Skip to content

Tag: Globe & Mail

Published August 7, 2009

Something For The Weekend, August 7th, 2009

Winnie and Wolf — cover design by Alex Camlin (the chap behind that rather wonderful Harvard Review overhaul). I’m hoping to speak to Alex for the designer Q & A series later this month.

And just while were on the subject, Caustic Cover Critic looks at the new designs for the Penguin World War II Collection.

In Search of Lost Time — David L. Ulin, Book Editor of the LA Times, on the lost art of reading:

Today, it seems it is not contemplation we seek but an odd sort of distraction masquerading as being in the know. Why? Because of the illusion that illumination is based on speed, that it is more important to react than to think, that we live in a culture in which something is attached to every bit of time.

Here we have my reading problem in a nutshell, for books insist we take the opposite position, that we immerse, slow down… Yet there is time, if we want it. Contemplation is not only possible but necessary, especially in light of all the overload.

But, if you sympathize with this perspective be warned: you are weak and you just don’t love books enough (and you’re probably a calcified narcissist).

Talking Books — I don’t agree with everything here (OK I actually disagree with a lot of it and, I’m sorry, describing the Globe & Mail as “daring” is just  delusional), but Ian Brown, writer, arts journalist and broadcaster has some interesting things to say about Canadian literature and culture in a sprawling interview over at Conversations in the Book Trade:

[T]he novel is no longer the prime example of literature. Nor does it need to be. Too much attention can ossify a genre. If anything is in trouble, it’s literary fiction–but again, only because there are so many alternative ways to consume good writing these days. The book itself is a fantastic technology, but literary fiction has some serious competition for my attention.

And as this has been something of slow week, and because I was chatting about it with book designer Jason Gabbert on Twitter (who is responsible for the lovely C.S. Lewis redesigns above), I’m just going to take this opportunity to (re)plug my image library on Image Spark and (while I’m at it) my slightly stream-of-consciousness inspiration blog The Accidental Optimist.

4 Comments
Published March 3, 2009

Monday Miscellany, March 2nd, 2009

Apologies for a delayed entry in the Monday Miscellany category, but here we go (better late than never)…

Eric Carl‘s Flickr photostream has some nice classic sci-fi and fantasy book covers (the rather fine looking Death of a Doll and New Writings in SF 5 pictured above). (via but does it float)

Re-envisioning the American small press — Fiona McCrae, director and publisher of Minneapolis independent Graywolf Press, profiled in PW (via @sarahw):

McCrae believes the publishing business is changing in favor of smaller presses, which can have close contact with their audiences and realistically support the smaller sales that typify many literary books: “I think that’s been true for a long time, and it’s just getting truer and truer and truer. There’s still obviously a layer in which we don’t compete, and it’s not our job to”

Rearrange, Rewrite, Redefine and Reimagine — Chicago-based indie Featherproof Books would like you to “remix” parts of their forthcoming titles, starting with Tour of the Drowned Neighborhood a short story taken from Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas (via @R_Nash).

Overdue! — The Central Library in Atlanta, the last building by “Modernist master” Marcel Breuer, is under threat according to Jonathan Lerner in Metropolis Magazine (pictured above).

A fair share — In the final installment of a 3-part series for the Globe and Mail on the publishing industry in Canada, James Adams looks at the thorny issue of digital rights.

Wild Hair, Wilder Ideas —  The Guardian profiles Alan Moore (and — on a related note — novelist Lydia Millet’s somewhat ill-considered assessment of Watchmen for the WSJ)

From Caveman to Spray Can: A Graphic Journey — Mike Dempsey’s gently meandering history of graphic design which not only features one or two books, but also the lovely Gill Sans typeface (picture above) which was used on the early Penguin paperbacks (via Noisy Decent Graphics).

Comments closed
Published February 13, 2009

Goodbye, Globe (no really)

I finally cancelled our subscription to the Globe & Mail yesterday. But not, as you might imagine, because I can read it for free online. No. I cancelled our subscription because they are unable to deliver it before we leave for work in the morning.

I am actually willing to pay for the convenience of having a newspaper delivered to my door by 6am (even if I am subsidizing that newspaper’s free website) — just like I’m willing to pay music and movies I like (and for books without ads inserted into them FYI) — because I think that service and quality have a value, and that journalists, artists, and writers should be able to make a living.

I’m less willing to pay for a newspaper that is delivered late and is out-of-date — and largely uninteresting — by the time I look it 12 hours later.

Now, I appreciate that losing one newspaper subscriber is not going to keep the CEO of CTVGlobalMedia awake at night. He’s too busy worrying about the internet. But, newspapers, and publishers for that matter, are mising the point. The internet, e-books, social media — they really are not your problem.  Taking your readers for granted – THAT is your problem.

