Here, via David Crotty at The Scholarly Kitchen, is a brisk introduction to the history of our 26 letters.
If you don’t see a video here, please click on the title of this post in order to view it in your browser.
The following week Mr Crotty brought us another video, this one on our ever changing pronunciations:
I suppose that in order to keep your audience when you make a video on such topics you really do have to act energetically enthusiastic.
Thanks to Beth Luey on the SHARP listserv, here is a story from The New York Times about a scheme to steal classic nineteenth-century Russian books from Libraries around Europe. “In most cases, the originals were replaced with high-quality copies that mimicked even their foxing — a sign of a sophisticated operation.”
Now the theft of valuable books is of course serious: “The books are worth tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars each.” Thus far, according to Europol, 170 volumes have been taken. In various countries arrests have begun to be made, so far all of Georgian nationals.
The story told by The New York Times is fascinating, but it glosses over what to my mind is the most impressive part of the operation. Just how, with a short window of opportunity, do you produce fake books of which it can be said that “the reproductions were so sophisticated only experts could tell them apart from the originals”? This is a two-part question: you’ve got to get the book to your reproduction center, and then you’ve got to be able to produce a duplicate which is accurate down to the rubbing wear pattern on the leather binding, and the foxing on the pages. Well, you’re obviously not going to bring your printing equipment into the library and work away unnoticed in a corner, so I guess the first takeaway in this account is how extraordinarily lax security must be in all these libraries. No doubt you keep your fingers crossed that nobody notices the absence of a volume while you copy it and smuggle it (the new “it”) back into the library. Maybe the few cases in which no replacement volume was provided represent the instances in which library security’s vigilance actually worked.
I cannot begin to imagine the work involved in producing a one-off facsimile (though of course, why should it be a one-off? Maybe the gang produce multiple facsimiles which they can also sell into the bibliophile market — though the risk of flooding the market must become a bit of an issue.) Presumably these originals, produced by letterpress as they of necessity were, are being photographed, and reprinted by lithography or digitally. The “experts” who couldn’t tell them from the originals were presumably not printing experts. Presumably matching the paper is another problem: they obviously cannot acquire nineteenth-century paper, but they at least have to match color and weight/thickness as closely as possible. The faking of the bindings is also pretty impressive: but you can see how handwork applied carefully and skillfully over a lengthy time period could achieve the prize. But making a book like this comes at a cost. You’d need to be selling the original books for thousands of dollars in order to be making any money on the deal.
Am I unduly cynical in wondering whether an undetectable facsimile is much worse than the original? There’s no “magic” in the idea that this actual book was handled by Alexander Pushkin; and of course it probably wasn’t — authors do not by and large hang about in publishers’ warehouses fondling their books — any such laying on of hands would have been by some Prince Galitzin or other who had bought a set of sheets and caused them to be bound up to create another volume for his personal library. True, we can find interesting traces of ancient interaction with books in these old volumes, underlinings, pencilled comments, folded down page corners, coffee stains and so on, but these facsimile merchants are no doubt faithfully copying all of that. In a way one might even argue that with rare old books, presenting to the public a facsimile is every bit as good as handling the actual original. This is sort of how I feel about the Elgin Marbles and all that “stolen” heritage stuff — keep a faithful copy, and if there’s a student who has to touch the original, let them go to Athens.
It seems amazing that we tolerate the vast disparities in education for reading (and everything else of course) that are entrenched in US society. Poverty is the root, of course. Research from 1995 showed that higher-income children had heard 30,000,000 more words by the age of four than their poorer age-mates.* Kids need to hear words in order to learn them, and not all parents are aware of the need to just talk at young children who in all likelihood don’t even understand at that time what’s being said to them, but add lots of items to their vocabulary without realizing it. The Great Expectations School, an account by Dan Brown (no; not that one) of a year spent as a novice teacher in a poor section of the Bronx, tells us of a mother, keen to help, who has to say that as an unmarried mother with four young kids and a couple of jobs, she just cannot find any time to read to her child. In an NPR piece about First Book, a nonprofit established in 1992 to ensure quality education access for all children in North America, we are told of a poor section of Philadelphia where in an area with 10,000 children researchers found a total of thirty three books in all of the homes, while in another part of town homes contained an average of three hundred books per child.
Talk, sing, read, write and play — these are the five basic practices for building a foundation for literacy in children. And as NPR’s Morning Edition of 30 December 2015 told us, these practices are reinforced by libraries. Lynn Neary’s NPR report is the second of a 3-part series. The first, from 29 December, linked to above, features the work of First Book. The final episode, about Sesame Street, is here.
