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Published March 20, 2013

Midweek Miscellany

WHAAM! — Comics historian Paul Gravett on Roy Lichtenstein’s appropriation from comics:

Lichtenstein’s… success, his getting away with turning supposedly anonymous ‘found’ comic art into high-priced paintings, continues to directly encourage others to do the same. But there is a difference—comics are no longer uncredited, trashy mass culture, and what worked as a lucrative schtick back in the Sixties art world is now largely drained and devoid of any shock value or irony… Five decades on… it is high time for the comics world and the art world to properly debate these issues, and to celebrate these hugely talented but still largely ignored visual storytellers.

(Pictured above: a page from ‘The Star Jockey’ drawn by Irv Novick, from All-American Men of War #89 February 1962)

See also: David Barsalou’s Deconstructing Lichtenstein project

(If Gravett underestimate’s Lichtenstein’s ingenuity in recontextualizing comic book panels, and his lasting influence on art AND comics, it is truly astonishing to see how poor Lichtenstein’s paintings are in direct comparison to the work he borrowed from.)

Blowing Shit Up — A long essay by Richard Nash on the business of literature at the VQR:

Selling a book, print or digital, turns out to be far from the only way to generate revenue from all the remarkable cultural activity that goes into the creation and dissemination of literature and ideas. Recall again all the schmoozing, learning, practice, hustling, reading upon reading upon reading that goes into the various editorial components of publishing; the pattern recognition; the storytelling that editors do, that sales reps do, that publicists do, that the bookstore staff does. Recall the average feted poet who makes more money at a weekend visiting-writer gig than her royalties are likely to earn her in an entire year. You begin to realize that the business of literature is the business of making culture, not just the business of manufacturing bound books. This, in turn, means that the increased difficulty of selling bound books in a traditional manner (and the lower price point in selling digital books) is not going to be a significant challenge over the long run, except to free the business of literature from the limitations imposed when one is producing things rather than ideas and stories. Book culture is not print fetishism; it is the swirl and gurgle of idea and style in the expression of stories and concepts—the conversation, polemic, narrative force that goes on within and between texts, within and between people as they write, revise, discover, and respond to those texts.

See Also: Book Publishers Scramble to Rewrite Their Future by Evan Hughes for Wired.

And finally…

The New Statesman has posted five classic book reviews from their archive, including V. S. Pritchett’s review of 1984 by George Orwell:

Nineteen Eighty-Four is a book that goes through the reader like an east wind, cracking the skin, opening the sores; hope has died in Mr Orwell’s wintry mind, and only pain is known. I do not think I have ever read a novel more frightening and depressing; and yet, such are the originality, the suspense, the speed of writing and withering indignation that it is impossible to put the book down. The faults of Orwell as a writer – monotony, nagging, the lonely schoolboy shambling down the one dispiriting track – are transformed now he rises to a large subject. He is the most devastating pamphleteer alive because he is the plainest and most individual…

 

 

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Published November 11, 2010

Midweek Miscellany

The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud has won the Giller Prize. Earlier this week The Globe and Mail profiled printer and publisher Gaspereau Press:

The house paper is Rolland’s Zephyr Antique Laid, which the Gaspereau website describes as “a creamy, sensual book paper.” The Quebec paper manufacturer Cascades makes it by special order for a handful of literary presses. Covers, meanwhile, are printed on Neenah Classic Laid from the U.S. papermaker Neenah. For the jacket of The Sentimentalists, Steeves selected a camel-hair colour to show off the cover illustration, a pencil sketch of a Vietnam soldier by Ontario engraver Wesley Bates who is a regular contributor at Gaspereau. Not coincidentally, The Sentimentalists has already won the Alcuin Society’s award for Excellence in Book Design in Canada.

(Well played Gaspereau, well played…)

Punk-As-Fuck — A fascinating history of Soft Skull Press, whose offices in New York closed last week:

“It will never be anything but a chronic uphill battle to run an indie publishing company,” says Johnny Temple, owner of Brooklyn-based indie publisher Akashic Books (and former Girls Against Boys bassist). “I think the efforts that Sander Hicks made when he started Soft Skull, and then Richard Nash after he took over, were pretty heroic in terms of trying to keep an independent publishing company with a radical vision afloat. Soft Skull was a company of righteous outsiders and has traditionally been a great home for people who don’t fit into mainstream society. What was particularly great was that Soft Skull has developed over time an international reputation. It wasn’t the only place for someone with a devoutly outsider sensibility, but it was one of the very best.”

MobyLives has a typically searing post on the closure of Soft Skull’s office in NYC. And while we’re on the subject, Publishing Perspectives has a Q & A with Richard Nash about his new venture Cursor.

