Photographer Steve McCurry, best known for his iconic National Geographic portrait ‘Afghan Girl’, recently posted twosets of beautiful photographs on his blog of people reading books. Publishing Perspectives spoke to McCurry about the ongoing project:
As a photographer, McCurry is always on the hunt for the “unguarded moment,” that slice of time that reveals something personal and honest. “I have another gallery of people sleeping and of couples interacting. There’s an intimacy people have with a book and its author that is similar,” he says, adding. “We’re all different and we’re all the same. It amuses me that whether you’re fabulously rich and sophisticated or you happen to be someone on the street in the third world or a classroom in some remote area, reading is all the same act. It’s a common link in our shared humanity, a thing we all do that is regardless of where we are economically or socially.”
The first selection of McCurry’s photographs of readers, titled ‘Fusion: The Synergy of Images and Words’, can be seen here. The second set is here.
Created by Rintala Eggertsson Architects, Ark is a free-standing wooden tower accessed by a spiral case that connects two floors of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The façades of the tower consist of hundreds of shelves, holding thousands of books, which visitors can browse. The books can be read in private chambers within in the structure.
The tower is part of the ‘1:1 — Architects Build Small Spaces’ exhibition at the V&A, which runs until the end of this month. In this V&A video, the architects talk about their practice, the book tower and its installation:
Book cataloging website LibraryThing has launched a new service that allows publishers to add their titles to the site and connect with the LibraryThing community. Five publishers have already signed up. Fun stuff.
Best known previously for his art-house novel Remainder and saving literature from itself, author Tom McCarthy has been pretty much everywhere since the somewhat surprising inclusion of his new novel Con the Booker long-list. Tom may not actually be bigger than Jesus — or the bookies favourite — but he certainly does give good interview…
“The avant garde can’t be ignored, so to ignore it – as most humanist British novelists do – is the equivalent of ignoring Darwin. Then you’re just a creationist. It’s ostrich-like. It needs to be worked through – which is not the same thing as imitation…
People use [‘experimental’] when what they actually mean is ‘not conforming to a certain type of realism’, and that’s just as much a literary convention as anything else. Burroughs said his ‘cut-up’ writing was more realistic than Jane Austen. I think he was right. You’re being assailed by associations and networks. Everything is a code…”
“Commentators and critics seem to want fiction either to be blatantly avant-garde and postmodern, or to be realist and 19th century; but really most literature is neither nor… ‘The avant-garde’ describes a specific historical moment that belongs to the early part of the 20th century. Certainly in C there is a huge amount of that moment behind the writing; the avant-garde is definitely embedded in it. But at the same time I think it gets used as catch-all term now for something that isn’t retrograde, anything that’s not a kind of nostalgic, kitsch version of the 19th-century novel, which is what much of middlebrow fiction right now is.”
C has been reviewed by Christopher Taylor at The Guardian and by John Self at Asylum, and you can keep track of Tom various comings and goings at Surplus Matter.
My interview with Tom McCarthy and book designer Peter Mendelsund ishere.
Update:The fine folks at3:AM Magazinehave also posted an interview with Tom about C.
Right now, in an age of print-on-demand for real-world publication and iPads / iPhones / Kindles for virtual publication, it would — on the face of it — seem unwise to launch a magazine like 8 Faces, especially as it’s targeted at such a niche audience. As I said in the introduction of the magazine, “everything about this project shouldn’t work.” But it has, and it’s done so in a bigger way than I ever would’ve imagined. I was confident that there was going to be a demand for the first issue, but I had no idea that it’d sell out in under two hours…
The essay is full of practical insights and 8 Faces is another great example of how people are using the web and traditional print media to publish in new and innovative ways.
In a recent op-ed for The Financial Times (registration required), John Makinson, CEO of the Penguin Group, outlined the opportunities e-books offer to publishers:
What is being missed in the debate about the division of digital spoils is the opportunity offered by e-books to authors and readers, as well as to publishers who have the specialist skills to exploit it… [W]e should not forget that the growth of the book market has always been driven not by changes in consumer demand but by the availability of new channels of supply. It was true of supermarkets and book clubs, and it will be true of digital platforms and formats.
