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Index: Books & Publishing

A brief guide to Oxford’s ‘Very Short Introductions’.

Michelene Wandor: The first ‘Very Short Introduction’ appeared in the mid-1990s, and now there are nearly 300 books, which have sold over three million copies, and been translated into over twenty-five languages. The virtue is unadorned: A ‘Very Short Introduction’ contains all you need to know in order to decide if you need to know more. The recipe is a tough call: a ‘Very Short Introduction’ must necessarily historicise, provide an epistemological guide to the subject, analyse its conceptual and ideological issues, and wrap it all up – for now.

Gratifying the desires of the analog bibliophile.

I’ve been gathering books for as long as I can remember. But I became a self-conscious book collector only in graduate school, when I lived amid dozens of secondhand shops in Cambridge, Boston, and the wider orbit of New England. Some of those shops survive, but many were closing toward the end of the 90s, with the rise of the Internet. Like many book lovers, I lamented that change.

Charles Dickens in the editor’s chair.

Percy Fitzgerald: There is one view of Dickens which has scarcely been sufficiently dealt with, namely, his relations with his literary brethren and friends, as editor and otherwise. These exhibit him in a most engaging light, and will perhaps be a surprise even to those abundantly familiar with his amiable and gracious ways.

Poetry of ‘a detailed curiosity’.

Alan Wall: Although radically different books, both Michelene Wandor’s writing and Myra Sklarew’s exhibit a detailed curiosity regarding the minutiae of existence, whether itemising seventeenth-century trade or arachnid encounters. The threads that tie dissimilarities together, whether gossamer or memories of Lithuania, hold the poems together with an alert gracefulness.

‘Private Eye at 50’, surrounded by elderly gents in greatcoats.

Michelene Wandor: This laid-back exhibition of images from its first fifty years, nestles in two interconnecting rooms at the V & A, conveniently on the route to the wonderful café. Lining one high wall are covers, each of which catches a chilling moment in recent political history. There is a young Tony Blair, dark hair waving over his head, visiting an elderly person in hospital. Blair has a huge grin, reassuring the patient that ‘there’ll be a spin-doctor along in a minute’.

‘The books are even getting choked in Tehran.’

The report entitled “The books are even getting choked in Tehran” is penned by Akram Dashtban who is a graduate of Social sciences.

Last year she was a runner up in the Report section of the Festival of “Superior media & books” for “What is Future doing down the cup?”

On Brownjohn Land.

Anthony Howell: With Quietism, form fits content as water fits a jug: it’s an abstract fusion that appeals to creative people who value the plastic properties of their medium. In poetry, its focus on familiar experiences or tasks that usually go unremarked, such as breaking eggs, is equivalent to a painter’s preoccupation with still-life. Significance is downplayed, but something is ‘brought to life.’

• The forgotten work of Ainsworth, the ‘footnote’ Gothic novelist.

This is the dark side of those progressive Victorians we all know about, with their trains and telegraphs, their technological advances and their scientific discoveries, their liberal politics and their enlightened scepticism.

• Shelf life: just check out these items.

The long-forgotten volumes that emerged from that excavation were quickly funneled through the occasionally deviant filter of none other than Richard Prince, the artist who for decades has been compiling and reworking the artifacts and autographs of what he calls “anything Beat, hippie or punk,” along with everything else that has struck his eclectic fancy over the years. It’s a peculiar way to make a living, and one that more than a few of us wish we’d thought of.

Anthony Trollope’s ‘English tale, on English life, with clerical flavour’.

Lucy Sheehan: Even as Trollope’s maps produce a comforting image of self-contained local communities, they also expertly trace lines of power, grafting social networks onto spatial locations to provide a cartography of social and political influence.

• The South Tower: Cool, not disengaged, but slightly detached.

“I asked him to name two actors that from his viewpoint represented the two towers,” said Toth. “One of the names he gave me was Gary Cooper. I was dancing around the Internet and somehow came upon Cary Grant. It all just fit together and answered itself and gave a little bit of a human persona to it.”

• Why no one shortlists Man Booker’s official announcements.

Julian Barnes, Carol Birch, Patrick deWitt, Esi Edugyan, Stephen Kelman and A.D. Miller are today, Tuesday 6 September, announced as the six shortlisted authors for the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

Death to the Reading Class.

Marshall Poe: If we in the Reading Class want to teach the the reading-averse public more effectively than we have in the past, we must rid ourselves of our reading fetish and admit that we’ve been falling down on the job. Once we take this painful step, then a number of interesting options for closing the knowledge gap become available. The most promising of these options is using audio and video to share what we know with the public at large.

• A brabble at an aerodrome? WTF, m8?

By DAVID BLACKBURN [The Spectator] – This is the age of the social network. ‘Re-tweet’ has been officially recognised by both dictionaries as a noun and a verb. It has been joined by an additional definition of ‘cougar’, a noun to describe an older women seeking sex with a much younger man, and ‘Textspeak’, a […]

• Rimbaud: ‘present at the hatching’.

Rimbaud suddenly saw that the true subject of a new poetry couldn’t be the usual things—landscapes, flowers, pretty girls, sunsets—but, rather, the way those things are refracted through one’s own unique mind.