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The Casual Optimist Posts

Published December 12, 2008

Something for the Weekend, Dec. 12th, 2008

The 10 Commandments of Book Giving by Michael Dirda, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and Senior Editor of the Washington Post‘s Book World (via Right-Reading):

Over the years I’ve gone through all kinds of Christmas presents, and nearly all of them quickly broke or have been long forgotten. Not so the gift books, whether Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan and the Golden Lion, a paperback copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses or the Pléiade edition of Stendhal’s Oeuvres Intimes. Given to me by relatives, teachers and friends, they helped to make the season bright — and they also helped to make me who I am.

“Book apps for the iPhone keep getting better” according to Maud Newton (via DesignNotes)

Lying Liars: “Nearly half of all men and one-third of women have lied about what they have read to try to impress friends or potential partners”, the BBC reports.

Nintendo launches ‘great books’ package:

The creator of Donkey Kong and Super Mario is hoping that Austen and Dickens will prove as great a pull to computer game fanatics. It has worked with HarperCollins to select 100 titles – from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to Gulliver’s Travels, Pride and Prejudice, A Tale of Two Cities and Treasure Island – which will be available in a single software package for the Nintendo DS

Mwa ha ha! Chip Kidd discusses Bat-Manga! (via Books Covered)

The Age of Mass Intelligence — Are we actually smarter than we think we are? John Parker thinks so (via kottke):

One of the commonest complaints by cultural doomsayers is that nobody reads good books any more. Yet in the past two years, the Oprah Book Club in America recommended Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” and three novels by William Faulkner–good by any standard, and they all made the bestseller lists. This year, Waterstone’s, which owns over 300 bookshops in Britain, asked two celebrated novelists, Sebastian Faulks and Philip Pullman, each to choose 40 titles and write a few words of recommendation. The chain then piled copies of the books on tables next to the entrances of its main shops and waited to see what would happen. Faulks and Pullman hardly dumbed down their choices: they included Fernando Pessoa’s “Book of Disquiet”, Rudyard Kipling’s “Kim”, and Raymond Queneau’s “Exercises in Style”. The sales increases for these books over the same period the year before were, respectively, 1,350%, 1,420% and 1,800%–clear evidence of latent demand. If you offer it, they will come.

In this brief interview at inFrame.tv, award-winning Australian artist and author Shaun Tan discusses his work and the adaptation of his book The Lost Thing into an animated movie (via drawn):

And on a similar note, stills of the 25 minute animated adaptation of Oliver Jeffers’ book Lost and Found (to be broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK on Christmas Eve) can be seen on the STUDIOaka website. Looks lovely.

And this is probably my last regular post for the next couple of weeks. In the extremely unlikely instance you get withdrawal symptoms, you can always check out the links in the sidebar and/or send me an email!

See you in the New Year!

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Published December 11, 2008

Midweek Miscellany, Dec. 10th, 2008

NPR’s Best Graphic Novels of 2008 include Josh Cotter’s Skyscrapers of the Midwest, Local by Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly, Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s Goodbye, and Alan’s War by Emmanuel Guibert (pictured). There’s an excerpt available of each book selected. Nice. (Thanks Ehren!)

A new way to express an old idea – An interesting interview with Canadian designer David Drummond at Books Covered (via Design Observer):

I tend to start with a list of words. For example I am working on a cover now that is about a dog but can’t show the dog on the cover. I like those kind of problems. How do you show this without showing it?

Amazon’s Jeff Bezo is PW‘s Person of the Year.

“Suburban surrender”: James Wood revisits Richard Yates’ blistering novel Revolutionary Road in the latest The New Yorker.

Little to do with books – The New York Times looks at the infighting and the politics of book groups:

Yes, it’s a nice, high-minded idea to join a book group, a way to make friends and read books that might otherwise sit untouched. But what happens when you wind up hating all the literary selections — or the other members? Breaking up isn’t so hard to do when it means freedom from inane critical commentary, political maneuvering, hurt feelings, bad chick lit and even worse chardonnay.

Russell Davies on “analogue natives”:

So much joyful digital stuff is only a pleasure because it’s hugely convenient; quick, free, indoors, no heavy lifting. That’s enabled lovely little thoughts to get out there. But as ‘digital natives’ get more interested in the real world; embedding in it, augmenting it, connecting it, weaponising it, arduinoing it, printing it out, then those thoughts/things need to get better. And we might all need to acquire some analogue native skills.

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Published December 10, 2008

Cautious Optimism

Books a better buy in Canada? After all the problems caused by the high Canadian dollar in 2007, Canadian publishers and booksellers are “cautiously optimistic” at the start of this year’s holidays according to Vit Wagner in the Toronto Star:

“The climate is much better this year,” says [Nancy] Frater, proprietor of the Orangeville store BookLore. “My reason for optimism is that in challenging economic times, people do turn to books. As gifts, books have long-lasting value and they’re reasonably priced.”

It’s all relative though:

“I can’t look into the future and say everything’s going to be sanguine,” says Random House of Canada’s [Brad] Martin. “We’re doing a lot of cost cutting, but it’s more discretionary, like cutting the number of sales conferences from two to one. But we believe that the organization that we have now is what we need to successfully publish books in this country at the level that we have been publishing them.

“What I can’t tell you is what is going to happen to the market over the first six months of next year. It’s concerning for all of us. But certainly right now we seem to be performing better in a difficult market than the two other major English-language markets.”

And I’m not sure how this all sits with the recently reported “belt-tightening” in Canadian publishing — including staff changes at KidsCan Press and Thomas Allen postponing most of  their spring 2009 list — and all the grim news coming out of the US.