While e-books mean that publishers can develop new products that expand on the traditional book, says Makinson, digital technology will also provide them with “rich consumer data” that can inform decisions about pricing and content. Furthermore, social networks and online communities will allow for greater reader engagement in the publishing process.
According to Makinson, technology will redefine the industry but, so long as publishers are adept at learning new skills, it will enhance their role rather than diminish it. And even with the “explosive growth” of e-books, Makinson is optimistic about print:
Perhaps the charm of the physical book will be lost one day. But I doubt it. Readers of all ages retain a remarkable emotional attachment to the thing. It is portable, convenient and a pleasure to own… There’s life in the old book yet.
Craig Mod’s fascinating essay on re-publishing his book Art Space Tokyo using fund-raising website Kickstarter has been much linked to elsewhere, but I’ve only just found time to actually read it and it is definitely worth your time if you have hadn’t had chance to read it yourself yet:
I had one chief consideration in defining the goals for the Kickstarter project: make enough books to generate substantial returns. Then use those returns to further expand this or similar publishing endeavors.
I never intended to just sell a few books. The last thing I wanted was for this Kickstarter project to be nothing more than the start and end of Art Space Tokyo’s new print run. Instead, I wanted it to be the jumping point for exploring more projects in a similar spirit to Art Space Tokyo; a means to explore digital books and to fund the startup of a publishing venture that could make this happen.
An interesting post by the whip-smart Evan Schnittman, Managing Director of Group Sales and Marketing at Bloomsbury, about e-book rights and royalties at his blog Black Plastic Glasses:
[A] successful and coherent publishing is not the sum of individual publishing rights, but rather the gestalt work presented coherently to a global audience. Viewing the ebook out of the context of the rest of the work gets us nowhere. We must understand how ebooks fit into the publishing ecosphere and only then can we determine what the right royalty should be… The whole work has FAR greater value than the sum of the individual rights. Allowing each individual part, or right, to be disaggregated and auctioned to the highest bidder serves only those who make profit from short-term gain.
Thriller writer Jason Pinter recently rattled some publishing china by suggesting that a stubborn belief that Men Don’t Read is alienating male readers:
I’m tired of people saying Men Don’t Read. Men LOVE to read… But the more publishing repeats the empty mantra that Men Don’t Read the less they’re going to try to appeal to men, which is where this vicious cycle begins.
Publish more books for men and boys. Trust editors who try to buy these books, and work on the marketing campaigns to hit those audiences. The readers are there, waiting, eager just under the surface… They’ve been alienated for a long time and might need to be roused from their slumber. But as I’ve always said the biggest problems facing the publishing industry are not ebooks, or returns, but the number of people reading. This is a way to bring back a lot of readers who have essentially been forgotten about.
Pinter is right in a sense. The idea that men don’t read books is a glib generalization and publishers really should be worried about literacy and declining readerships. But are men really turning away from reading because the book trade isn’t trying to reach them?
The scandal engulfing former Penguin Canada CEO David Davidar is a prickly reminder that the upper echelon of publishing is still largely a boy’s club. And even if you accept Pinter’s assertion that “that most editorial meetings tend to be dominated by women”, Rebecca Smart, Managing Director at Osprey Publishing, ably demonstrates that women can publish effectively for a predominantly male readership.
And even if you ignore all the books on football mentioned last week (not to mention the endless number of books on baseball and cricket), and the entire output of writers like Cormac McCarthy, George Pelecanos and the late (but still in print) Patrick O’Brian, the New York Times best seller lists reveal more than a few new books have been successfully published for men.
The perception that publishers are marginalizing men is just as much an illusion as Men Don’t Read. At least if men read the NY Times and like books on economics, war and expletives. (And who doesn’t?)
