The list, care of the Guardian.
Thursday, April 18, 2013
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
11 Book Burnings in History
The list, care of Mental Floss.
From said list...
6. The Library of Congress
In 1800, President Adams decided that the new government needed a place to hold "such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress." Thus the Library of Congress was born. Only 14 years later though, the Library, along with the White House and much of Washington, D.C., was burned to the ground by the invading British. Considering there were only 3000 books in the library at the time, this burning wasn’t the most terrible loss, but it led directly to a much worse one. Famously, Thomas Jefferson, who had the largest private library in America at the time at around 6500 volumes, offered to sell his collection to the government to replace what had been lost. The books were happily accepted and everything was great until 1851 when an accidental fire destroyed more than two-thirds of Jefferson’s collection and two-thirds of the Library’s total collection. So if the British had not burned down the Library in the first place, we might have far more of the president’s personal books still today.7. Chinese Libraries
During World War II, it was policy for the Japanese military to destroy libraries. In fact, there are few wars in which you won’t find a major library destroyed; before the internet they were some of the only places to find written examples of a city or country’s culture and heritage, and therefore made very symbolic targets. But few armies destroyed as many libraries, or as many books, as the Japanese in China. They burned eight major libraries and their collections to the ground, resulting in the loss of millions of books.It Will Be the Most Expensive Book Ever Sold
It's the Bay Psalm Book and it will be going to auction in November expected to get as much as $30 million.
From a piece on ABC News...
The Bay Psalm Book, which is the first book printed in what is now the United States, comes from the Old South Church in Boston, one of two copies of the book in its collection.
“One copy, the copy we are keeping, was bequeathed to us by our fifth minister, the Reverend Thomas Prince,” Nancy Taylor, Old South Church’s senior minister and CEO, told ABCNews.com.
Sotheby’s specialists used comparables to value the book. “We have sold books as much as $11.5 million in the past, which are far less rare than this,” Redden said. The last Bay Psalm Book was bought at a Sotheby’s auction in 1947 for $151,000 by Yale University.
The Kama Sutra - There's an App for That
State-of-the-art technology has transformed illustrations from the 2,000-year-old Sanskrit sex manual into pop-up holograms.
From a piece in the Guardian...
Each image can be seen from all angles, meaning users are offered a complete view of the guide's sexual diagrams.
The free app comes with a new version of the text, which is based on ancient Indian Hindu philosophies and is believed to have been written about 2,000 years ago.
The Kama Xcitra promises to help couples master positions from the book and ensure they are brought "closer to the action than ever before".
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
The New York Review of Books Turns 50
New York Magazine sits down with its founding editor, Robert Silvers.
From the piece...
You didn’t have any notion this would become an institution in this way?
No. I didn’t know what was going to happen. I thought it was very possible that I would come back, and it was very kind of Jack to say my job would be held open. I asked Barbara Epstein that morning if she would join me as co-editor. She said yes. We met the next night with Lizzie in the darkened Harper’s offices. We looked through the books that had come in for review, and we thought of various people who might write on them.
The first issue appeared dated February 1, 1963. It has been called the best first issue of a magazine ever published. Looking at these names glittering on the cover, it’s astonishing how many, from W. H. Auden to Gore Vidal, Mary McCarthy to Norman Mailer to William Styron, John Berryman to Robert Lowell to Robert Penn Warren, and on and on, are still recognizable.
I remember Jason called his friend Wystan Auden. Lizzie called Fred Dupee—Lizzie and Barbara both. Lizzie called Mary McCarthy, and so did I. Barbara called Gore Vidal. I called Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, and Norman Mailer. In the next two days I talked with Jonathan Miller, who wrote on Updike, and then with Philip Rahv, and Dwight MacDonald, who wrote on Arthur Schlesinger.
What did you say?
I said, we’re starting a new book review, and would they write on the book I was sending? They had three weeks. There was no question of payment. No one asked about it. Sometimes they said, “I’d rather do another book.” They all just assumed a new book review was needed.
Monday, April 15, 2013
What's Next for the New York Times Book Review?
They have a new editor so what's coming?
From a piece on the Daily Beast...
Are you worried about the future of books?
No,
because fundamentally people love stories and they want information,
and a book, to my mind, is still one of the best ways to tell stories
and deliver information and I don’t think it’s going anywhere. I think
that’s part of human nature.
As
a longtime fan of the Book Review, the one criticism I would offer is
there are times, reading from Berlin or California, when it has seemed
to me a little too focused on the tastes of people in Manhattan. To what
extent are you looking to address a New York readership and to what
extent are you looking to a national readership?
