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Tag: andrew wylie

Published October 11, 2013

New Republic: Who Said the Book Industry is Dying?

The latest issue of the New Republic looks at the book publishing industry and it includes an article by Evan Hughes on the relative health of the book business:

At the individual level, everyone in the trade—whether executive, editor, agent, author, or bookseller—faces threats to his or her livelihood: self-publishing, mergers and “efficiencies,” and, yes, the suspicious motives of Amazon executives. But the book itself is hanging on and even thriving. More than any major cultural product, it has retained its essential worth.Of course, publishers think that $9.99 is still too low for popular e-books, an assessment that drove their ill-fated effort to work with Apple to take control of what they cost… It may be that a higher price would be more equitable. But other media still have reason to look at the relative economic health of the book with envy.

There is also includes a much-tweeted  interview with literary agent Andrew Wylie. Wylie is, of course, eminently quotable (I think my favourite line from the interview is this: “We’re selling books. It’s a tiny little business. It doesn’t have to be Walmartized.”) and interviewer Laura Bennett has posted some choice outtakes from her print piece.

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Published June 1, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

An introductory reading guide to the work of Norwegian cartoonist Jason from Robot 6:

Since his U.S. debut in 2001, Jason has produced 15 books, with nary a drop in quality. More to the point, he’s been able to use and play with a lot of familiar genre cliches — movie monsters, the big heist, the man accused of a crime he didn’t commit — and make them seem fresh and inviting.

That’s largely because his characters are usually grounded in a strong emotional reality. What often drives them are not simplistic ideals about right and wrong but love, longing, guilt and anxiety, the same stuff that drives most of us. What’s especially fascinating about his work, though, is how he’s able to convey all these roiling emotions with such a… minimalist style… Anyone interested in learning about timing and tempo… should be studying Jason’s comics.

Jason’s latest book Isle of 100,000 Graves is released this month.

Let’s Put It This Way — Cartoonist Ivan Brunetti profiled in The Chicago Tribune:

When people talk about Brunetti, they often couch it with a “Let’s put it this way.” Francoise Mouly, the longtime art director of the New Yorker, said, “Let’s put it this way — Ivan will never be comforted in life.” She said it in her native French lilt, with the breeziness of tone and the bluntness of meaning we associate with the French. But without malice or sarcasm, only lament and concern. There is no comforting Ivan Brunetti.

(I am still slightly traumatized by Brunetti’s Misery Loves Comedy)

The Poverty of Abundance — Sukhdev Sandhu, author of London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City, reviews Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past by Simon Reynolds for The Observer:

Retromania is a book about the poverty of abundance. At malls, on mobile-phone ads, in the background as we work at our computers: pop, usually in the form of anorexically thin MP3 sound, is everywhere these days. Perhaps that ubiquity puts a brake on its ability to astound or shape-shift. Perhaps the process of circulating and accessing music has become more exciting than the practice of listening to it.

Future Classics — Agent Andrew Wylie in The WSJ:

[T]he business we’re in is to identify and capture and anticipate the value of books that are inherently classics, future classics… Sure, writers these days can go directly to readers, without publishers or agents. But there needs to be a chain of people who have authority and can help convey what is essential. We spend most of our time strongly supporting work that we believe is significant.

And finally…

Peter Saville discusses his favourite designs for Joy Division and New Order with The Guardian.

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Published June 30, 2010

Midweek Miscellany

Edward Gorey book cover set on Flickr (via This Isn’t Happiness).

15% of Immortality — Literary agent Andrew Wylie profiled in Harvard Magazine:

“The music industry did itself in by taking its profitability and allocating it to device holders. Manufacturing and distribution accounted for roughly 30 percent of the music industry’s profit. These were conveyed to Apple in the deal for iTunes. But why should someone who makes a machine—the iPod, which is the contemporary equivalent of a jukebox—take all the profit?… [Apple] couldn’t have sold the device without the music that was on it. Instead, why didn’t the music industry say to Apple, ‘We want 30 percent of your iPod sales?’ Or ‘How about paying us 100 percent of your music revenues—you keep your device profits, and give us our music profits?’ That’s not the deal that was made. And that is why the music industry hit the wall.”

