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Published November 11, 2010

Midweek Miscellany

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.

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Published July 29, 2009

Midweek Miscellany, July 29th, 2009

Geometric books covers at Design Daily.

The Debate That Will Not Die — Mike Shatkin weighs in on DRM and tries to find that elusive middle-ground. The discussion continues into the comments (of course)…

Unputdownable — A nice ad campaign by Saatchi & Saatchi for Penguin Books in Malaysia (via The 26th Story).

Great Ideas — The Caustic Cover Critic looks at the covers for all 20 of the new additions to Penguin’s Great Ideas series. Some fantastic typographic stuff here as you might imagine, although — to be honest — I think there are one or two weaker entries in this round and the purple motif works better for some books than others…

A New Page — (Much linked to elsewhere, but in case you missed it) Nicholson Baker’s meticulous vivisection (or “epic takedown” if you prefer) of the Kindle in The New Yorker:

The problem was not that the screen was in black-and-white; if it had really been black-and-white, that would have been fine. The problem was that the screen was gray. And it wasn’t just gray; it was a greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray. The resizable typeface, Monotype Caecilia, appeared as a darker gray. Dark gray on paler greenish gray was the palette of the Amazon Kindle.

This was what they were calling e-paper?

And if you can’t get enough of that Kindlenfreude feeling…

David L. Ulin, book editor  The LA Times, weighs in on Amazon’s troubling reach.

Niches — Richard Nash, formerly of Soft Skull Press, talks about his new community-based venture, tentatively called ‘Cursor’, in Publishers Weekly.

And finally…

A Journey Round My Skull has a nice post of vintage Swedish books covers from collected from the excellent  Martin Klasch. I particularly like this vampiric cover for Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep by Martin Gavler from 1963 (above).

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Published July 8, 2009

Midweek Miscellany, July 8th, 2009

A-Type — The Independent has a nice look at book design and Faber & Faber’s Eighty Years of Book Cover Design by Joseph Connolly:

You could argue that the current renaissance in book design came about thanks to Penguin, always the most design-savvy of publishers. In 2004 they produced their first series of Great Ideas – small paperback editions of classic, mostly philosophical texts. They had highly tactile covers and used bold period typography to give a sense of when and where each book was coming from. The following year we got Penguin by Design, an illustrated history of 70 years of Penguin covers, and then, in 2007, Seven Hundred Penguins, a two-inch-thick collection of the best covers, shown life-size, one to a page. For seasoned haunters of second-hand bookshops, this particular item was as thrilling as a similar-sized brick of Class A drugs.

JRSM has more on the Faber book at Caustic Cover Critic.

5 Easy Pieces — Dave Daley discusses his site  Five Chapters,  which publishes a short story in 5 parts over the course of a week, with Ron Charles at the Washington Post‘s Short Stack blog:

“I write passionate notes to writers I admire. And I tell them about the site and why I think it’s a good place for them to be. Here’s an audience of story-lovers and book buyers… The short story is just ideal for our attention spans these days.”

Rogue Agent — Scott Esposito talks to Denise Oswald, the new Editorial Director Soft Skull, for The Quarterly Conversation:

Soft Skull is like a rogue agent—who wouldn’t want to work there? It’s exciting. I’ve always loved their shoot from the hip / take no prisoners attitude and the house’s commitment to embracing the outspoken and the contrarian, the marginal and the disenfranchised. Their books are thoughtful and deeply engaged on a ground level with the world we live in. Yet there’s always room for something elegant and literary or naughty and fun, which is a very satisfying balance at the end of the day because it helps one from becoming too self-serious.

Coffee and Memory — On topic close to my heart, research from the University of Florida has shown that caffeine both prevents and reverses symptoms of Alzheimers in mice, which, according to Donald Clark, just goes to show coffee is cognitively good for you:

Coffee has… long fuelled learning, whether it be through the direct stimulation of the brain, increasing attention, improving memory, preventing dementia or providing a social context for debate and work. It’s something we coffee drinkers have always instinctively known!

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Published February 21, 2009

Something for the Weekend, Feb 21th, 2009

Corpoetics — The text from the websites of  “well-known brands and corporations” remixed and rearranged into strangely engaging and enigmatic poetry by Nick Asbury (photo above from Ace Jet 170). I rather like the one taken from Scottish Widows:

Here in an Edinburgh coffee house,
their futures became history.
Meet the latest widow.

Copies of Corpoetics available for £5 (plus p&p) from Nick Asbury’s website, and all proceeds go to the National Literacy Trust, an independent charity dedicated to changing lives through literacy.

A Q&A With Four Young Editors — Just a fantastic, fascinating conversation between Richard Nash (Soft Skull), Lee Boudreaux (Ecco), Alexis Gargagliano (Scribner), and Eric Chinski (FSG) in the latest issue of Poets & Writers. It’s long. Make some coffee, grab a snack and devote some time to it. Well worth it. Honestly.

In Defense of Readers — Mandy Brown, Creative Director at W. W. Norton & Company,  on designing websites for readers:

Despite the ubiquity of reading on the web, readers remain a neglected audience… Readers flourish when they have space—some distance from the hubbub of the crowds—and as web designers, there is yet much we can do to help them carve out that space.

And last, but by no means least… Coralie in Conversation — The Caustic Cover Critic interviews Penguin’s super-talented book designer Coralie Bickford-Smith.

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Published February 4, 2009

Midweek Miscellany, February 4th, 2009

Slow Burner (above) — a rather awesome — if slightly racy — cover seen at the Bookkake Blog.

