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Month: January 2009

Published January 30, 2009

BEC DOA

Book Expo Canada is in trouble.

The Canadian publishing trade show has been dogged by industry apathy and persistent complaints about high costs, low attendance, and a lack of paying customers for years. But the immediate need to cut costs in the face of the economic downturn — or, at least, see some kind of measurable return on investment —  has been the final straw for dissatisfied publishers.

Random House, Canada’s largest trade publisher, unilaterally withdrew from the event in November, and last week HarperCollins and Penguin — closely followed by  Scholastic Canada and H.B. Fenn & Co.  — announced that they would not be attending BEC in 2009 either.

Scheduled for June 19th-22nd at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, organizers Reed Exhibitions initially said that it was still their intention to hold the annual convention even though Simon & Schuster was the only one of the “Big Four” multinational publishers committed to the ailing event.

Now it seems Reed may be reconsidering that decision after Random House’s recent announcement that they would be launching a new Toronto “literary and cultural” festival with the Globe and Mail in May —  one month before BEC.

With a high-profile media sponsor, and including events with crowd-pleasing luminaries such as Naomi Klein, Margaret MacMillan, Richard Florida, Pulitzer Prize nominee Ha Jin, and New Yorker columnist Adam Gopnik, the two day “Open House Festival” is clearly aimed at doing precisely what BEC has seemed so incapable of – bringing in paying customers and driving book sales.

More troubling for Reed is that the new festival means their latest initiative, the Toronto Book Fair, planned for the first weekend in October, will almost certainly be stillborn.

Details of the fair were unveiled earlier this month by John McGeary, Reed’s general manager for Canada.

Hoping to win over critics of Book Expo, McGeary outlined an “inclusive celebration of reading and literacy” akin to Salon du Livre. But hampered by a venue (the Direct Energy Centre) on the fringes of public transit, and scheduled for one of the busiest months in the publishing calendar, Reed’s plans disappointed the vast majority of the invited audience of independent booksellers and industry-types.

McGeary, relying heavily on his PowerPoint slides, struggled to articulate a coherent vision for a fair that nobody seemed to want, and was unable to substantially differentiate it from Word on the Street, the popular not-for-profit book festival taking place in downtown Toronto one week before the Reed event.

“We consider ourselves extremely different” was about the best McGeary could manage. “Yes”, a wag in the audience said, “Word on the Street is free and in Queen’s Park!” Touché .

The poor timing and location, combined with a breath-taking dearth of both imagination and logistical detail, makes it unsurprising that Random House and Penguin have already announced they will not be attending the new fair. And more publishers are sure to follow suit.

Reed — who are now, according to PW, reviewing all their dealings with the book industry in Canada — will no doubt blame the combined failure of BEC and the Toronto Book Fair on the crumbling economy and the mixed messages sent by fickle, selfish and duplicitous book industry players.

But Reed cannot entirely escape responsibility for their situation. They have consistently put the cart before the horse, planning events before they have identified a real need or purpose. This ‘build it and they will come’ attitude may have worked in the past, or perhaps elsewhere. Unfortunately Reed’s abortive attempt to make BEC more inclusive two years ago, the now infamous the Booked!, and the shortcomings of the trade show itself have seriously damaged their credibility in Toronto.

And Reed is guilty of simply trying too hard. Their efforts to be inclusive are laudable, and yet in trying please everyone, they inevitably please no one.

The book community in Toronto consists of authors, publishers, distributors, bookstores, libraries, readers, publicists, journalists, bloggers and more. Their interests conflict at least as often as they overlap, and one only needs to look at the finger-pointing and handbag-swinging caused by the high Canadian dollar last year to see that relations between publishers and booksellers, and booksellers and their customers, (not to mention the industry and the media), are fragile at best. People get upset. And they get over it. Reed has never quite seemed to grasp that to organise an effective event they will need to risk offending some people.

It is simply not fair to expect Reed to organise an event like BookCamp, or even Word on the Street. It would be impossible. But Reed could – and probably should – have organised an event like the Open House Festival. It should’ve been possible to work, initially at least, with one or all of the Big Four and a single retailer to kickstart something bigger and more inclusive. Random House’s understandable impatience has slammed that door  in Reed’s face, and, to be honest, it is hard now to see where they have left to turn.