Is there worse to come? Any Thoughts?

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Published December 10, 2008

“A hint of optimism”

Publishers Weekly is reporting that following “one of publishing’s bleakest weeks” in living memory, there’s a reason for us to keep on living in the form of two recent digital announcements from Penguin and Random House.

Penguin have launched Penguin 2.0 which includes more online content, e-books and POD, as well as an app imaginatively called ‘Penguin Mobile’ which makes the features from Penguin’s website available on the iPhone.

In the meantime, Random House have announced a partnership with Stanza “the popular iPhone e-book reader from Lexcycle” that will make e-books by several RH authors available for free on the platform. According to the press release, the books available “will be drawn from each author’s backlist and will include excerpts for any new hardcovers coming in 2009.”

I have to say I was really surprised how much I like e-books on the iPhone. But what does this mean for single-purpose devices like Sony’s e-Reader and Amazon’s Kindle?

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Published December 10, 2008

FaceOut Books

FaceOut Books, updated every Monday, is a fascinating website about the practice of book cover design:

“This is not a blog to rip apart what we dislike—everyone has a different aesthetic. This is a blog about the challenges and outcomes of a project. We are here to teach and be taught by one another.”

The post from December 8th is by Charlotte Strick who designed the cover for Roberto Bolaño’s much lauded 2666 (pictured):

It’s a designer’s dream to have a mysterious, numerical title to work with. I was a big fan of Rodrigo Corral’s jacket design solution for “The Savage Detectives” (FSG, 2007), so that made it an even greater challenge to take on what is considered by many to be the late author’s “magnum opus”.

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Published December 8, 2008

Monday Miscellany

“I have always enjoyed photographing loners” — A lovely BBC audio slideshow of “Writers’ Rooms” narrated by award winning photographer Eamonn McCabe. The project, appearing weekly in The Guardian and currently on show Madison Contemporary Art in London, captures the working environments of novelists, biographers and poets.

Book Industry Enters Shaky Chapter: NPR’s Lynn Neary looks at last week’s horrorshow.

The 10 Best Books of 2008 according to The New York Times Book Review. Interesting that they’ve also created a mini-site which has promotional material for the top 10 books, including shelf talkers, bookmarks, and posters for bookstores to download . There are also web banners and a video with author Toni Morrison. This is has to be a good idea.

“The news is still big. It’s the newspapers that got small”: A spectacular Roger Ebert rant about the death of criticism :

The celebrity culture is infantilizing us. We are being trained not to think. It is not about the disappearance of film critics. We are the canaries. It is about the death of an intelligent and curious, readership, interested in significant things and able to think critically. It is about the failure of our educational system. It is not about dumbing-down. It is about snuffing out.

Spot. On.  I actually met Roger Ebert a few years back in Pages bookstore. The Toronto International Film Festival must have been on. I had no idea who he was at the time (a colleague told me later), but he was very nice about it.

“The Most Dangerous Man in Publishing”:  A profile of publisher Barney Rosset in Newsweek:

Before Rosset challenged federal and state obscenity laws, censorship (and self-censorship) was an accepted feature of publishing. His victories in high courts helped to change that. Rosset believed that it was impossible to represent life in the streets and in the dark recesses of the heart and mind honestly without using language that in the mid-20th century was considered “obscene”—and therefore illegal to sell or mail. To a significant extent, the books he published convinced others that this was true.

The Well-Tended Bookshelf— Laura Miller on culling one’s book collection:

There are two general schools of thought on which books to keep, as I learned once I began swapping stories with friends and acquaintances. The first views the bookshelf as a self-portrait, a reflection of the owner’s intellect, imagination, taste and accomplishments… The other approach views a book collection less as a testimony to the past than as a repository for the future; it’s where you put the books you intend to read.

Which leads me rather nicely to…

Books At Home: A blog about bookshelves. It is possible that this just too nerdy. Even for me.

Relevance: Brian at daxle.net interviews author Tim Manners , editor and publisher of The Hub and Reveries.com. It’s a fascinating discussion that covers innovation, brands, and the consequences of overabundant advertising (amongst other things).

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Published December 7, 2008

Interview with Carin Goldberg

Success Secrets of the Graphic Design Superstars interviews design doyenne Carin Goldberg. Goldberg has designed book covers for just about all the major US publishers, including Simon & Schuster, Random House, Farrar Straus & Giroux, and Harper Collins:

Book jacket design was not as “sexy” or as visible then as it has become. Art directors at that time had more control. There were fewer, if any, marketing meetings or other sorts of group decision making that often dilute the creative process. It was an easier, more rewarding time to be designing covers.

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Published December 7, 2008

100 Design Book Covers

100 Design Book Covers at Visual Evasion. Amazing (via A Whole Lot of BS):

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Published December 7, 2008

Tschichold: Titan of Typography

The Brillance of Jan Tschichold — Richard Hollis at The Guardian looks at the career of the man who perfected Penguin’s classic paperback:

Tschichold tidied up the horizontally banded covers of the standard Penguins and refined the Penguin emblem. Each of these adjustments hardly changed what we now think of as the “classic” Penguin designs, but the effect was to set new standards for book production in England.

The Guardian also has a slide show of Tschichold’s poster and paperback designs

If you’d like to know more about Tschichold, Thames and Hudson have just  published Jan Tschichold Master Typographer by Cees W. de Jong,  and Raincoast are distributing Hyphen’s Active Literature: Jan Tschichold and New Typography by Christopher Burke — published in March 2008 — here in Canada.

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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 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?

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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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