We’re
a national newspaper now and that’s even more so with the Book Review,
because we are the last freestanding book review section in the country,
so I definitely consider our audience not only to be national but
global. Just as we read The Guardian here at the Review, we have a
readership in other countries. There are so many books that are
conceived on a global way in the same way that’s happened in the film
industry. We have an international audience. There are a lot of people
who are interested in books in English who live all over the world, and
we want to address them as well.
Rare John Keats Portrait Goes to Auction
The portrait was taken from life.
From an article in the Guardian...
The miniature, which is ascribed by Bonhams to the "circle of [painter] Charles Hayter" is set to be auctioned by Bonhams next month, and is expected to raise between £10,000 and £15,000. Tonkin said it "has the power to move anyone who has ever admired Keats's work".
She dated the image to between 1810 and 1815, judging by the clothes – a black double-breasted coat and waistcoat, white frilled chemise, stock and tie – that Keats is wearing in the portrait. Keats would pass his exams to become a doctor in 1816; by 1819 he had published The Eve of St Agnes, with Ode to Psyche, Ode to a Nightingale and Ode on a Grecian Urn all written the same year. In 1821, aged just 25, he died in Rome, and was buried by Severn in the protestant cemetery in that city, his grave inscribed, "Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water".
Sunday, April 14, 2013
Saturday, April 13, 2013
Unfinished Richard Scarry Manuscript to Be Published
A collection of sketches and text featuring Lowly Worm is due to be colored and completed by Scarry's son.
From a piece in the Guardian...
News that an unfinished manuscript by children's illustrator Richard Scarry is to be coloured up by his son and published this autumn may not immediately thrill the children of today, but it will provoke waves of nostalgia in those of us who grew up with his busy anthropomorphised beasts.
The book will feature one of Scarry's best-loved and most ubiquitous characters, the alpine-hatted, singly-shod Lowly Worm who drives an apple and was probably the first worm in space. The unfinished book of sketches and text, devoted to the cheerful invertebrate, was discovered among Scarry's papers, and his son Huck, also an artist, is colouring and completing it. Appropriately, since its publication will form part of the 50th anniversary celebrations of The Best Word Book Ever, it will be published under the characteristically hyperbolic title Best Lowly Worm Book Ever.
Friday, April 12, 2013
Maya Angelou - How I Write
She's interviewed about writing and her process in the Daily Beast.
From the post...
How do you approach the distinction between straight autobiography and autobiographical fiction?
Well,
I don’t think there’s such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I
say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind. I promised myself
that I would write as well as I can, tell the truth, not to tell everything
I know, but to make sure that everything I tell is true, as I
understand it. And to use the eloquence which my language affords me.
English is a beautiful language, don’t you think? I speak a number of
languages, but none are more beautiful to me than English.
What is your second-favorite language, of those you speak?
I
would say Spanish, because I speak it best, I guess. I used to think
French, but when I’m doing a live promotion in France, and I look for a
word, like “tablecloth,” if it does not come out right away, it will
snap out of my mouth in Spanish.
You
have said that nothing frightens you as much as writing, but nothing
satisfies you as much either. What frightens you about it?
Will
I write a sentence that will just float off the page? Easy reading is
damn hard writing. But if it’s right, it’s easy. It’s the other way
round, too. If it’s slovenly written, then it’s hard to read. It doesn’t
give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader.
Thursday, April 11, 2013
Shakespeare and the Sway of the Sea
Can one seriously imagine that the Bard, who wrote so
stunningly of the sea, never truly saw it? Royal Shakespeare Company
associate director David Farr on the power that the ocean held over the
poet.
From a post on the Daily Beast...
What these plays all need, in
production, is that sensitivity to the sea. They need a strange, elusive
poetry that renders fortune, fate, chance (all words constantly used in
these plays) as agents of a greater power. That makes the sea both God
and Devil, and that makes man tiny and vulnerable. In the Twelfth Night
I directed for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the world of Illyria was a
hotel, its furniture seemingly drifting on an endless wave, the flotsam
of human disappointment. What one learns in working on Twelfth Night
is that the truly shipwrecked souls of this play are not Viola and
Sebastian but the wretched inhabitants of Illyria, clinging to the
driftwood of their dashed hopes as their world goes under.
But
we are not just overwhelmed by the ocean, we also contain it. Orsino in
Twelfth Night describes his passion as “all as hungry as the sea”
(2.4.101). The human soul is an ocean tossed by storms of passion, deep
and bottomless in its need for succor and nourishment. Storm is a
metaphor for our own desires.