How to Publish in a Recession Part 3 — The always interesting Richard Nash, the editorial director of Soft Skull Press and the executive editor of Counterpoint, talks to Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading.

The Once and Future e-book: On Reading in the Digital Age — A fascinating article on the past, present, and future of e-books and e-book readers by John Siracusa at Ars Technica.  I think — like many —  he underestimates the challenges (such as rights issues and, on a really basic level, a lack of expertise and human resources) publishers face making their titles available as e-books, but this really is a must-read.

Book Expo Canada is officially dead. It is an ex-trade show– Surprising precisely no one. The Globe and Mail has publisher reactions and a postmortem interview with Tom Best, vice president, marketing, at H.B. Fenn. What troubles me is the belief that we need something to replace it…

There’s so much written about how publishers don’t know what they’re doing… But how do you know what to do?”— The New York Observer talks to former PW editor Sara Nelson:

“You’re making a bet on who’s gonna like something a year and a half from now. That’s without even getting into the economy or anything—just, ‘What’s the mood of a number of people going to be a year and a half from now?’ If you thought too much about that, you’d shoot yourself.”

“We are on the verge of an explosion in independent book publishing” — Hugh McGuire of Librivox and The Book Oven chats to Allentrepreneur.

The Google Paradox — Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, on two new books published (in the conventional way) about Google:

“the more Google does to kill the traditional publishing industry with the free online content from its search engine, the more books will get written about the central role of Google in our new digital economy… The irony of Elsewhere USA and What Would Google Do? is that both books rely on the five hundred year-old technology of Johannes Gutenberg’s moveable type to explain the wrenching digital transformation of the 21st century.”

Who is on twitter? — I think I fall into the cateogory of “people who are concerned about the collapse of the publishing industry.” (Thanks Sio!)

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Published February 3, 2009

The e-book Revolution Favours the Agile (But Deep Pockets Help)

The publishing industry is finally turning toward “mass digitization”, Matthew Shaer reports in The Christian Science Monitor .

But “it’s not the bigger houses, such as Macmillan or HarperCollins, that are moving the fastest” he says. It is agile independent presses — who can make decisions quickly  and are “more open-minded when it comes to distribution and marketing” — that are “making the most extensive restructuring efforts” according to Schaer.

Independent presses are undoubtedly innovating — necessity is the mother of invention after all — and I would really love to believe that they can steal a march on the big publishers in the “e-book revolution”. Unfortunately I just don’t think it’s true. Or, at least, that simple.

Even if you ignore the Schaer’s assertion that the “typical” independent press can make quick decisions “without much internal friction” (in theory yes, in practice I’m not so sure), the ability to adapt is not just about a “fast and light ethos”, it is also about resources. It actually takes a great deal of time and expertise — often in short supply at small presses — to put a digital program in place. And although the cost of creating, marketing, and selling e-books may be low once the infrastructure is there, getting to that point requires a lot investment.

Soft Skull’s ambitious aim to have its entire list available digitally by the end of the year is a huge step for an independent publisher. But the two publishers Schaer specifically identifies as being behind the times are, in fact, already on this track. In November last year, Pan Macmillan made books available for the Stanza e-book reader for iPhones, and they currently offer a large, large number of downloads in different formats from their  web site, as do  HarperCollins .

In fact, ALL of the other major publishers — Random House, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster — offer e-books to download from their web sites in the US. Not that you would know from Schaer’s article.

And HarperCollins has been trailblazing with creative online initiatives in the past year. They set up Authonomy, a community site for writers, and are launching BookArmy, which Victoria Barnsley, chief executive of HarperCollins UK, describes as a “social networking site organised around books and authors.” . They’ve collaborated with if:book London and Apt to create an online, annotated version of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook , and in December they released a charming online video, This Is Where We Live, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of their 4th Estate imprint, that quickly went viral.

In April 2008, HarperCollins also acquired The Friday Project — originally set up to find  web based material and turn it into books — as an “incubator for fostering new talent, and finding new markets.”

And let us not forget HarperStudio who may not be offering e-books yet, but have firmly established themselves on online.

Penguin have not been idle either. In December, Penguin US launched Penguin 2.0 to boost their web presence with an iPhone app and other downloads. Penguin in the UK — who sponsored in the recent BookCamp on technology and the future of the book — not only offer over 1,000 e-books on their website, they have an online dating service (no, really), and have created SpineBreakers, a web site with teenage contributors. And there is, of course, the ever-popular Penguin Blog.

The same day as Penguin 2.0 was announced, PW also reported that Random House would be partnering with Stanza and making select titles available for iPhones, and in January, Simon & Schuster relaunched their website with all the whistles-and-bells — such as blogs and author videos (outlined by PW here) — that one would expect from a publisher who knows their audience is online.

Of course none of  these strategies is perfect and the major publishers still have work to do on their e-books programs (there have been complaints about the  pricing in particular), but this is a period of experimentation and, with the best will in the world, it’s simply absurd to suggest, that the big publishers are “dinosaurs” who “think people are just sitting down in leather chairs and reading hardcopy books.”

Independent publishers may have “the most to gain from electronic publishing” as Richard Nash of Soft Skull says, and I genuinely hope that e-books usher in a renaissance of independent publishing. But the big publishers are not blind to the possibilities that technology is opening up and they have the resources to move quickly and boldly, and, in some cases at least, they are doing so. Let’s just give credit where it is due.

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