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, 18 January 2012
By George Orwell. WHEN I WORKED in a second-hand bookshop—so easily pictured, if you don’t work in one, as a kind of paradise where charming old gentlemen browse eternally among calf-bound folios—the thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people. Our shop had an exceptionally interesting stock, yet I doubt whether […]
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.
Wednesday, 21 December 2011
Alan Wall: The collection exists in order to hold ruin at bay, so there is an acute poignancy to the ruin of any collection. Particle meets anti-particle; annihilation ensues. Alfred Russel Wallace spent years putting together his collection of animals and plants from the Amazon. The brig on to which they were loaded for return to England caught fire, and almost everything was destroyed.
Wednesday, 21 December 2011
John Ferriar: Proudly he shews, with many a smile elate,
The scrambling subjects of the private plate;
While Time their actions and their names bereaves,
They grin forever in the guarded leaves.
Tuesday, 13 December 2011
“Bruges-La-Morte,” a tale of obsessive love, is a Symbolist novel, perhaps the Symbolist novel. The movement (officially promulgated by Jean Moréas in his “Manifeste du symbolisme” of 1886) is best understood as a vague composite of moods and formal preoccupations that pervaded the music and art of that era, no less than its poetry and prose.
Thursday, 8 December 2011
I stayed in touch with Logue for a while after our meeting. I received a couple of beautiful hand-written cards and spoke on the phone a few times, but I got the impression he was already bored of me. Then one afternoon a postman knocked at my door with a large brown tube. I opened it and inside was one of Logue’s poster poems from the 1960s, with a note of thanks inside.
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.