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.