As we move into the digital age, the well-made copy has come to occupy a familiar, almost nostalgic middle ground between the aura of an original and the ghostly quality of a computer file. A mass-produced paper book, though bulkier and more expensive, may continue to be more desirable because it carries with it this material presence.
Peter Riley: ‘The judging criteria, being tied to a system of familiarity and recurrence, are inevitably subjective and inevitably self-propagating. What chance is there of objectivity in an art where there is no common agreement as to what constitutes its qualities?
Will the new NYPL still support scholars — especially the independent scholars who need it most — and give students a chance to know and love real books as well as their digital shadows? Can public library budgets support the constant upgrading needed to keep a digital workspace usable?
By TIM WALKER [Independent] – From the ancient Roman calendar to Facebook’s brain-melting new “Timeline” profile layout, most of us are accustomed to visualising history as linear; a middle, book-ended by arbitrary beginnings and ends. And yet, timelines designed as a single straight axis, with a regular and measured distribution of dates, have only existed [...]
[From the announcement online] – Seventy writers, mostly from the East Midlands, will be reading from their work at ‘States of Independence’, an events programme at the Clephan Building, De Montfort University, Oxford Street, Leicester, on 17 March 2012. The event also features participants from independent publishers and writing organisations staffing bookstalls and displaying their [...]
Saturday, 25 February 2012
Anthony O’Hear: There is one respect in which Maistre might himself be too much a figure of his own age: he is as much a believer in progress as his Enlightenment opponents. It is just a different sort of progress.
Thursday, 23 February 2012
He wanted to talk numbers, percentages, how the distribution worked. It was a lesson — and often enough he wanted a lesson in return, as he sat on his sofa with an ever-present rum and coke. It was like he never quit publishing.
All the main poetry publishers – Faber, Picador, Jonathan Cape, Carcanet and Bloodaxe – have practising poets as editors, and a house’s tone and fortunes can be radically altered depending on the poet in charge of the poems of others.
The graphics are vivid, and for a newspaper that long limited itself to small line drawings, it is still surprising to see illustrations in color and reflecting careful selection designed to underscore the theme of the books.
Wilkie Collins never did put Dickens in the top echelon of novelists. That honour he reserved for James Fenimore Cooper, Walter Scott, and Honoré de Balzac…
Wednesday, 25 January 2012
Martin Sorrell: The type is blotchy, made worse by an expiring ribbon and a clutter of corrections hammered over the several typos. This ‘pomenvylope’, and the few others I’ve managed to read, speak to me of the frustration Moore lived with for the decades after brief fame had become neglect. They express the dogged endurance of a poet still possessed of a strong voice and the wish to have it heard.
“The consumer is not asking for this,” said Jane Friedman, CEO of Open Road Media, an e-book publisher that is experimenting with enhanced titles. “It takes it from being a reading experience to something else, and we are publishers.”
Thursday, 19 January 2012
very education publisher knows that its biggest growth opportunities are digital products and services, expansion into global markets, and efficient investment in its content-based enterprises (like books and journalism).
Wednesday, 28 December 2011
he dream of a true universal language is in the end dependent on perfect translation. Aside from the lessons of Babel, the history of the Bible istelf offers other cautionary tales, particularly this year – the 400th anniversary of that great cathedral of language, the King James Bible. The anniversary has proved to be both a cause for celebration and for reflection on whether there can ever be an ideal or final version of such a work. Isn’t every new rendering bound to reflect the social and cultural context in which its translator works ?
Saturday, 24 December 2011
Type was once the tangible province of engravers and metal casters who labored in unforgiving but enduring media. To make a C with a cedilla, for example, involved a lot more effort and thought than holding down the Option key on your Mac. A comma-shaped steel appendage had to be lashed with string to the bottom of the C punch to produce a new matrix.
Alan Wall: The Janus Face of Metaphor. | Clues and Labyrinths. | Ruin, the collector and sad mortality.
Joseph de Maistre’s ‘different sort of progress’.
Anthony O’Hear: There is one respect in which Maistre might himself be too much a figure of his own age: he is as much a believer in progress as his Enlightenment opponents. It is just a different sort of progress.