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Published January 28, 2009

Midweek Miscellany, Jan 28th 2009


John Updike (pictured) has died at 76. The Guardian and the New York Times look back at his life and career in pictures. Designer Observer points to ‘Deceptively Conceptual’ Updike’s astute 2005 essay on book covers for the New Yorker:

Publishing forms a minor branch of the entertainment industry, and book design is increasingly a matter of fashion—that is, of attention-getting. In the visual clamor of a bookstore, the important thing is to be different; a whisper becomes a shout, and the ugly becomes beautiful if it attracts attention. Yet an utter flaunting of conventional expectations may baffle and repel the public; when the title and the author’s name are left off the front of the book… it sends a subliminal message of contempt for the written word, the product being packaged.

Batman as jazz– Brad Mackay wins top prize for funniest headline of the week for his look at the reinvention of the Dark Knight and the genius of BatManga! in the Globe and Mail.

“Content is Free… But Curation is Sacred” — Peter Collingridge at Times Emit considers the implications of the Google settlement and what happens if/when we are flooded with unmediated free “stuff”:

[A]s the amount of content we are exposed to increases, without any discernible gauge of quality, it is the trusted curators of that content to whom we will choose to give our attention, time or money, rather then trying to filter it all out personally… the curator may be the bloke in the record shop who knows my music collection and recommends something new, the staff in my local wine merchant, or a particularly good blog I follow, my newspaper – anything. However, it is not Amazon’s recommendation algorithm; it is decidedly human, and, over time, a relationship of trust is built up. If it works, that trust leads to action, purchase, attention, refinement and more trust.

See the Web Site, Buy the Book: J. Courtney Sullivan looks at author web sites and book trailers for the New York Times.

Sara Nelson, editor in chief of Publisher Weekly has been fired is “leaving as part of a companywide restructuring”. The indefatigable Sarah Weiman has a extensive round-up of the reactions in the blogosphere.

The fabulous Book Cover Archive have recently add a couple of lovely minimalist cover designs by Gabriele Wilson (pictured above). Nice.

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Published January 23, 2009

Things We Didn’t See Coming

Love this simple, elegant cover solution for Things We Didn’t See Coming by Steve Amsterdam (seen at JACKET MECHANICAL):

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Published January 23, 2009

Something for the Weekend, Jan 23rd, 2009

Big Mouth Strikes Again — The Friday Project’s charming Scott Pack interviewed at North Meadow Media:

people who have dealt with me directly are pleasantly surprised that I am not the complete cunt I am sometimes made out to be. I am a bit of an arse but not quite as bad as my press would suggest.

Books Unbound — author Lev Grossman’s (much linked to) thoughts on the evolution of publishing for Time magazine. Meh.

Unhappily ever after — The Guardian’s Nick Laird  reviews Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, and asks is it “too good a novel to make a great film”?:

It is a solid and noble effort that succumbs to what should be a moral of literary adaptation: bad books can make great movies, but a great book hardly ever does. And though you can see what tempted the movie men – that great dialogue! those poignant characters! – with Yates it’s the sentences themselves that are truly panoramic, and no matter what you do, they’re going to get left behind.

That may all be true, but to be honest, the wayward casting in Sam Mendes film adaptation is so catastrophically contrary to the characters in my mind that I can’t bring myself to see it anyway.

BlogTO profile one of Toronto’s best independent bookshops Ben McNally Books. Lovely bloke that Ben McNally . BlogTO have profiles of other Toronto bookstores here.

Toronto gets another new literary festival. I can hardly contain myself.

The message is the subject — Jenny Tondera interviews Dutch designer Wim Crouwel, creator of the ‘New Alphabet’ (pictured above and famously tea-leafed by Peter Saville for the album cover of Joy Division’s Substance), about the Bauhaus for Geotypografika. Jenny also interviews Michael Bierut, Experimental Jetset, Steven Heller, Paula Scher, Ellen Lupton, and Jessica Helfland.

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Published January 22, 2009

Midweek Miscellany, Jan 21st, 2009

The Books are alright — Montreal’s Hugh McGuire (of LibriVox and Book Oven) on the Penguin-sponsored BookCamp in London:

If the amount of thought and enthusiasm generated that day — and evening — is any indication, I think we’re going to be OK. The book is alive and well, even if defining “book” is becoming more complicated; and the publishing business, bracing itself for the biggest shake-up since the paperback, will come out the other end, transformed certainly, but alive nonetheless.

Cuts Were Necessary — The New York Observer on Marcus Dohle the new CEO of Random House (previously described as “dapper, but mildly off-putting”):

Now, the feeling among both literary agents and executives who used to work at Random House seems to be that Mr. Dohle inherited a rotten, bloated thing when he took over last May, and though one can wish it hadn’t gone the way it did, there simply was no reversing the damage done by his predecessor, Peter Olson, without forcing the publishers who’d survived his thoughtless 10-year reign to make some hard calls.

Rotten and bloated. Nice.

How to Publish in a Recession — a wide-ranging interview with Declan Spring, senior editor at New Directions, at Conversational Reading (via Ready Steady Blog):

We’re not beholden to stock owners, our overhead is pretty small, and we always count on just a pretty small profit every year anyway. Our staff has worked here for many years, mostly the same folks for twenty years, who are devoting much of their lives to the mission of ND. We see it as a profit-making business, but we are also realistic and dedicated to the cause. That makes it easier in this climate.

And speaking of New Directions… Any excuse (really) to post another book jacket by Alvin Lustig (pictured).

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Published January 19, 2009

Vintage Paperback Illustrations

Sanford Kossin cover for Bantam 1957

What with the inauguration this week it seems awfully quiet on the publishing front right now. Maybe that’s just relative to the economic blitzkrieg that happened before Christmas or my twitchy unease about what horrible surprises 2009 might hold!

In any case, I’m going to use the lull as an excuse to post a link to Kyle Katz’s incredible, overwhelming, (possibly obsessive?) Flickr collection of vintage paperback covers, which I’ve had bookmarked gathering dust for about year… The collection has been loving arranged into various categories — including by the cover illustrator (!) — and, it is, in Katz’s words, “mostly pulp fiction, vintage sleaze, almost all mass market, and usually between 1940 and 1980, with a few exceptions.” But it so much more than that. It’s terrifying. And brilliant.

Alvin Lustig design for New Directions 1950

Link

(via Leif Peng’s marvellous Today’s Inspiration)

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Published January 17, 2009

More Vintage Penguins and Pelicans

Ace Jet 170 has just posted about a “brilliant and odd” vintage Penguin paperback design by Herbert Spencer (pictured):

And, what with the link yesterday to Things magazine’s collection of vintage Pelican covers, I thought I should also link to Ace Jet 170’s growing Penguin/Pelican Flickr collection.

Ace Jet 170

Ace Jet 170’s Penguin/Pelican Flickr Collection

UPDATE

Also: The Penguin Paperback Spotters’ Guide Flickr Pool

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Published January 16, 2009

Something for the Weekend, Jan 16th, 2009

David Mirvish Books, the best fine art bookstore in Toronto, is to close. Damn. At least the Art Gallery of Ontario’s bookstore has re-opened with a decent selection of art books.

“It’s not something you should really do unless you feel really compelled to do it” — An interesting interview with Doug Seibold about founding Chicago-based publisher Agate over at Slate’s Bizbox:

As in a lot of other businesses, there’s a bunch of giant multinational conglomerates that are the big players, and they leave a lot of waste behind them. My feeling was a company that functioned efficiently at the appropriate scale could do a lot of business by being cost-effective and opportunistic. Not too little, but not too grandiose: growing at a careful, natural pace.

Attack of the “renegade cybergeeks”: New York magazine meets the team behind the New York Times’ online operation:

[T]here is something exhilarating about watching web innovation finally explode at the Times, with its KICK ME sign and burden of authority… Despite the effectiveness of blogs, the majority still mainly provide links and commentary. The Times Online suggests what might happen when technology fuels in-depth reportage

A little up it’s own arse and not short on hyperbole (“the New York Times is less a newspaper and more an informative virus”? Really?), it’s still definitely worth a read. Gawker’s predictably acerbic response can be found here.

“Poetry is both flourishing and floundering” — Neil Astley, editor of Bloodaxe Books, argues poetry must be responsive to readers not academic cliques, in the New Statesman:

The producers of poetry aren’t in tune with the lovers of poetry. Many poets and publishers are actually hostile to the promotion of poetry… They see marketing as a dirty word instead of simply the means by which their books are made available to more readers.

“Publishers… lost control of their industry” — a somewhat melodramatic (and therefore much-linked to) “autopsy” of the book business by Jason Epstein in the Daily Beast. I have a lot respect for Epstein, who is indeed a “publishing legend”, but it is worth keeping in mind that he said most of this in Book Business, published in 2001, and in an article for  Technology Review from January 2005. He’s also the man behind the futuristic-yet-seemingly-redundant (is there a word for that? Apart from ‘segway’?) Espresso Book Machine, so he’s not an entirely dispassionate observer.

Grant Morrison talks Batman with Publishers Weekly:

I wanted to assemble all the classical tropes of the pulp noir crime genre: the diabolical mastermind, the femme fatale, the inescapable traps, the secret societies of evil…and push them beyond all reasonable limits to a kind of screaming Death Metal crescendo.

Nice.

The Pelican Project: A collection of Pelican Book covers from the 1930’s through to the 1980’s (pictured). (I was reminded of this wonderful project by the eclectically brilliant FFFFound)

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Published January 14, 2009

The Confessions of a Literary Editor

With regard to the challenges facing book review editors, mentioned here yesterday, Scott Pack has posted an interesting Q & A with Robert McCrum, former literary editor of The Observer newspaper (and former editor-in-chief at Faber & Faber):

What criteria did you use as a literary editor when deciding which books to review?

I always tried to choose the very best books available on the shelves – and on many weeks I felt I never had enough space. Plus, I tried never to lose sight of the fact that The Observer is a news-paper. The books we covered had to satisfy some fairly basic (literary) news criteria. What do I mean by that? Well, a new novel by Philip Roth or Milan Kundera is automatically more newsy than almost any first novel, unless of course you decide — as literary editor — that, say, Zadie Smith is a new voice to watch out for.

It all seems so straightforward — and I do have some sympathy for this view — and yet it leaves you wondering what hope is their for debut authors, under-appreciated talents, and small presses? (Zadie Smith — if needs to be said — was published by Penguin and hyped to the gills). Perhaps it also gives some indication as to why all newspaper book sections look so similar and review so many of the same titles?

Link

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Published January 14, 2009

Jules Verne Series at FaceOut Books

The featured work at FaceOut Books this week is 28-year-old Ely Sarig’s elegant–and unpublished–designs for Jules Verne’s classic 19th Century science fiction novels 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (above), From the Earth to the Moon (below), and The Clipper of the Clouds . The designs draw inspiration from Victorian industrial design, pirate ships, WWII submarines and spacecraft. Does it get any better than that?

Link

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Published January 14, 2009

The New Globe & Mail Books

As announced in December last year, The Globe and Mail replaced its standalone Books tabloid with a combined ‘Focus and Books’ section this weekend, simultaneously launching a new Books website that will feature, amongst other things, daily book reviews, news on books and the publishing industry, and blogs by Globe Book’s online communities editor Peter Scowen and Books editor Martin Levin.

In context of the numerous issues facing newspapers internationally, and the rapid decline of book review coverage in the US (and elsewhere) in recent years, the Globe’s long-foreshadowed shake-up has garnered barely a murmur outside of Canada. Nevertheless there has been some lively discussion on several Canadian book blogs.

Describing it as a “an inauspicious start” and “a work in progress”, That Shakespeherian Rag gives the new books coverage a thorough critical mauling, drawing particular attention a egregious error regarding the 2008 Giller Prize-winning novel Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden, and several other missteps. The Literary Lad’s final verdict: “[A] mixed, but generally underwhelming bag, with the online component scoring better than the new print format… Let’s hope that the early hiccoughs are just that, and not an indication of how things are to be run in the long term.”