It seems obvious that your public library is bound to be a key location of information, knowledge and self-education, especially in literacy. But we none of us can resist telling libraries what they should be. Here’s the BBC suggesting that libraries should be more like coffee shops (delivered via Publishing Cambridge). Libraries do seem poised to become everything to all people: just last weekend John Oliver was showing us libraries lending out leaf blowers, air fryers, stuffed birds — and books of course, the subject nowadays of coordinated conservative objection.
And here comes The New Publishing Standard telling us all this lack of reading is really the fault of publishers: we are just not producing enough books for people who can’t read books! Well, while we book-lovers might like a world where free books were forced on anyone who said they didn’t want any books, the root causes of literacy failure lie deeper than mere availability of books. Obviously school is the front line, as ProPublica’s piece, referenced by TNPS, points out directly. Their piece includes an interactive map of the USA which gives lowest reading rates county by county.
As a nation we now seem to have moved on from worrying about people not reading to focussing of the problem of people reading the wrong things. Banning books may be enough to soothe conservative impulses, but luckily they seem not to have figured out that just cutting funding for schools would be more effective! If kids were unable to read at all, then Moms for Liberty could start worrying about something else.
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* Can this be true? Probably not. In 2020 Edutopia suggested that researchers nowadays are questioning the number, which was actually 32 million, though nobody’s yet disproved it. Apparently the number came from a single study by psychologists Betty Hart and Todd Risley using just forty-two families. The word gap even has its own Wikipedia page! I suspect we can all afford to compromise on the number, and agree that the gap can be described as “large”.
Julian Barnes speculates at the London Review of Books about how we remember artworks. He is talking about paintings but throws in this interesting bookish aside: “We think we remember works of art rather well; and probably assume that the greater the work of art, and the more powerfully it strikes us, the more accurate our mental image of it must be. Maybe this is the case with professional art historians: I assume that they have – must have – a better visual memory than amateur art-lovers, and perhaps even artists. After all, literary critics in my experience have a better memory of books than most readers, and better even than that of many writers (and they have certainly read more than the average novelist, whose gaps are sometimes shocking). But memory is such a shifty and shifting process, constantly duping us.”
In La Prisonnière Proust has M. Bergotte becoming dizzy and eventually expiring before Vermeer’s “View of Delft”, muttering “‘Little patch of yellow wall, with a sloping roof, little patch of yellow wall”. Proust saw this painting in 1902 and again in 1921 when it had a Begotte-like dizzying effect on him. (But he didn’t die; that happened the following year.) He declared it “the most beautiful painting in the world”. It is pretty cool — I think the sky is what makes it, though it might be the shadows in the water. On his second viewing Proust “discovered” the blue figures in the foreground on the rose-colored sand.
Barnes makes much of Bergotte’s calling the wall yellow — it’s orange he says — though one man’s orange may well be another man’s yellow, particularly where different languages are concerned: after all what the dying Bergotte was saying is “Petit pan de mur jaune avec un auvent, petit pan de mur jaune“!* I assume the bit of wall we are talking about is just to the left of the pointed tower above the barge, but it’s hard to be sure at this scale. (And auvent doesn’t really mean roof.)
Barnes ends up wondering if it is “the case that the greater the work of art the better you remember it?”, deciding against. We just have lousy memories, and of course that’s why rereading a book is never the same experience. It also might be pointed out that we are no longer the same person in 1921 as we were in 1902, so our reaction to any work of art cannot but be different. We can never step into the same river twice — and even if we could the view from the water would be different each time. For this reason you’ll find fresh news in Our Mutual Friend every time you reread it. Do not allow yourself to be discouraged by the knowledge that literary critics will always know more than you do. Even they don’t know it all, and doubtless hope to find new things when they reread — if not, being a critic would be a life-sentence we should not envy.
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* Languages vary in the number of color categories that they “see”, ranging from two to a dozen. They also diverge in the boundaries between different colors. John Lyons gives us several charming instances in his chapter in the volume Colour: Art & Science (The Darwin College Lectures; CUP, 1965); these include “. . . there was no word meaning ‘brown’ or ‘grey’ in Latin; literary Welsh has no words with the same meanings as the English words green, blue, grey or brown, but one word (glas) that covers part of green, another that covers the remainder of green, the whole of blue and part of grey, and a third term that covers the remainder of grey and part, or the whole, of brown. . . . Russian has no single word meaning ‘blue’, the words goluboi and sinii (usually translated as ‘light blue’ and ‘dark blue’, respectively) denote what are in Russian distinct colours, not different shades of the same colour, as an English translation might suggest”. Whether yellow and orange are a major French/English divergence I’m not sure, but we certainly differ in our red/brown border. Professor Lyons weighs in on yellow, telling us that in French “one would not use brun of brown shoes, but marron (or perhaps beige, or even jaune, for a lighter brown)”. All this mixter-maxter is not too amazing, as after all color vision is an internal brain function based on interpretations of reflected light, not a consequence of anything “real” out there.
