels, and you have an oeuvre that resembles a messy and ever-expanding Venn diagram of the author’s obsessions. Even so, a 200-page book about a Russian film from 1979 takes commercial indifference to heroic lengths.

(And much as I love you and your recent redesign LARB, could we get simple RSS feed please?)

The Great Unwashed — Julia Kingsford, writing at The Bookseller, on the cultural snobbery and clichés surrounding Fifty Shades of Grey  (h/t Don Linn):

Surely they can’t be ‘real’ readers whose papery passions have traditionally been our bread and butter and who shop in ‘real’ bookshops? No, these must be a different sort of reader, new and not as good, ‘silly’ and to be only temporarily humoured and nervously served before we gladly see them off as they return to whatever form of entertainment they normally enjoy. Far from intellectual snobbery about readers being the preserve of the book trade, it runs rife through everyday media and culture, constantly perpetuating the view that books are for the few.

Medium-Rare — Author Lev Grossman (The Magician King) on almost being a rare book collector, at Time:

My specialty as a collector is books that almost have value. When I love a book, I don’t buy the first edition, because those have become incredibly expensive. But I might buy a beat-up copy of the second edition, third printing, which looks almost exactly the same as the first edition except that a couple of typos have been fixed. (In the rare book trade the little details that definitively identify a first edition are called “points.” My books are not strong on points.) It’s not glamorous, but it’s still satisfying, and it’s a hell of a lot cheaper.

And finally…

“New” — An archive interview with art director and pioneer of modern advertising Helmut Krone. There is so much good stuff in this… (via Coudal, naturally):

“New” is when you’ve never seen before what you’ve just put on a piece of paper. You haven’t seen it before and nobody else in the world has ever seen that thing that you’ve just put down on a piece of paper. And when a thing is new all you know about it is that it is brand new. It’s not related to anything that you’ve seen before in your life. And it’s very hard to judge the value of it. You distrust it, and everybody distrusts it. And very often it’s somebody else who has to tell you that that thing has merit, because you have no frame of reference, and you can’t relate it to anything that you or anybody else has ever done before.

(The going rate for Helmut Krone: The Book appears to be upwards of $80 on Abebooks. Time for a reprint?)