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Tag: Paul Hornschemeier

We Were Not Made For This World

We-Were-Not-Made-For-This-World-poster

Directed by Colin West McDonald, We Were Not Made For This World is a short science fiction film based on the comic strip of the same name by cartoonist Paul Hornschemeier about a robot searching for his creator:

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‘We Were Not Made for This World’ was first published in Project Telstar by AdHouse and later collected in Let Us Be Perfectly Clear by Fantagraphics.

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Something for the Weekend, October 23rd, 2009

Illustrator Jay Ryan has a new book, Animals and Objects In and Out of Water (published by Akashic Books), coming in December. Literary types might remember Jay’s cover and illustrations for Michael Chabon’s novella The Final Solution.

Jay is also touring the US in November and December with Paul Hornschemeier whose new book All and Sundry (published by Fantagraphics) is now available (via Jacob Covey).

(Un)selling — Independent sales rep John Mesjak on building trust with bookstores and readers in the Huffington Post:

I’m able to act as a guide for my bookstore buyers because they trust me. That trust comes both from recommending great books that have ended up being staff favorites and, maybe more importantly, sometimes telling a buyer, “You don’t need this book.”…Good booksellers earn trust with their own customers the same way — by providing honest suggestions and reliable advice… Booksellers shouldn’t be afraid to say, ‘I didn’t like the book.’

Small Acts of Defiance — Novelist Jonathan Lethem, interviewed in Time about his new book Chronic City, on owning a small used-book store in Maine (via Shelf Awareness):

I don’t really own the building. I guess I sort of own the books until someone comes along and buys them. I’m like the junior partner in a very funky clubhouse of a used-book store. It’s something that makes me very happy… it never crossed my mind that it was an expression of defiance. If it’s taken as that, that’s great. I did it for the pleasure. It didn’t have to do anything with my career or the Internet or the publishing world. It was just to be handling the books. I worked in used-book stores for 15 years on and off. That was the only work I ever had before becoming a full-time writer. I have a lot of osmotic book knowledge just from handling books I didn’t ever read. Turning them over in my hands, trying to figure out where they came from and why they exist and whether they should be priced at $4 or $6.

Plus ça change — Literary agent and prolific blogger Nathan Bransford summarizes (with the requisite amount hyperbole) a week that saw another wave of e-readers and an ugly price war in the US:

This was, quite simply, a massively huge week in the publishing industry. All of the various pressures on the industry seemingly came to a head: the steady rise of e-books, downward pressure on book prices… the rising clout of e-tailers, an increasingly difficult landscape for independent bookstores, and the industry’s creeping dependence on a small handful of mega-bestselling authors.

AND speaking of the pricing wars, the American Booksellers Association has asked the  Department of Justice to investigate the practices of Amazon.com, Wal-Mart, and Target.

And finally…

Co-existence — Steven Fry on on why books and the web go together in an interesting piece for the BBC earlier this year:

Very often people oddly put books against the internet… You don’t throw away your books when you buy a computer. You keep both. The beauty of living in the present day is you don’t abandon the past. The past co-exists.

ABA Asks Department of Justice to Investigate Bestseller Price Wars
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