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Tag: peter owen

Midweek Miscellany

60 Years of Innovation — The estimable John Self on publisher Peter Owen for The Guardian:

It cannot simply be good luck that leads one man to publish such an embarrassingly long list of riches. Owen is clear that both “literary acumen and a business mind” are essential. He has survived where other publishing houses forging a similar path, such as those of Marion Boyars and John Calder, have been closed or sold, and had their lists filleted by larger houses; if you are just “an editor buying books you like, with no idea how to run a business,” Owen says, “you don’t stand a chance.” For him, a distinctive look helped: bold (and presumably inexpensive) two-colour covers by Keith Cunningham may have lacked the cool of Jan Tschichold’s Penguin templates, but gave the list a uniform feel. The odd commercial success helped more, with titles which caught the public mood such as Siddhartha and The Man Who Planted Trees. Owen may not always have liked his authors (Salvador Dali was “a creep [but] not as mad as you’d think. When you mentioned money, he suddenly became very sane”), but it’s hard to question his commitment to new and avant-garde writing.

Goodbye To All That — The Economist glumly ponders the fate of Borders and independent bookstores:

The problem, however, is that no one seems willing to buy full-price books anymore. Campaigns to get people to buy books from their local bookstores—such as “Save Bookstores Day” on June 25th—miss the point. While there is demand for real bricks-and-mortar places to gather, drink coffee and read new books, such places can’t exist if the market can’t accommodate them… [T]he market is squeezing out a meaningful public space. It will be interesting to see what fills the void these bookstores leave behind.

“Interesting” is probably not the adjective I would have used personally…

Dead Cool — Comics critic Paul Gravett talks about his new book 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die with Bleeding Cool:

Initially, the American publishers tried to insist that every one of 1001 Comics must be available in English. But I had to insist that this would exclude loads of absolute masterpieces, and it wouldn’t make the book work in the other languages it is going to appear in, such as French or German. So somewhere around 12 per cent or so of the 1001 are not available in English, at least not yet. I seriously hope that exposure in 1001 will alert publishers and motivate them to translate them.

And finally…

Naomi Yang, designer, visual artist, publisher and founding member of the band Galaxie 500, talks with Print Magazine:

A book has always been an object! That is what can be so wonderful about them and so different than a digital book—or even a print-on-demand book. A book is an entire world: you see the cover, you pick it up, you feel the material of the cover, you turn it over, you read the back—and then you open it! You get the progression of the half-title, the title page, the table of contents and then that first page of text, that first line. And there are so many small things, the page numbers, the running heads, the proportions of the margins—the same elements in each book—but how will you do it this time?

 

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