“You just can’t kill us” — Publisher’s Weekly looks at the future of sales reps, “the roaches of the business”:

[T]he key to the rep business may no longer be synonymous with the key to the car. Independent reps continue to call on as many stores in their territory as possible, but they also tweet, blog, e-mail, Constant Contact, and GoToMeeting, as well as phone, to stay in touch with their accounts. “If there’s a rep who can call on an account in person, it usually benefits the account,” says Kurtis Lowe, head of group for Book Travelers West, who until last year was the only rep traveling to Alaska. Now he uses what he calls “a hybridization of personalization and electronic contact”… Reps now provide stores with a mix of sales, marketing, customer service, and pretty much whatever else is needed.

“We all have our fates” — Berlin-based Bookslut Jessa Crispin talks to Ulrich Ditzen about his late father, the author Hans Fallada, and the posthumous success of his novel Every Man Dies Alone:

It was the fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg who first approached Dennis Loy Johnson at the publisher Melville House, saying it was a shame the book had never been translated into English. “She talked to the American publisher, why didn’t he publish this book, it was a fantastic book,” Ulrich said. “She was very surprised that it had never been translated. Dennis Johnson then read it and shared her opinion and proceeded to get it translated. And it was a runaway success, to my great surprise.”

And speaking of Berlin…

Because who doesn’t want a remote-controlled mountaineer’s harness to peruse their bookshelf? Dwell features the Berlin home of typographer Erik Spiekermann and his wife, designer Susanna Dulkinys:

Inside, the house has a strikingly modern look… Which is not to say that there are no luxurious touches… [E]xtras include an ingenious, if terrifying, remote-controlled mountaineer’s harness that lifts browsers to the books on the two-story-high bookshelf (though they have to be careful not to run into the Ingo Maurer Zettel’z light). To avoid clutter, almost everything is built in, with cleverly designed zippered fabric panels on the walls working to hide plugs and cords. “It’s like creating white space,” says Dulkinys, “so you can free your mind and be creative.”

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Published April 21, 2010

Midweek Miscellany

In the Land of Punctuation published by Tara Books (seen at DesignWorkLife):

Written in 1905 by the German poet Christian Morgenstern, In the Land of Punctuation is a darkly comic linguistic caprice that holds a resonant mirror to our times. Situated at the crossroads of language, design, and politics, this illustrated edition is a unique picture book for adults. Translated faithfully by Sirish Rao, with typographic illustrations by Rathna Ramanathan, this is a brilliantly inventive dance of text and image.

More on the illustrations at Rathna Ramanathan’s blog.

Quality. Interest. Significance — Robert McCrum profiles literary agent Andrew ‘The Jackal’ Wylie in The Observer:

The more he talks, the more Wylie’s innate puritan zeal comes to life within the clerical black of his undertaker’s suit and tie. “I’m a books person. Yes, I have a Kindle. I used it for an hour and a half and put it in the closet. I’m not interested in mass culture. When I started out I saw nine out of 10 people heading for the door marked Money, Commerce, Trash. So I chose the door marked Quality. Interest. Significance…”

Battle Royale — In a much linked to article, Ken Auletta, author of Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, discusses the iPad, the Kindle, and, yes, Google, in The New Yorker:

Publishing exists in a continual state of forecasting its own demise; at one major house, there is a running joke that the second book published on the Gutenberg press was about the death of the publishing business.

There’s not much (if anything) new in the article and more than a few of the usual suspects (and clichés) appear, but it does cover a lot of ground and provides a decent summary of where things currently stand in the publisher-Apple-Amazon-Google pissing match.

Revolution Betrayed — Christopher Hitchens on George Orwell’s Animal Farm for The Guardian:

It is affecting to imagine battle-hardened ex-soldiers and prisoners of war, having survived all the privations of the eastern front, becoming stirred by the image of British farm animals singing their own version of the discarded “Internationale”, but this was an early instance of the hold the book was to take on its readership. The emotions of the American military authorities in Europe were not so easily touched: they rounded up all the copies of Animal Farm that they could find and turned them over to the Red Army to be burnt. The alliance between the farmers and the pigs, so hauntingly described in the final pages of the novel, was still in force.

And finally…

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Massimo Vignelli says we use too many fonts.  I Love Typography has a smart response. The full 36-minute interview with Vignelli is available from Big Think.

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