Text for Nothing? — Ben Ehrenreich on Tom McCarthy and his novel C for The Nation:

In C, Nabokovian wordplay abounds. The characters not only have names, but each name is a web of echoes and allusions. So let Carrefax lead you to “carapace”—insects are important here—or to “caracole,” with its spiraling, cryptlike depths, even to deathly “catafalque.” Dig in deeper and you’ll find “fax,” of course, short for “facsimile” and denoting not only technology and transmission but replication—key concerns in C‘s cosmography. And in that prefix you might hear kara, Turkish for “black,” or perhaps even kar, Syldavian for “king” (Syldavian being the language spoken in the fictional Balkan nation of Syldavia, where, you may recall, brave Tintin foiled a Bordurian plot to steal King Ottokar’s scepter). Jam these associations together if you like—”black king of technological transmission” is not a bad descriptor for young Serge—or let the allusions drift and frolic, as McCarthy suggests in his Tintin study, as a “dynamic set of overlayings and cross-encodings…that resonate at levels far beyond that of any individual, re-encrypting themselves as they speak.”

And finally…

Raincoast Books has entered a team for this year’s Movember in support of Prostate Cancer Canada. If you would like to support Raincoast and/or “The Wagstache” (AKA my personal attempt to look like Daniel Plainview), you can follow our progress here. Any donations — big or small — are greatly appreciated.

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Published October 20, 2010

Midweek Miscellany

Mode of Transportation by VSA Partners for Mohawk Fine Papers, seen at For Print Only.

Convergence — Richard Nash on the Frankfurt Book Fair, the book business, and enhanced e-books:

The reality is that the lack of audio and video in book is a feature, not a bug. All art forms are defined as much by what they exclude as by what they include, by what is left out as much as what is put in, by performing addition by subtraction, by less being more. The rules of haiku, of villanelle, of science fiction all exist to describe what is disallowed so as to give the freedom of not-everything-being-possible to the artist. Which, again, is not to say artists ought not create transmedia works. They should, and will. It is instead to say that when frightened publishers start scheming to create them in cahoots with third-party vendors we can safely say that this is a policy designed not to create desirable consumer products nor to create art but to create a survival pod for the publisher. What problem does the enhanced eBook solve?

(While not exactly a fan of enhanced e-books myself, I have no doubt that some people would be equally critical if publishers weren’t experimenting in this area).

Daniel Justi’s new font Ataxia is now available from You Work from and MyFonts. My interview with Daniel is here.

And finally…

A neat book trailer for John Lanchester’s Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay (I.O.U. in Canada and the US) with animated segments by Yum Yum London (who made the wonderful short Parallel Parking):

(h/t the funniest man who-used-to-work-at-Penguin, Alan Trotter)

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Published July 29, 2009

Midweek Miscellany, July 29th, 2009

Geometric books covers at Design Daily.

The Debate That Will Not Die — Mike Shatkin weighs in on DRM and tries to find that elusive middle-ground. The discussion continues into the comments (of course)…

Unputdownable — A nice ad campaign by Saatchi & Saatchi for Penguin Books in Malaysia (via The 26th Story).

Great Ideas — The Caustic Cover Critic looks at the covers for all 20 of the new additions to Penguin’s Great Ideas series. Some fantastic typographic stuff here as you might imagine, although — to be honest — I think there are one or two weaker entries in this round and the purple motif works better for some books than others…

A New Page — (Much linked to elsewhere, but in case you missed it) Nicholson Baker’s meticulous vivisection (or “epic takedown” if you prefer) of the Kindle in The New Yorker:

The problem was not that the screen was in black-and-white; if it had really been black-and-white, that would have been fine. The problem was that the screen was gray. And it wasn’t just gray; it was a greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray. The resizable typeface, Monotype Caecilia, appeared as a darker gray. Dark gray on paler greenish gray was the palette of the Amazon Kindle.

This was what they were calling e-paper?

And if you can’t get enough of that Kindlenfreude feeling…

David L. Ulin, book editor  The LA Times, weighs in on Amazon’s troubling reach.

Niches — Richard Nash, formerly of Soft Skull Press, talks about his new community-based venture, tentatively called ‘Cursor’, in Publishers Weekly.

And finally…

A Journey Round My Skull has a nice post of vintage Swedish books covers from collected from the excellent  Martin Klasch. I particularly like this vampiric cover for Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep by Martin Gavler from 1963 (above).

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Published April 3, 2009

Something For The Weekend, April 3rd, 2009

On a very wet and miserable day in Toronto, it only seems appropriate to start with a couple of books about the rain and then move on to some steaming hot coffee before all the usual book miscellany…

Stickers and Stuff lauds Helen Borten’s lovely illustrations for Franklyn M. Branley’s book Rain and Hail (pictured above). And  Andy Smith shares some of his illustrations for his silkscreen book The Rainy Season on his blog (pictured below).

And, while were on the subject of Andy Smith, he’s posted some of his book jacket work  on Flickr (via Beyond the Covers).

The Daily Grind — Benjamin Obler, author of Javascotia, on his 5 Favourite Cups of Coffee in a Day at the Penguin blog:

It’s so obvious, I know, but the morning cup — the first — morning cup — is like the pioneer. The self-sacrificer. Without it, there would be no others… Even on a regular day, it’s a workhorse.

Head On — Indie heartthrob Richard Nash talks to Interview Magazine (via Booksquare):

It is very complicated for an unknown writer to reach an audience of readers given the vast numbers of unknown writers out there. How do people find out about it? So I believe in the role of intermediaries. People always look to trusted friends who might be more expert or knowledgeable in a given area for advice about things… The question is, who are going to be those people. The model is going to shift from kind of a gatekeeper model to an advisor/service model.

Mr. Nash was also interviewed by BookSlut back in March.

I watch you read — Julie Wilson,  AKA Seen Reading and publicist for Canadian publisher Anansi,  is now blogging for Walrus magazine.

Atomized — Mark Coker, CEO of e-publishing service Smashwords, talks about e-books and iPhones with Maria Schneider at  Editor Unleashed.

Bite-Size Edits — The Book Oven launches “a tool that makes proofreading easy and might just be the most fun you’ve ever had spotting typos with your clothes on.” The Book Oven blog has more. (NB Bite-Size Edits is still in private alpha, but  I have a couple of invitations so email/DM me or leave a comment below if you would like to be involved).

And finally, Carny Kill as seen at Pop Sensation (words fail):

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Published February 3, 2009

The e-book Revolution Favours the Agile (But Deep Pockets Help)

The publishing industry is finally turning toward “mass digitization”, Matthew Shaer reports in The Christian Science Monitor .

But “it’s not the bigger houses, such as Macmillan or HarperCollins, that are moving the fastest” he says. It is agile independent presses — who can make decisions quickly  and are “more open-minded when it comes to distribution and marketing” — that are “making the most extensive restructuring efforts” according to Schaer.

Independent presses are undoubtedly innovating — necessity is the mother of invention after all — and I would really love to believe that they can steal a march on the big publishers in the “e-book revolution”. Unfortunately I just don’t think it’s true. Or, at least, that simple.

Even if you ignore the Schaer’s assertion that the “typical” independent press can make quick decisions “without much internal friction” (in theory yes, in practice I’m not so sure), the ability to adapt is not just about a “fast and light ethos”, it is also about resources. It actually takes a great deal of time and expertise — often in short supply at small presses — to put a digital program in place. And although the cost of creating, marketing, and selling e-books may be low once the infrastructure is there, getting to that point requires a lot investment.

Soft Skull’s ambitious aim to have its entire list available digitally by the end of the year is a huge step for an independent publisher. But the two publishers Schaer specifically identifies as being behind the times are, in fact, already on this track. In November last year, Pan Macmillan made books available for the Stanza e-book reader for iPhones, and they currently offer a large, large number of downloads in different formats from their  web site, as do  HarperCollins .

In fact, ALL of the other major publishers — Random House, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster — offer e-books to download from their web sites in the US. Not that you would know from Schaer’s article.

And HarperCollins has been trailblazing with creative online initiatives in the past year. They set up Authonomy, a community site for writers, and are launching BookArmy, which Victoria Barnsley, chief executive of HarperCollins UK, describes as a “social networking site organised around books and authors.” . They’ve collaborated with if:book London and Apt to create an online, annotated version of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook , and in December they released a charming online video, This Is Where We Live, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of their 4th Estate imprint, that quickly went viral.

In April 2008, HarperCollins also acquired The Friday Project — originally set up to find  web based material and turn it into books — as an “incubator for fostering new talent, and finding new markets.”

And let us not forget HarperStudio who may not be offering e-books yet, but have firmly established themselves on online.

Penguin have not been idle either. In December, Penguin US launched Penguin 2.0 to boost their web presence with an iPhone app and other downloads. Penguin in the UK — who sponsored in the recent BookCamp on technology and the future of the book — not only offer over 1,000 e-books on their website, they have an online dating service (no, really), and have created SpineBreakers, a web site with teenage contributors. And there is, of course, the ever-popular Penguin Blog.

The same day as Penguin 2.0 was announced, PW also reported that Random House would be partnering with Stanza and making select titles available for iPhones, and in January, Simon & Schuster relaunched their website with all the whistles-and-bells — such as blogs and author videos (outlined by PW here) — that one would expect from a publisher who knows their audience is online.

Of course none of  these strategies is perfect and the major publishers still have work to do on their e-books programs (there have been complaints about the  pricing in particular), but this is a period of experimentation and, with the best will in the world, it’s simply absurd to suggest, that the big publishers are “dinosaurs” who “think people are just sitting down in leather chairs and reading hardcopy books.”

Independent publishers may have “the most to gain from electronic publishing” as Richard Nash of Soft Skull says, and I genuinely hope that e-books usher in a renaissance of independent publishing. But the big publishers are not blind to the possibilities that technology is opening up and they have the resources to move quickly and boldly, and, in some cases at least, they are doing so. Let’s just give credit where it is due.

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