This looks pretty foolish: Oxford University Press, New York have laid off a union organizer in the midst of negotiations and with a strike threat already on the table. The Bookseller of 19 April brings us an account. Publishers Weekly and Publishers Lunch covered the event too. Publishers Lunch links to a press release from the OUP Guild (the union group) saying that Scott Morales’s sacking is “an illegal and retaliatory act”. The union is currently filing an unfair labor practice claim with the National Labor Relations Board.
On 16 April Morales, “the guild’s unit chair and OUP’s strategy and transformation co-ordinator, was laid off effective immediately.” Scott had worked at Oxford University Press for more than fifteen years (for a few years we were departmental colleagues) and an “immediate firing” like this is surely excessive, certainly reckless, and no doubt illegal: the union should know better than any of us of course. Although he had an office in Oxford’s new location at 545 Fifth Avenue, Scott worked largely from home so he was not actually escorted off the premises — the age-old humiliation reserved for fired folk who you feared would filch documents and sabotage the computer system! However he suffered the digital equivalent.
The union won recognition in 2021 with an 80% vote of the bargaining unit. Negotiations have been under way since February 2022. Struggling against a new reality is never a smart management strategy, and seems especially odd behavior for a university press — or am I just being simple-minded to look for intelligent behavior at an establishment set up to publish intelligent books? — When I was involved in organizing a union at Cambridge University Press fifty years ago, the wind was somewhat taken out of our radical sails when we were warmly welcomed by management, who assured us they had nothing to hide — and were smart enough to recognize that they had in reality nothing to lose!
I suggested a few weeks ago that Oxford’s willingness to forgo sales for a month in order to set up a comprehensive computer system might represent a hope of reducing staffing by replacing those oh-so-troublesome people with machines. Maybe that’s not the only strategy for staff reduction which OUP is pursuing.
Video by Michiel de Boer (aka Posy) from Aeon. If you don’t see a video here please click on the title of this post in order to view it in your browser.
Just because we can make non-wood-fiber paper doesn’t of course mean we will inevitably end up using it for books. Electronic paper’s use is elsewhere. For books Calcium carbonate paper is being also being proposed. A waterproof paper is being sold by Rite in the Rain. Personally I think the main charm of these alternatives is that we have had the ingenuity to think them up. It’s not as if we have a crisis (yet) of tree growth — the paper industry claims to plant as many trees as they harvest; though of course one can argue about forest make-up and variety. But — and I guess there is here a bit of a parallel with fossil fuels — until the alternatives become financially irresistible, the old version will continue to be used. And of course cutting down and replanting trees does not represent anything like the same threat to the environment as is burning oil and gas. Just cutting down and burning trees to make more grazing lands for methane-generating bovines is a different story.
Direct address to your reader isn’t altogether unusual: in fact it was rather common in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century novel. “Reader, I married him” notoriously says Jane Eyre. HarperCollins has published a collection of stories under this title.
I wasn’t aware that when I finished Martin Amis’ Inside story I put in in a bookcase about two inches away from Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller. It’s a deep shelf and Calvino was in the back row. This is only interesting (and maybe interesting to only me) because as Nigel Beale points out in his conversation with Amis at The Biblio File, both books open by inviting the reader in in a passage of direct address.
Martin Amis claimed never to have read If on a winter’s night a traveller, and there’s no reason to doubt him. But really there’s no comparison between the two books: Amis’ is a quasi-memoir presented as a novel, and Calvino’s is a fiction about a quest to find the complete version of a book which is actually the book you are reading.
Maybe the most blatant address to the reader comes in The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling, where at the start of Book 10 Fielding goes as far as to blame his readers for their anticipated inadequately enthusiastic response to his book.
“Reader, it is impossible we should know what sort of person thou wilt be; for, perhaps, thou may’st be as learned in human nature as Shakespeare himself was , and, perhaps, thou may’st be no wiser than some of his editors. Now lest this latter should be the case, we think proper, before we go any farther together, to give thee a few wholesome admonitions; that thou may’st not as grossly misunderstand and misrepresent us, as some of the said editors have misunderstood and misrepresented their author.
