Wow.

I have just received and read through the 70-odd pages of a publisher's Jan-June 2016 catalogue... and found not a single book that I'd be interested in taking a look at, let alone sitting down and reviewing.

Books I've actually finished lately: 95

The publishing trade shouldn't just be guarding against Google, but against itself, against its increasingly fainhearted conviction about its own necessity.

- Roberto Calasso

[NB The Art of the Publisher (sic) is sent unto you by the same literary eminences responsible for this.]

Body and soul

One of the editors of the Enciclopedia Einaudi invited me one day to write the entry for 'body'. I told him I felt honoured and perplexed, and instinctively asked him who was going to be writing the entry for 'soul'. "There's no plan for such an entry," he immediately replied, as though I'd asked something improper. At that moment I realized we would never have seen eye to eye.

- Roberto Calasso, The Art of the Publisher

And the award for Best Use of the Phrase 'Uncorrected Proof' goes to...

The lives of other writers

Or - Two friends record their recent experiences in the book 'business'.

William Brown, author of Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age



Howard Male, author of Etc Etc Amen

An apology

Whatever the facts in this particular case, the whole thing has the rather suspicious whiff of litigiousness about it.

Mini biog

(from this month's Literary Review)

Books I've actually finished lately: 49b

Even if I do think that my super-advanced reviewer's pre-print copy (unsigned)

is just that teensy bit cooler.

Intriguing...

Back in the pre-WWW days you couldn’t just whip open your phone and command it to give you a rare book: You had to brave odd looks in rare bookstore after bookstore by people who had never heard of The Codex Seraphinianus and who highly suspected you had either hallucinated the existence of such a book or had heard of the book from someone else who had hallucinated it.

- Dangerous Minds, on the (now extant) Rizzoli edition of the Codex Seraphinianus

--
Footnotelet: What does it mean to have a 'French' edition of this (ostensibly untranslatable) book?

Technical Hitch?

A very close reading of Christopher Hitchens' Arguably, by Rob Crilly.

(Sadly I do not own this magnificently dust-jacketed edition. I have the crappy American paperback, with the bright yellow spine.)

VEEP book-signing (Hillary Clinton eat your heart out)

1) WOMAN: Can you write: 'To Alice... This is to get you back.'? 

2) SELINA: Look at us. You pretending to be me signing a book I didn't even write.
      BEN: It's politics in a nutsack.

3) SELINA: What d'you think of that title?
      BEN: Well, you're so full of shit there's a colon right smack-dab in the middle.

- VEEP, 3:1

Just. No.

In 1996 he took up a position as an assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester and settled permanently in England in 1970.

- jacket copy for A Place in the Country* (emphases mine)

--
* This book costs £20, and has fewer than 200 pages.

According to the TLS (9/5/14)...

from some point during Second World War until its sale (sic) in 1979, the [American] copyright to Mein Kampf - and therefore all ensuing royalties(?) - was held by... the United States government.

Umm...

OUPs!

Does anybody else think

that twenty quid is more than can be reasonably expected for a hundred and sixty pages?

Faber, isn't it.

An April Fool(!)

Mae Dappersonne introduces Penguin Now!, a new range of classic novels grammatically updated for 2014.

Should Penguin Now! prove a success, the team are looking into replacing the traditional ? with a more contemporary :/

[With thanks to Alexandra Coghlan]

#BadSex

His mind... will never be able to think of an ear in the same way again.

- Hunting for Dirty Books, an entertaining short film from the team behind the Bad Sex Award.

On Teju Cole

Publishers now pitch their books like Hollywood concepts, so Teju Cole’s first novel, “Open City” (Random House; $25), is being offered as especially appealing to “readers of Joseph O’Neill and Zadie Smith,” and written in a prose that “will remind you” of W. G. Sebald and J. M. Coetzee. This is shorthand for “post-colonialism in New York” (O’Neill), “lively multiracial themes” (Smith), “free-flowing form with no plot, narrated by a scholarly solitary walker” (Sebald), “obviously serious” (Coetzee), and “finely written” (all of the above). There is the additional comedy that Cole’s publishers, determined to retain the baby with the bathwater, boldly conjoin Smith and O’Neill, despite Smith’s hostility, advertised in an essay entitled “Two Paths for the Novel,” to O’Neill’s expensive and upholstered “lyrical realism.”

- James Wood, The New Yorker

The brief history of publishing

quixotic — a word derived from one of the first novels licensed to a publisher.

- Joshua Cohen, New York Times Book Review