Mark at INDEX // mb , who has clearly given this a lot of thought (he’s written about the launch too), isn’t keen on the presentation, but does give credit where he thinks it’s due: “The Globe team have given us a great online destination for Canadian readers. Congratulations to them for planning, creating, and delivering the new site.”

And despite some initial disappointments, Hugh at Book Oven is also optimistic, noting that the “decision to not just quietly kill their book section, as so many other papers have, but to relocate it is encouraging.”

Like Hugh, I’m grateful the Globe has decided to maintain some kind of book coverage in what is a horribly toxic environment for newspapers and book reviews. And I know book review editors (particularly, perhaps, Canadian ones) have a truly thankless task —  trying to please everyone means, inevitably, you please nobody (least of all bloggers!).

I am personally sad, however, to see two distinct sections that I liked unceremoniously (and somewhat incoherently) brought together in a expedient shotgun wedding. No doubt Focus and Books will grow into its new identity and improve with time, but the result this weekend lacked clarity and a sense of purpose. The new features appeared, well, rather desperate.

The online component — technical issues aside — feels a little belated to me and the Globe is lagging behind the extensive book coverage to be found elsewhere on the web, notably at the New York Times and the Guardian who committed earlier to being online. Better late than never though, and with an authoritative and informed focus on the Canadian literary scene, the Globe might be able to carve out a niche for itself given time.

Peter Scowen — who has been honourably responding  to the critical reactions on the Globe’s In Other Words blog — notes that the online launch did not go “without a hiccup” and I don’t suppose that producing the new print section was straightforward. Perhaps it is really too early to tell how this will all play out? Still, I must confess to being strangely ambivalent about the new section and website. With layoff expected at the Globe any day now, I can’t shake the feeling that they’re re-arranging the deckchairs…

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Published January 9, 2009

Something for the Weekend Jan. 9th, 2009

Curation, Appeciation, Organization: The Book Cover Archive goes live with “cross-indexed meta data” (and blog)! LOVE this. Nice work fellas. (via SwissMiss)

Skinny tight jeans and mild panic: The Scotsman profiles Canongate’s Jamie Byng.

Almost half of Canadians can’t name a single Canadian author according to the hand-wringing National Post… Or to put it another way, over half of Canadians CAN actually name a Canadian author? It could be worse (really)…

Canadian booksellers manage a “late holiday rally” in December reports PW:

Retailers large and small were unanimous in their opinion that books proved to be an excellent recession gift, with the value proposition of books being improved in part by fact that the actual price of books have fallen relative to U.S. prices.

A .38 shell for independent bookshops: The Guardian‘s Stuart Evers considers consumer apathy and the imminent closure of the Murder One bookshop on Charing Cross Road in London:

These kinds of shops are facing a long, bloody battle – and one which, without significant reinforcements, they are likely to lose. As we hear of the travesty of another brilliant independent going down, we’ll mourn the loss, wring our hands and damn Amazon and the supermarkets and Waterstone’s. Yet perhaps the most important detail we’ll probably keep under wraps: the last time we actually spent any money there.

Hapless Houghton Mifflin Harcourt reinstate editor Drenka Willen after Noble prize-winner Günter Grass intervenes.

Nostalgic book covers a hit for Penguin in Australia— 50 titles released with covers in the original orange-and-cream designs are selling strongly:

“They are instantly recognisable and have an emotional pull… Most people or their parents have got second-hand or old Penguins at home that have the same livery. But it’s not only pulling on that nostalgic lever, it’s also got that retro coolness. We’ve found that younger readers have been really drawn to them.”

“To say his work was inspirational is an understatement”: The New York Times profiles the late Barney Bubbles  whose iconic album cover designs (for the likes of Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, and The Damned) are celebrated in Paul Gorman’s new book “Reasons to Be Cheerful: The Life and Work of Barney Bubbles” published by Adelita (pictured).

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