And then again we are just a drop of water. Lonely, lost, bereft.Wednesday, April 10, 2013
BBC Plans Whaling Drama Based on Moby-Dick Inspiration
The story of dramatic survival of 14-year-old Nantucket seafarer Thomas Nickerson following a shipwreck begins filming in Malta.
From a piece in the Guardian...
Nickerson and seven other survivors spent three months at sea before rescue, with some finding themselves on the Pacific Island Henderson and others resorting to cannibalism at sea.
Melville is widely believed to have read Chase's book about the sinking although he would not have read Nickerson's own account which was written 55 years later in 1876, just seven years before he died aged 78.
However the BBC will put the cabin boy at the centre of its own retelling of the events and is due to cast a well-known American actor in the role of the older Nickerson recounting his experiences.
According to the producers of The Whale, which is being made with the US broadcaster Discovery, Moby Dick is clearly inspired by many of the grisly experiences of the Essex crew as documented by Chase.
10 Ways Self Publishing Has Changed the Book World
The list, care of the Guardian.
From said list...
1. There is now a wider understanding of what publishing is – and that it is more difficult than it looks. The industry has long suffered the irony that effective publishing is most evident when invisible; it is only when standards are less than felicitous that we realise how well what we read is managed most of the time. Now that school cookbooks, or fundraising brochures for sports teams, can be effectively self-published, people are learning the process and what is involved. In the past, the industry has tended to recruit heavily from those in the know (the offspring of former publishers and authors being particularly well-represented); wider awareness of publishing is now promoting wider diversity.
2. Gone is our confidence that publishers and agents know exactly what everyone wants to (or should) read, and can spot all the material worth our attention. Soft porn and fantasy have emerged as particularly under-represented in the industry's official output.
Tuesday, April 09, 2013
Monday, April 08, 2013
Does Poetry Still Matter?
Short answer, yes.
From a piece on NPR...
"We all need poetry," Smith says — even hedge fund managers. "The moments in our lives that are characterized by language that has to do with necessity or the market, or just, you know, things that take us away from the big questions that we have, those are the things that I think urge us to think about what a poem can offer." Even the students who probably won't keep writing poetry can learn from poems, Smith says. "The things that a poem can teach them to see and to hear and to listen for are necessary."
One thing that isn't necessary, Smith says, is rhyme — no "moons in June" in her class. "I want them to think in a way that feels more natural and more in keeping with the lexicon in which they live," she says.
For the Love of Commas
Benjamin Samuel makes a passionate defense of the comma in McSweeney's.
From the piece...
10. Dear Benjamin,
I return you to this salutation. See how that comma hangs there? See how it embraces the end of the name? See how its usage does indeed suggest that care has been taken, thought given? This specific use of the comma, one that accompanies a carefully chosen salutation (in this case “Dear” meaning loved one, one who is close to the heart), should clearly be taken as a sign of glad-tidings, and also as a reason to pause, to take a breath of expectation before proceeding to the following line.
Sunday, April 07, 2013
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Are Travel Guidebooks Dead? Spoiler Alert: No.
The Huffington Post offers some reasons why they're better than what you get on your device.
From the post...
Paper Maps
Ebook maps are hopeless. The format just doesn't lend itself to usable maps. Once cached, Google maps on a smartphone or tablet are convenient but don't quite replace a good paper map with a map key that locates important highlights and is easy to annotate. If I need directions (as I surely will), I'm more comfortable whipping out a paper map on a busy street than asking a stranger to pour over my tablet. In fact, just taking out the map can attract a helpful local.
Easier to Use
Unlike a novel which is read sequentially, using a travel guide involves a lot of jumping around. Flipping through paper pages or turning to a good index to find what you're looking for is easier than the tapping, searching and bookmarking in an ebook. Should I visit this village or that village? In a guidebook, I can put a finger on one page while reading another, easily comparing the two places. Not so in an ebook, let alone an app. And, it's still useful to hand-write a notation, cross out a phone number or circle an essential sight.
Saturday, April 06, 2013
The New Colossus
The Los Angeles Review of Books discusses the poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty.
From the piece...
WHEN I TELL PEOPLE that I am writing my first poetry column for the Los Angeles Review of Books about the poem that is on the base of the Statue of Liberty, they often look at me quizzically, as if they only kind of know what I am talking about. They may be thinking, “Did I know there was a poem on the Statue of Liberty?” or, better yet, “Yes, I know there is a poem there, but I can’t remember how it goes or who it is by.” In order to put an end to the awkward silence that often follows, I sometimes say, “You know: ‘Give me your tired, your poor, et cetera, et cetera,’” at which point some people nod happily along and in unison with “et cetera” precisely because, if they know the poem at all, this is exactly where their knowledge of the lines ends.
In fact, it turns out that almost no one knows the entire poem that adorns the statue’s pedestal, and very few people have ever heard of the poet who wrote it. In this column — the first of what I hope will be many to come, each about a single poem, often a poem that we think we know but don’t really know — I will immerse you in the stories that poems tell, stories about their own making, about the world from which they came and the world in which they continue to exist, stories about what we as readers have done with them over time. In the case of “The New Colossus” — the formally stunning, politically subversive, yet oddly forgettable poem that Emma Lazarus composed in November 1883 and that was engraved on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in 1903 — this story take us from ancient Greece to Hurricane Sandy, from US anti-immigrant legislation to the crimes committed against Russian Jews at the end of the 19th century, from the challenges faced by a woman poet who wrote for a very public audience to the other, silent monument that displays these lines.
Collection of 60,000+ Rare Comic Books Go Up for Auction
A secret collector in Vancouver is putting his giant stash up on the auction block.
From a story in the Province...
The East Vancouver man putting the collection up for sale isn’t revealing his secret identity, but has told Able Auctions he was inspired by his older brother and began collecting when he was three years old, more than 40 years ago.
“The mystery consignor travelled across North America, visiting an estimated several hundred comic book conventions and attended many of Vancouver’s local comic book stores to fill his desire to find some of the world’s best comics,” reads a release from the auction house handling the sale.
The collection features some of the most iconic in superhero lore including Fantastic Four, Star Wars, X-Men, Captain America and many more.
A highlight of the auction is a professionally restored issue of The Incredible Hulk #1 from 1962, a personal favourite of the mysterious consignor. A near-mint copy of that comic has previously been valued at about $22,000.
7 Myths about Book Editing
The list, care of the Huffington Post.
From said list...
Myth #1: A good writer doesn’t need an editor.
In these days of self-publication and “service” publishers -- who take a percentage of sales for letting the author do all of the work -- you hear this a lot. “I’ve slaved over this manuscript for years. I checked it through a hundred times. Microsoft Word’s Spelling and Grammar comes up clean. It’s ready for publication.”
Want an example of a professional book from a world-class author who convinced her publishers to put out the book as-is, without a deep developmental edit (see #3 below)? Look at J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Pretty good book, and it’s sold millions of copies, absolutely -- but it’s at least a hundred pages longer than it needs to be. There’s needless repetition, uneven pacing, and side-plots that go nowhere. You’ll notice that the previous and subsequent books in the bestselling series were much shorter and much tighter. Rowling worked more closely with her editors.
Here’s the fact: if you want your book to be strong, clean, professional, and appealing, for it to affect the readers as you want it to affect them, you need to have it professionally edited. There’s never been a text written that didn’t need editing. By the time you’ve spent weeks, months, or years on a project, you can’t see the words any more. You can see the ideas -- the concepts, arguments, plot, and characters -- but not every word that’s on the page, or that isn’t, or where there are gaping holes in logic or jumps in style. An editor will. It’s what they’re paid to do.
Friday, April 05, 2013
How Google Earth Can Help Writers
Write what you know? How about write what you can learn using Google Maps?
From a piece in the New York Times...
If you want to write about North Korea, it’s not hard to find pictures
of the monuments and colossal boulevards of Pyongyang, the capital city,
because these are the images sanctioned and disseminated by the
government, and all that any visitor allowed into North Korea is allowed
to see of it. But if you are interested in the rest of the country — at
least if you are a writer who wants to put characters on the ground
there — the obvious problem becomes: How to render what these characters
see? How to describe the topography of the landscape? In essence, how
to breach the misanthropy of a country just for getting its street names
right?
Enter Google Earth. Enter Google Maps.
I happened on Google Earth a few years ago while reading up on
Scientology and, O.K., about John Travolta and his demesne, which can
apparently accommodate two private planes. But don’t believe me, see for
yourself: here are the coordinates on Google Earth. . . . Wait — what? I
downloaded the program and was, in an instant, floored by this
technology. Forget Travolta’s place. I could visit the Grand Canyon,
which, unbelievably, I once drove right by without stopping. I could
check out aerial photos of cattle worldwide and see if they really do
orient themselves along a north-south axis while they graze. I could
return to my childhood home in Cleveland. And perhaps most
astonishingly, I could take a look at North Korea — at a map of the
country overlaid with satellite imagery and captions. What an incredible
resource for a writer. If you can’t get to a place yourself, spy on it.