“First then, we warn thee not too hastily to condemn any of the incidents in this our history as impertinent and foreign to our main design, because thou dost not immediately conceive in what manner such incident may conduce to that design. This work may, indeed, be considered as a great creation of our own; and for a little reptile of a critic [Fielding has previously identified us readers as critics] to presume to find fault with any of its parts, without knowing the manner in which the whole is connected, and before he comes to the final catastrophe, is the most presumptuous absurdity. The allusion and metaphor we have here made use of we must acknowledge to be infinitely too great for our occasion; but there is, indeed, no other which is at all adequate to express the difference between an author of the first rate and a critic of the lowest.
“Another caution we would give thee, my good reptile, is, that thou dost not find out too near a resemblance between certain characters here introduced; as, for instance, between the landlady who appears in the seventh book and her in the ninth. Thou art to know, friend, that there are certain characteristics in which most individuals of every profession and occupation agree. To be able to preserve these characteristics, and at the same time to diversify their operations, is one talent of a good writer. Again, to mark the nice distinctions between two persons actuated by the same vice of folly is another, and, as this last talent is found in very few writers, so is the true discernment of it found in a few readers; though, I believe, the observation of this forms a very principal pleasure in those who are capable of the discovery; every person, for instance, can distinguish between Sir Epicure Mammon and Sir Fopling Flutter; but to note the difference between Sir Fopling Flutter and Sir Courtly Nice requires a more exquisite judgment: for want of which, vulgar spectators of plays very often do great injustice in the theatre, where I have sometimes known a poet in danger of being convicted as a thief, upon much worse evidence than the resemblance of hands hath been held to be in the law.
Nowadays I think we like to pretend that our novels are out there, waiting for us to discover them. We the readers are of course assumed, but we are discretely ignored. Just why we are now reluctant to acknowledge that reading a novel is a two-way process, I’m not sure. Is it all too meta for us?
Students at Zagreb School of Design were invited to design postage stamps based upon this environmental brief: “Plastic waste in the seas is one of the most serious environmental problems of today’s society. Plastic waste, including bottles, bags, packaging and microplastics, pollutes seas around the world, threatening the marine ecosystem and human health. According to data from the European Parliament, by 2050, plastic waste could exceed the number of fish in the seas. The key is to reduce the amount of plastic waste entering the environment, encourage recycling and replace single-use plastic products with sustainable alternatives.”
The Daily Heller brings us this video, made by Todd Carroll, showing the result, a tiny book showing the stamp designs:
If you find the designs flashing by too quickly in the video, you can find still images by clicking on The Daily Heller link above.
The book is 35.5 x 42.6mm, 1.40″ x 1.68″, about the size of a largish postage stamp. The winning design, shown at the top, was printed for Earth Day in an edition of 30,000 copies, 10 stamps to a sheet, each with a face value of EUR 1.14.
Well, maybe the CEO of the Independent Book Publishers Association, should be in a position to know if a crisis is at hand, and should certainly be cautious about the risk of crying wolf to her 4,100 members. Ken Whyte at SHuSH tells us that Andrea Fleck-Nisbet recently told Publishers Weekly that the industry is “at an inflection point.”
As I understand it the big problem is that Ingram, providing warehousing and distribution services for many small (and quite a few large) publishers, is just charging too much for the Independent Publishers Association members. (A couple of independent distributors have recently closed their doors.) Mr Whyte calls it “the Ingram problem”. Ingram Content Group he says represents more than 37,000 publishers around the world — can that really be true? (Stocks books from . . . , I’d believe.) Whatever the number there’s surely a perfectly understandable force at work here: Ingram — any powerful business — will seek to use its monopoly power to maximize its margins. Push and push until you get all the profit going on this or that product, and the producers of the product will no longer find it profitable to create the item — at which point your revenue crashes, because 60% of nothing is not such an attractive proposition. At this point, or just before this point is reached, your well-run big company will suddenly see the justice of reducing its fees — obviously, we all understand (ha-ha), they were generously intentioned all along, and always had our best interests at heart. If only they’d known of our suffering! Well now they do, and everyone’ll all get along marvelously with them enjoying a meager 55% of the margin.
Among the sorts of signal that will get Ingram to this point is of course clients moving their books elsewhere. Anne Trubek writes at Notes from a Small Press that her publishing company, Belt Publishing, is moving its books to Arcadia Publishing from Ingram. Short of such action Ingram will no doubt find themselves motivated by talk of setting up a collaborative distribution system for all the smaller publishers out there. Sure we all know it’d be a nightmare to get up and running, but Ingram really doesn’t want to allow you even to dream about it: the more they get, after all, the more attractive such an alternative will look. There’s a platonic ideal out there for sharing out the money raised by a book’s sale — I don’t know what it should be exactly but something along the lines of
Ingram, and you, might like to dicker with the splits, but it’d be crazy to let the golden goose die in this ditch — or more likely to migrate to a totally self-publishing ebook model.