Newspapers and publishers have been able to get away with being so utterly complacent about their consumers because, for years, readers had  no alternative. But now they do. And too often the newspapers that are printed and the books that are published — and way they are delivered — are not good enough for people to want to pay for them because there is more interesting and convenient stuff elsewhere.

Newspapers and publishers: If you want to survive, stop wringing your hands about digital content — That debate is over bar the shouting. Start respecting your readers. Provide them with something they’re willing to pay for. Delivering my newspaper on time would’ve been a start.

4 Comments
Published February 9, 2009

Monday Miscellany, February 9th, 2009

“Books exist because we want and need them” — A slide show of pages from Robert Bringhurst’s new book The Surface of Meaning: Books And Book Design In Canada (pictured) published by CCSP Press in The Globe and Mail. (Disclosure: The Surface of Meaning is distributed by Raincoast in Canada).

A bookshop is a dynamite-shed — Bookride have posted a splendid John Cowper Powys rant about second-hand bookshops:

[A] bookshop — especially a second-hand bookshop — is an arsenal of explosives, an armoury of revolutions, an opium den of reactions. And just because books are the repository of all the redemptions and damnations, all the sanities and insanities, of the divine anarchy of the soul, they are still, as they have always been, an object of suspicion to every kind of ruling authority.

Pessimism Porn — Hugo Lindgren explains his addiction to nightmarish economic news  in New York Magazine:

“[E]cono-porn… feeds a powerful sense of intellectual vanity. You walk the streets feeling superior to all these heedless knaves who have no clue what’s coming down the pike. By making yourself miserable about the frightful hell that awaits us, you feel better. Pessimism can be bliss too.”

Publishing certainly has its fair share of addicts…

Visionary locations — Toby Litt on J.G. Ballard in the Guardian:

“Plenty of other writers now fictionally venture into multistorey carparks, airport hospital wards, decaying hotels, but they do so in the knowledge that they’re trespassing on Ballard’s territory. He was here first; he was the pioneer – back when these places were seen as totally unliterary. What could possibly happen on a motorway embankment that was of interest?”

Finding alternative best sellers — Toronto bookshop This Is Ain’t The Rosedale Library profiled by Brian Joseph Davis in the Globe and Mail.

Is CondéNet Dead? — Slate’s The Big Money examine how “a publishing giant failed to get the Web”. Lessons (if more were needed) for book publishers (via @jafurtado):

“To say that we’re just a magazine company in this day and age is like saying that we’re a buggy company.”

PUFF — lovely pictures of PUFF by William Wondriska (published in 1960 by Pantheon Books Inc.) at the wonderful Grain Edit (pictured above).

Image Spark— A neat image bookmarking tool. V. excited about this as you can probably imagine… (via @michaelSurtees/DesignNotes) .

1 Comment
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.

Comments closed
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…

1 Comment
Published December 4, 2008

Goodbye, Globe

According The Quill & Quire, The Globe & Mail will be folding it’s weekly standalone Books tabloid into the Focus section of its Saturday paper in the new year:

Globe editor-in-chief Edward Greenspon argued that the move is aimed at bringing more eyes to the books pages, and is not an attempt to reduce books coverage. “The Books section itself is a little bit of a ghetto, and the Focus section is one of the best-read sections of the paper,” he said. “There should be more traffic, more eyeballs going through it, both in print and online.”

In the new, combined print section, the number of pages devoted to books will ultimately depend on advertising revenue, Greenspon said, which he admits has been suffering of late. But he said the ramped-up books website should pick up any of the slack in coverage.

After the precipitous decline of book coverage in newspapers across North America in recent years, the Globe‘s decision is hardly unexpected. Standalone book sections have been dropping like flies in the US, and here in Canada the Toronto Star halved its books coverage to two pages in the summer, and the Montreal Gazette has turned its weekly standalone books section into a monthly. The writing was on the wall for the Globe‘s Book section, especially after its unexpected two week ‘hiatus’ in August.

So, no surprise. But the thought occurred to me that what advertisers now want from the Globe & Mail is clearly very different from what I want as a subscriber to the newspaper. And the Globe is — rightly or wrongly — going with the ad revenue. Thus they can maintain a weekly standalone Auto section — bloated with ads — that I don’t read, and scrap their prestigious standalone Books tabloid — with very little advertising — that I read cover to cover.

For newspapers, there is surely a tension between the interests of advertisers and the interests of readers, and whilst trying to strike a balance, the temptation, inevitably, is to follow the money. The question is though, when newspaper readers like me decide that you’re no longer reflecting our interests and cancel our subscriptions, what are the advertisers and, in turn, the newspapers going to do then?

1 Comment