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Tag: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published October 1, 2020

The Lord of the Rings covers by Johan Egerkrans

I don’t post a lot of fantasy covers here (less than I should, no doubt), but I rather like the look of these reissues of The Lord of the Rings trilogy available in the US from HMH this month. The covers were designed by Christopher Moisan with illustrations by Swedish illustrator Johan Egerkrans. There’s something about the cover of The Return of the King in particular that reminds me of classic pen and ink fairy tale illustrations by likes of Arthur Rackham and John Bauer.

The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King are available October 6, 2020.

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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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Published December 5, 2008

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?*

There has been relentless torrent of grim publishing news coming out of New York the last few days.

It has, at times, been hard to keep up with it all, and I don’t know the people involved well enough or understand the machinations sufficiently to offer much in the way of trenchant analysis. I hope that a summary of ‘Black Wednesday’ and the rest of this week’s events — with appropriate links — will, at least, offer some kind of context.

The details are sketchy, but Houghton Mifflin Harcourt acknowledged that there would be further changes at the company, including job-cuts. According to Publishers Weekly, at least eight people have been let go including executive editor Ann Patty, senior editor Anjali Singh and legendary editor Drenka Willen. GalleyCat has spokesman Josef Blumenfeld’s full statement about the changes.

Personally I’m stunned that the recipient of the 2007 Maxwell E. Perkins Award Drenka Willen, the US editor of Günter Grass, José Saramago and Umberto Eco, has been let go by HMH. PW profiled Willen in 2002, and, after pointing out that she has edited four Nobel Prize winners, MobyLives asked, pertinently, “do the proprietors of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt really know what they’re doing?”

I think my favourite quote, however, came from an unnamed ‘publishing veteran’ who told GalleyCat:

“Those fuckers have destroyed two venerable publishing houses in less than a fucking year.”

Elsewhere things are not much better.

Earlier in the week, Christian publisher Thomas Nelson announced it would be laying off 54 employees, or about 10% of its workforce. CEO Michael Hyatt said in a statement on his corporate blog From Where I Sit :

This was the second round of reductions this year. Unfortunately, this one was no less painful. We did the first round after significantly cutting our SKU count. However, this second round was purely a result of the slowdown in the economy.

According to GalleyCat , Hyatt apparently first made the announcement by Twitter. Stay classy Michael, stay classy…

After Doubleday cut 16 jobs in October, the “long anticipated” restructuring of Random House was announced on Wednesday. Maud Newton offered some bleak analysis and reprinted the full memo from Random House CEO Markus Dohle. Sarah Weinman has questions. Kassia Krozser at BookSquare thinks it’s all irrelevant:

“Who really cares if Crown or Knopf or Ballantine or Bantam Dell survives? I’m serious. Who. Cares… Focusing on imprints is focusing on the wrong problem.

The hyperbole-prone New York Observer called it “The End of an Era”.

In addition to the upheaval at Random House, Simon & Schuster announced it was eliminating 35 positions on Wednesday. Publishers Weekly reported that the Rick Richter, the president of the company’s children’s book division, and Rubin Pfeffer, senior v-p and publisher of the children’s group, would also be leaving.

On Thursday, Penguin Group chairman and CEO John Makinson announced the company will not give pay raises to anyone earning more than $50,000 in the new year. PW quoted Makinson as saying: “I cannot of course guarantee that there will be no job losses in Penguin in 2009. In this financial climate that would be plain foolhardy.”

And, according to a recent wire story from the AP on this week’s events in publishing, pay raises at HarperCollins have been delayed until next July. Spokeswoman Erin Crum says that “no decisions had been made” on job cuts, whatever that means…

All in all, it’s been quite a week. Thursday’s New York Times had a thorough summary and postmortem, and Andrew Wheeler has been keeping a running tab of the changes on his blog if you want more details.

Do I see a silver lining? Well, my hope is that all the talented, smart people who got unceremously dumped this week will stay in publishing (but who could blame them if they don’t?) and take their brilliance and vast experience to smaller more flexible companies and deliver a resurgence of creativity in New York. That would be nice wouldn’t it?

UPDATE:

Ron Hogan has posted some that trenchant analysis that I was talking about over at GalleyCat.

Also, what are the implications of all this, if any, for Canadian publishers? Anyone…?

*Thanks to Pete for the best blog post title ever.

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Published December 3, 2008

Don’t Panic

“The news heard ‘round the publishing world” is how Sarah Weinman described  the decision of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) — the US publisher of Philip Roth, Gunter Grass and José Saramago — to temporarily stop acquiring manuscripts.

Certainly the story has been ricocheting around the book blogs — and beyond — for the last week as everyone tried to figure out what the wider implications were.

GalleyCat, Sarah’s former stomping ground, quoted Janet Reid of FinePrint Literary Management :

“I think it’s smoke and mirrors,” she said of the announcement. “If they want something, they’re going to get it.” She pointed out that some HMH editors were known, even before yesterday’s freeze, for extremely judicious buying practices, and questioned how much less they could acquire (other than, of course, nothing)… “This is a whirlwind blown out of proportion to what it really is,” Reid continued, calling yesterday’s buzz a consequence of “the first huge economic downturn in the age of transparency.”

And, as the dust settled, HMH themselves tried to played things down.

According to The New York Times,  Jeremy Dickens, president of Education Media (HMH’s owners),  simply wanted HMH to be “extremely prudent about the way that we allocate our capital and where we make our investment decisions.” And HMH’s distinctly chipper-sounding spokesman Josef Rosenfeld described the new policy as “freeze-lite”  to the Associated Press:

“A headline about a freeze is very appealing, but in reality all we’re doing is taking a good, hard look at everything that comes in, much the way this company is watching all expenses and expenditures… It’s just a higher degree of scrutiny.”

Back at Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, Sarah cited literary agent Colleen Lindsay’s advice not to over-react (“publishers do this kind of thing all the time”), but sounded unconvinced:

“So no, we’re not in panic mode, not yet. But as long as… HMH’s parent company… continues to take a bath and the economy stays moribund (or worsens in the first quarter of ’09), the gloom feels rather warranted, even if it’s only a metaphorical sign of what may well come in other places.”

Personally, I was reserving judgment on the whole situation. But, I have to admit, Sarah was looking bloody prescient this afternoon when AP reported  HMH senior vp and publisher Becky Saletin had resigned, and The New York Observer began speculation that “the C.E.O. of HMH’s parent company, a man named Barry O’Callaghan whose core business in K-12 textbooks is not generating enough money to offset his massive debt, will sell the trade division and its illustrious backlist.”

Yikes.

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