Thursday, April 04, 2013
Rehabilitating Zelda Fitzgerald
This year sees a flurry of interest in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s mad, bad wife – and some surprising revelations, as Therese Anne Fowler found when she was researching her novel on Zelda.
From a piece in the Telegraph...
Zelda, who loved dancing ballet, who enjoyed writing (her works included the semi-autobiographical novel of her rocky marriage, Save Me the Waltz), and who was a talented painter, attempted to pursue her interests as Scott moved them from place to place, searching for the right opportunity to have it all. One prominent critic noted that Zelda was “cleverer than Scott, if the truth were known”. He was greatly angered by her novel, for instance; he felt their life was “his material”. Scott drank more, wrote less, grew more insecure and demanding. Fights, jealousies, and suspicion came to define their life together. The downward spiral that would lead to her breakdown and, later, his had begun.
Zelda spent much of her later life in mental institutions. But did she really go “insane?” As I dug through material, I got to know a woman who not only wasn’t crazy but was far more intelligent, talented, and clear-thinking than popular culture would have us believe.
Wednesday, April 03, 2013
10 Things to Know about Kickstarting a Book
The list, care of the Huffington Post.
From the piece...
Be a Good Kickstarter Citizen
A good rule for life on the internet (and life in general) is to spend 80% of your time giving, 10% asking, and the last 10% saying thank you. Get involved in the Kickstarter publishing community and back some cool projects well before your own campaign launches. Direct your followers to projects you like and support (we do this on social media and in semi-regular “Bookish Kickstarters You Should Back” posts at Book Riot).
Pay attention to what works, and learn from others’ successes and mistakes. You’re more likely to get positive responses to your requests for support when you’ve established yourself as someone who is willing to support others’ projects too. Also, there’s just a ton of really interesting stuff being done with publishing Kickstarters, and you don’t want to miss out.
Get Proof of Concept
Prose is a relatively tough sell on Kickstarter, as it is difficult to render, sketch, or otherwise prototype. (Unsurprisingly, illustrated books and designed objects tend to do much better). And fiction is even more difficult than non-fiction. For fiction, a sample is tough to beat, and for non-fiction a clear outline of what you are doing, how you are going to do it, and why a reader might care about helping you make it happen are crucial. Give your project description personality and passion; at the start of Kickstarter campaign that’s what’s going to get your momentum going. Readers have to like you and your project, and they have to trust that you are going to do a good job.
Tuesday, April 02, 2013
Tom Stoppard Writes Pink Floyd Play
In honor of the 40th anniversary of Pink Floyd's classic album, Stoppard has written a short play for the BBC.
From a piece in the Guardian...
Stoppard's hour-long play, called Dark Side, will incorporate music from the album, which stayed in the charts for 741 weeks until 1988, and what is described as a "fantastical and psychedelic story that takes listeners on a journey through their imaginations".
Stoppard, a long-time Pink Floyd fan who was first approached with the idea of writing a play about the album by a friend in 1973, said: "This is more or less, I think, the first time anything like this has been done on radio.
"[I thought] 'Yes I definitely want to do that,' but had no idea for a long time what I would do. Finally, I found some time and sat down and listened to the album for the thousandth time and picked up from the beginning and kept going."
The lead roles will be taken by Iwan Rheon, best known for his portrayal of Simon Bellamy in E4's Misfits, and stage actor Amaka Okafor, with contributions from Nighy, Sewell and Adrian Scarborough.
Pink Floyd's David Gilmour said: "I have read the script of Tom's radio play and found it fascinating.
Shakespeare - Tax Dodging Food Hoarder
Could Shakespeare’s Coriolanus have been his way of trying to expunge a guilty conscience?
From a piece in the Sunday Times...
The play depicts a famine created and exploited by rich merchants and politicians to maximise the price of food and includes the lines: “They ne’er cared for us yet: suffer us to famish, and their store-houses crammed with grain”.
It has now emerged that as Shakespeare wrote the play at the height of the 1607 food riots, he was himself hoarding grain. As one of the biggest landowners in Warwickshire, he was ideally placed to push prices up and then sell at the top of the market.
“There was another side to Shakespeare besides the brilliant playwright — as a ruthless businessman who did all he could to avoid taxes, maximise profits at others’ expense and exploit the vulnerable — while also writing plays about their plight to entertain them,” said Jayne Archer, a researcher in Renaissance literature at Aberystwyth University.
Monday, April 01, 2013
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