But this is, of course, completely subjective. The New York Times bestsellers — war, history, politics, and angry (funny) old men — may not be the kind of books Pinter had in mind. I certainly didn’t read the book that caused Pinter so much angst, A Lion’s Tale by pro-wrestler Chris Jericho, but then I don’t read much Roth, Amis, or Coetzee either, though I suppose plenty of men do. Perhaps the real problem is publishing along stereotypical gender lines? Not all men (or women) want to read the same books…
I was thinking about this because of two books I finished recently: War by Sebastian Junger (Twelve 2010) and Colony by Hugo Wilcken (Harper Perennial, 2007). Both are books by men about men — and I enjoyed them both — but otherwise they have almost nothing in common.
Full of piss, vinegar, and shit blowing up, War is a nonfiction account of Junger’s time embedded with the Second Platoon of Battle Company in the Korengal Valley, eastern Afghanistan.
At one level, Junger’s book is a chronicle of Second Platoon’s days. He takes us up the mountains, along the valley floor, on helo-lifts, into firefights. We sit with the men in their bunks — infested with fleas and tarantulas — and we listen to their low-grade (and sometimes hilarious) philosophizing as they pass the hours… But Junger is aiming for more than just a boots-on-the-ground narrative of the travails of American fighting men. As the book’s grandiose title suggests… “War” strives to offer not just a picture of American fighting men but a discourse on the nature of war itself.
With it’s acronyms, hot military hardwareand bunker philosophizing War is, without question, a compelling read. But it is also a deeply troubling book. Junger’s intimate dependence on this closely knit platoon clearly affects his journalistic perspective, and Junger’s narcissism aside, I was left wondering whether there is a psychological condition in embedded journalists similar to Stockholm Syndrome.
Lewis Manalo, a former sapper in 82nd Airborne Division, describes Junger as a “war tourist” in a scathing review of the book for Publishing Perspectives:
[W]hat a fantasy it is. All the thrill of being in combat with none of the responsibility of knowing what to do. He endows the different engagements with the excitement and clarity of a Hollywood action film… As Junger paints them, these fights are where all those big words like “heroism” and “courage” and “sacrifice” come into play, where men achieve amazing things and where they die dramatic deaths. Over and over, Junger and the men he depicts rave about how exciting battle is. In Junger’s world, war is a glorious thing where everyone should want to be.
“Fantasy” is an interesting choice of words. Certainly, the phrase ‘war-porn’ came to mind when I was reading it. Perhaps not surprisingly then, Junger’s experiences in Korengal are also the basis for a feature-length film called Restrepo co-directed with photographer/filmmaker Tim Hetherington:
If War is a dirty nonfiction hypemachine, Colony by Hugo Wilcken is a beautifully constructed — if largely ignored — literary novel.
With echoes of Conrad and Camus, Colony is a sophisticated post-modern adventure story. Sabir — a war veteran and petty criminal — finds himself on a boat to a brutal penal colony in French Guiana. He escapes the camp, but as his plans unravel, the book takes an unexpected tack, throwing the previous narrative into doubt. The past, present, and future mix in memory and imagination.
John Self, who has long championed the novel, had this to say about it:
The book’s sometimes elusive nature seems to be reflected in the references to Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. But what impresses most is Wilcken’s unwillingness to try to impress the reader: the prose is unfussy, the scenes uncluttered. There is no ‘fine writing’. Instead, there is very fine writing indeed.
The theme of Colony is escape: from captivity to freedom, and vice versa; from reality into dreams and memories; from one identity to another; from life to elsewhere.
Colony is simply an extraordinary book. It also feels like an old-fashioned one, especially compared to War‘sheadymultimedia blend of insider reportage and violence stuck together by hasty research and memoir. My sense is that itis War‘s template that will be imitated by publishers trying to capture Pinter’s elusive male reader. But personally it will be Colony that endures, and lives long in my mind.
The past, present, and future mix in memory and imagination. The prose is simple and uncluttered. Familiar characters become surprising and complex.
Photographer Steve McCurry, best known for his iconic National Geographic portrait ‘Afghan Girl’, recently posted two sets of beautiful photographs on his blog of people reading books. Publishing Perspectives spoke to McCurry about the ongoing project:
