Mr Patterson, ever the fairy-godmother of booksellers, or maybe patron saint is better, is about to sprinkle more pixie dust.
Archives for the month of: March, 2024
We are all aware, aren’t we, that we live in an age of unprecedented reading supply. There must be more books available today than ever before, and with the advent of print-on-demand, and even more significantly, ebooks, there’s no reason why any book should ever go out of print ever again. I doubt if all the old ones which we’ve forgotten about will all come back into circulation, but of course, in theory, they could, and lots of them will. (We have yet to fully confront the author contract issues which this situation entails.)
In his essay on Madame du Deffand, (1696-1780) written in 1913 and republished in 1922 in Books and Characters, Lytton Strachey tells us “In nothing, indeed, is the contrast more marked between that age [mid to late eighteenth-century France] and ours than in the quantity of books available for the ordinary reader. How the eighteenth century would envy us our innumerable novels, our biographies, our books of travel, all our easy approaches to knowledge and entertainment, our translations, our cheap reprints! In those days, even for readers of catholic tastes, there was really very little to read. And of course Madame du Deffand’s tastes were far from catholic — they were fastidious to the last degree. She considered that Racine alone of writers had reached perfection, and that only once — in Athalie. Corneille carried her away for moments, but on the whole he was barbarous. She highly admired ‘quelques centaines de vers de M. de Voltaire.’ She thought Richardson and Fielding excellent, and she was enraptured by the style — but only by the style — of Gil Blas. And that was all.”
In the early days of the book business, supply was much more restricted than what we are accustomed to. Books were expensive — often more than a worker could ever expect to see. As a result they were really targeted at the wealthy. Conspicuous consumption demanded that, since before the nineteenth century books were sold unbound, the knights of the shires would have their books bound up in splendid leather covers, often custom designed and gold-stamped for their own libraries. Lytton Strachey tells us of Madame du Deffand’s library that “of the two thousand volumes, she possessed — all bound alike, and stamped on the back with her device of a cat — she had only read four or five hundred”. And reading, for her, didn’t mean exactly what we’d immediately think of. Madame du Deffand employed a reader, “an old soldier from the Invalides, who came round every morning early, and took up his position by her bedside. She lay back among the cushions, listening, for long hours.” Madame du Deffand tended to rise at about five in the afternoon and spent most of the evening and night in her “salon” talking, talking, talking. True, she did find time to write many and long letters.
Last year Shady Characters visited St Andrews, and posted this photo of the oldest (?) bookshop in town, J & G Innes, Ltd. In December however, the bookshop announced it was closing after 144 years in business. Jude Innes said “We are closing the shop because the three directors, myself and my two sisters, have decided to retire and spend more time with our families.” It was emphasized that the decision to close had nothing to do with economics. Fear not: British bookselling remains buoyant.
St Andrews, which is on the coast of Fife is known as the home of golf. More significantly, it is the home of the oldest university in Scotland; founded in 1413.
The Shady Characters‘ post is however mostly about the $ sign which was probably first cut as a piece of type in Philadelphia by a former occupant of these premises. The post shows a plaque above the shop’s door commemorating the building’s Atlantic-spanning type-founding history. The $ symbol first appears in business correspondence in the 1770s designating the Spanish American peso also called the Spanish dollar. In 1792 the United States Congress adopted the currency as their own, although until 1857 various other coins were also accepted as legal tender.
Just as social media are facilitating a surge in disinformation, so the development of printing in the fifteenth-century lead to a surge in rumor production. Stefan Andriopoulos examines the trend in his Public Books article. “The Pope-donkey as indicated by Philip Melanchthon” as this 1523 caption has it, originated in stories about a donkey drowned in a flood in Rome in 1496. Melanchthon assures us that “This abominable figure . . . portrays and represents the entire essence of the papal realm so accurately that no human being could possibly have made it up, but one must rather say that God himself has fashioned this abomination in its likeness.” There really was a donkey found in the mud of the Tiber when the flood receded, and it’d be covered in slime and much other rubbish which could justify lots of extravagant excrescences. Maybe it even had a papal flag tangled up with it. No doubt it wasn’t holding a castle in its front legs. But clearly it provided grist for the protestant rumor mill.
Mr Andriopoulos points out that in order to thrive, fake news needs a factual hook to stick to and evolve, a parallel of less extraordinary reality that might well be true, and this real fact provides a kind of validation for the more extravagant claims which get added to it. After all if priests indulge in child abuse, why would you have trouble believing that members of the deep state have some DC pizza-parlor front for such activity too? Thus many, probably all, monsters have some ambiguous basis in reality.
Another case of account inflation facilitated by the power of print is Monster of Ravenna, to which Mr Andriopoulos also alludes:
This “monster” almost certainly originates in accounts of a stillborn infant suffering from Roberts’ syndrome, a rare but unmysterious genetic abnormality which I will not illustrate for you, though you can look it up.* The tiny hands sprouting from the shoulders of such a misfortunate could easily be described as wings. The one-leggedness developed as the story wended its way from Italy to Paris. Stories of one-leggedness gain their clue from cases of sirenomelia: a disorder of the genetic instructions which results in a failure to divide “leg” into two separate entities. Horrendous genetic accidents like this, while not common, are less rare than you’d like to think, and mercifully usually result in stillbirths. Thus word of them will tend to be locally contained. A communication surge like that provided by the printing press will facilitate the news being more widely known, thus allowing for its distortion to serve a particular end, or just be misunderstood.
One can see the non-malicious operation of this process in early illustrations of exotic animals. Dürer and Gessner only had travellers’ tales to go on, and did get pretty close to the rhinoceros. He looks a bit too much like a knight in armor though.
With social media the dissemination of this sort of “news” is now instantaneous. Does it not seem likely that just as we have managed to overcome the early-modern surge of misinformation facilitated by the printing press, so we will develop modes of weeding out social media nonsense too? Fingers crossed.
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* Anyone interested in discovering more about human embryology and its pitfalls should take a look at Mutants: On the form, varieties and errors of the human body by Armand Marie Leroi (London, HarperCollins, 2003). Experimentation on humans is of course not possible, so what we know of our embryology tends to have to be gleaned from analogy with mice, fruit flies etc, and more importantly perhaps from the system’s occasional instances of error. This is one of the most interesting books I’ve read this year.
LitHub‘s piece, Not just covers, but every page . . . by Debbie Byrne, may be addressed to authors, but it usefully makes clear what the thought process of a publisher’s designer must be in looking at the layout of a book.
Times change, and the influence of America is irresistible in all things — but once upon a time, half a century ago, it was possible to contrast UK and US text design in fairly simple terms. British design could be described then as minimalist, American, maximalist (or at least, far from minimalist); British restraint was contrasted with American exuberance; simplicity with complexity. Stanley Morison, perhaps the onlie begetter of twentieth-century British typographical style, in his First Principles of Typography admonishes us “in the printing of books meant to be read there is little room for ‘bright’ typography. Even dullness and monotony in the typesetting are far less vicious to a reader than typographical eccentricity or pleasantry.” Often one would see a British book, leased to an American publisher, using the same text layout but replacing the staid chapter titles with some flamboyant display face, just because it looked fun, and would thus create visual interest. The designer of a book’s interior needs to keep the expression of their personality under strict control. Designers should resist the temptation to create “visual interest” — to do so just declares a lack of confidence in the content of the book — the author after all should be relied upon to create all the “interest” called for. Mr Morison wags his finger at us — the designer’s “only purpose is to express, not himself, but his* author.”
The LitHub piece is actually an excerpt from Ms Byrne’s book from the University of Chicago Press, The Design of Books: An Explainer for Authors, Editors, Agents, and Other Curious Readers.
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* In Morison’s defense: in 1929 when his First Principles were first promulgated, almost all designers did tend to be men.
Benedict Cumberbatch may be heard giving it his all in reading this juicy missive at Open Culture. They describe it as “the best cover letter ever written” — which may be a matter of taste. It’s certainly in the race for the floweriest.
Dear Sir:
I like words. I like fat buttery words, such as ooze, turpitude, glutinous, toady. I like solemn, angular, creaky words, such as straitlaced, cantankerous, pecunious, valedictory. I like spurious, black-is-white words, such as mortician, liquidate, tonsorial, demi-monde. I like suave “V” words, such as Svengali, svelte, bravura, verve. I like crunchy, brittle, crackly words, such as splinter, grapple, jostle, crusty. I like sullen, crabbed, scowling words, such as skulk, glower, scabby, churl. I like Oh-Heavens, my-gracious, land’s-sake words, such as tricksy, tucker, genteel, horrid. I like elegant, flowery words, such as estivate, peregrinate, elysium, halcyon. I like wormy, squirmy, mealy words, such as crawl, blubber, squeal, drip. I like sniggly, chuckling words, such as cowlick, gurgle, bubble and burp.
I like the word screenwriter better than copywriter, so I decided to quit my job in a New York advertising agency and try my luck in Hollywood, but before taking the plunge I went to Europe for a year of study, contemplation and horsing around.
I have just returned and I still like words.
May I have a few with you?
I don’t think I’d have wanted to have many words with the writer of this letter, but it does seem to have worked. Robert Pirosh’s letter “secured him three interviews, one of which led to his job as a junior writer at MGM. Fifteen years later [he] won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for his work on the war film Battleground.” Probably had a co-writer to keep a check on his logorrhea.
(Link via Shelf Awareness for Readers.)
I don’t ever find much to say about book banning: it’s so pointless — yet I guess local communities have the right to do pointless things if that’s what they all really want.
The apparent pointlessness escalates to new heights with Publishers Weekly‘s news of the banning of Katherine Applegate’s Wishtree, a book about a red oak.
The red oak is a breed of tree which (dare I say it?) is both male and female, or to put it in less emotive terms, is monoecious, i.e. has reproductive parts that can pollinate and flower simultaneously. (Warning, book banners: following that link will take you to a place which will surely make your cheeks burn with embarrassment: it’s all about reproduction!) Relief all round will no doubt be felt now that we can rest assured that the children in Floyd County Virginia’s One Division, One Book reading program will no longer be forced to confront a talking tree which says things like “Call me she. Call me he. Anything will work.” It does seem that this red oak espouses some fairly liberal attitudes, which is no doubt what actually lead to the ban demand. Red oaks are just so frank and uninhibited, aren’t they?
Reluctant readers need all the encouragement they can get and it seems to me that Ms Jodi Farmer, the parent objecting to Wishtree, has actually provided a service in this regard. Instead of sitting staring out of the window, maybe one or two kids will be struck with the thought that there must be something “wrong” with that book, and thus suddenly develop a need to take a look at it.
Ms Farmer is of course far from alone. The Guardian tells us that the American Library Association identified 4,240 individual titles which were banned in schools and libraries during 2023. A record to reflect on.
For myself I believe that any and all reading material should be available, but that nobody should be compelled to read a book that they (or for the very young, their parents, I guess) chose not to. This does demand care in the selection of classroom reading materials, but ought to be of no relevance to the contents of the library. I am forced to acknowledge that although some parents’ views may seem crazy to me, I do not have the right to tell them that because I know better they must allow their kids to read this or that book. However well-meaning they may be, this rule has to apply to school teachers too, doesn’t it? Education is all about providing the tools for enquiry: whatever it is, whether you’re for it or against it, young people are going to find out about it.
Enjoy this video almost as a piece of historical evidence. Library binding does still exist, but less flourishingly that it once did. It’s all subject to National Standards.
Once upon a time a paperback would have been prebound before being put on the library shelves. Nowadays librarians have apparently figured out that they might as well just offer the paperback edition for loan. If it falls apart it’ll probably be cheaper to buy another paperback (if it’s still needed) than it would have been to bind it up as a sturdy hardback in the first place! And of course binding a beautiful book which is only borrowed a couple of times represents a sad charge against your ever-challenged budget. Perhaps the library section which will end up keeping library binders going is the reference section — as long as we retain readers who want to look stuff up by turning pages rather than googling it.
Link via David Crotty’s post at The Scholarly Kitchen.
No need to despair; it’s never all about economy. This sort of binding work will no doubt survive, just as hand setting of metal type, letterpress printing, laced on wooden boards, and even handwriting a book or two have managed to survive: as a specialized service carried on by devoted craftsmen and craftswomen.
See also Library repair.
In 2021 I wrote about Hunter Bliss’ work promoting stone paper — a paper made from calcium carbonate without wood fibre. Last December Printing Impressions followed up with a description of a bible to be published by Mr Bliss in association with First Baptist of Lexington, South Carolina. This ends up being almost an edition of the stone tablets Moses lugged down from Mount Sinai — the book ended up 8½” x 11″ and weighing 7lbs. True salesman that he is, Mr Bliss manages to convince himself that this is an advantage. They were forced into printing the 1056-page book sheet-fed on 108gsm paper because the 80gsm stock they first tested would stretch and melt on the web press it was first tested on! The press run was projected to take place in China in January.
Stone paper may or may not turn out to be a great benefit to mankind — but as of now it hasn’t quite come to pass. Nobody is making calcium carbonate paper in America yet, so the savings Mr Bliss hoped for from volume manufacturing have not yet been realized. He is reduced to prayer as a mechanism to bring about this development.
In my previous post I worried about binding methods — you could have checked it out on a copy of The Word in Stone by subscribing $100 at their Kickstarter site, though it looks like the appeal is now over, having failed to reach its target. There is a video interview there with Mr Bliss which can still be viewed though. Not sure what happens next.
Unless AI kills off the university and scholarship in general, we are surely always going to need something that quacks like a university press. It’s conventional these days to rail against the “gatekeepers” of book publishing, but when it comes to academic works a gatekeeper is a requirement. Life is short and it’s quite helpful to be able to assume that this book from Oxford UP, Cambridge UP, Harvard UP etc., is likely to be worth more study than that one from Discount Academic Books. Once in a while this signal may be wrong, but ars longa, vita brevis; and on we go to the next reference.
A nice description of the work of a university press is provided at Public Books by Rebecca Colesworthy. Scholarship and the university press are co-dependent. As long as one goes on the other will adapt to fill the need. Times may be tough these days, with much gear-grinding going on as we adapt to a (more) digital world, but it was always tough selling small quantities of expensive books to a specialist market, and yet here we are. The Scholarly Kitchen also brings us an article about the Association of University Presses, working away to uphold the values their member presses represent.
Richard Charkin, always reliably sensible, reminds us in a piece entitled Why Publishing Matters that “Publishing is both the gatekeeper to ensure accuracy of information and the ringmaster linking authors, authors’ societies, authors’ agents, designers, illustrators, learned societies, translating publishers, collective rights organizations, technology support businesses, wholesalers, retailers, librarians via conferences, book fairs, personal acquaintances and all the activities driven by the desire to communicate as widely as possible.”
Making Book 