Grub Street, or the “new” Grub Street of the late nineteenth century kept its inhabitants’ noses to its grindstones. The triple-decker was the established method of publishing novels in the nineteenth century, and the triple-decker took a lot of writing. But the subscription libraries liked them, insisted on them, because their subscribers would take out three subscriptions in order to be sure of getting all three volumes at once. Publishers serving this market tended to buy their novels outright.
Edwin Reardon may be read as George Gissing’s alter ego in his novel New Grub Street. He expatiates on the tantalizing gaze of the triple-decker: “For anyone in my position, . . . how is it possible to abandon the three volumes? It is a question of payment. An author of moderate repute may live on a yearly three-volume novel — I mean the man who is obliged to sell his book out and out, and who gets from one to two hundred pounds for it. But he would have to produce four one-volume novels to obtain the same income; and I doubt whether he could get so many published within the twelve months. And here comes in the benefit of the libraries; from the commercial point of view the libraries are indispensable. Do you suppose the public would support the present number of novelists if each book had to be purchased? A sudden change in that system would throw three-fourths of the novelists out of work.” [Ch. 15]
The catch of course is that it takes a certain type of mind to be able to keep going on three-volume after three-volume novel — well, on any kind of novel I guess — but if you must write to live, this struggle becomes all-consuming. Another character, Marian Yule, working as a research assistant for her father Alfred, “kept asking herself what was the use and purpose of such a life as she was condemned to lead. When already there was more good literature in the world than any mortal could cope with in his lifetime, here she was exhausting herself in the manufacture of printed stuff which no one even pretended to be more than a commodity for the day’s market.” Later “her startled eye had caught an advertisement in the newspaper headed ‘Literary Machine’; had it then been invented at last, some automaton to supply the place of such poor creatures as herself, to turn out books and articles? Alas! the machine was only one for holding volumes conveniently, that the work of literary manufacture might be physically lightened. But surely before long some Edison would make the true automaton; the problem would be comparatively such a simple one. Only throw in a given number of old books, and have them reduced, blended, modernised into a single one for today’s consumption.” [Ch. 8] Now of course, a hundred and thirty years later, we have indeed created this automaton.
Without ChatGPT however, the author was on his own and had to write as fast as he could in order to provide food and lodging for himself and his family. Sickness would get in the way, but “there came a day when Edwin Reardon found himself regularly at work once more, ticking off his stipulated quantum of manuscript each four-and-twenty hours. He wrote a very small hand; sixty written slips of the kind of paper he habitually used would represent — thanks to the astonishing system which prevails in such matters: large type, wide spacing, frequency of blank pages — a passable three-hundred-page volume. On average he could write four such slips a day; so here we have fifteen days for the volume, and forty-five for the completed book.” [Ch. 9]
Keeping on thereafter was a different problem though. You can’t just keep telling the same story over and over. Dialogue was an important resource, the lines can be short, and each speaker gets you a fresh line break. Second volumes of triple-deckers were notoriously padded, and New Grub Street‘s second volume does contain a lot of talk, but it’s not one of the culprits in second volume vaporing.
This writing rate which Gissing may himself have been able to maintain, was of course an ideal. Reardon admits: “‘On Neutral Ground’ took me seven months; now I have to write three volumes in nine weeks, with the lash stinging on my back if I miss a day.” [Ch. 15] Gissing wrote New Grub Street, a three-volume novel itself, in two months in the autumn of 1890, at the pace of nearly 4,000 words a day, the rate ascribed to Reardon above — so it could be done. Forty-five days’ worth of 4,000 words would get you three volumes of 60,000 words, which with judicious typography could yield three books of 300 or more pages each. Which, if you were a workaday hack might get you £100 if you were lucky. Talking of the successful authors of the day, Reardon asserts “They are public-school men, University men, club men, society men. An income of less than three or four hundred a year is inconceivable to them.” [Ch. 27] The big-name authors of the day would be getting £200 or £300 a book. See my recent post “New Grub Street” for further financial details.
The numbers will be bigger, but the pressures on today’s career writer will be similar to those facing the Victorian author. We are all the beneficiaries of their dedication, because in spite of what Ms Yule may say we don’t really believe that having “more good literature in the world than any mortal could cope with in his lifetime” is enough.
Making Book 