If you don’t see a video here, please click on the title of this post in order to view it in your browser. (Thanks to David Crotty at The Scholarly Kitchen for the link.)
Turns out that the colors dogs see are indeed a bit different from human color vision. This can’t really come as a surprise can it? Not every creature has the same system of rods and cones. We know that bees for instance see flower colors in a different light than we do, so why not dogs? More intriguingly, it looks like a dog’s vision may be governed not just by sight but by smell too — at least there are a whole lot of connections from a dog’s nose to the area of the brain used for vision processing. This seeing/smelling idea is hard/impossible for us to imagine. Is it a bit like synesthesia? Hard to know until we do the Dr Dolittle and can talk to the animals. Recent advances with animal research raise a little bit of optimism in this regard: we think we’ve identified individual names in the languages “Whale” and “Elephant”.
Photo: Aleen Shinnie via the Scottish Book Trust
When we get to the point of printing books for dogs we will no doubt have to give some serious thought to the scent angle. “Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read” Groucho Marx (or someone else) is said to have said. Easier with scratch-and-sniff though.
It shouldn’t amaze anyone that a book publishing and manufacturing conglomerate should look into Artificial Intelligence. This report, State of Play: Exploring Generative AI‘s Transformative Effects on the Media & Entertainment Industry, was commissioned by Bertelsmann (parent of Penguin Random House inter alia). It is divided into three chapters — the current state of play, the technology itself, and possible future applications. The authors, consultants Arthur D Little, study four segments of the media and entertainment business: Broadcast entertainment and news; Music; Publishing; and Marketing.
Knees jerking away, LitHub reacts negatively. They chose to head their scare piece with an image of a couple of Luddites trying to bust a mechanized loom. (Linked to in Nate Hoffelder’s Monday email roundup.) Didn’t we all learn from the Luddites that standing in the way of an irresistible force was never a good idea? AI’s not coming; it’s here. It makes little sense to panic about the most extreme possibilities while ignoring the more modest implications which have for years already been affecting the workplace. Just because OpenAI created ChatGPT does not make it inevitable that a robot is coming to take your job away. Of course people will eventually no doubt end up losing jobs, and that’s never a pleasant thing. But people move on anyway, and if technology takes your place here, there’s probably an interesting alternative opportunity around the corner.
Sure the movie actors and writers went on strike last year to prevent AI duplication of their persons and voices. But the movie business is already deep into AI — for instance in post production without needing to duplicate its actors — the Bertelsmann report gives a case study of the creation of lip-synced versions of foreign-language films. Technology, we need to remember, brings good things as well as bad. Gazing into its crystal ball the report suggests some possible benefits: “TV, books and marketing could be interactive and personalised. Viewers could have agency over how a series ends, or readers could converse with a character in a book. Music could be composed in real time in response to events in a listener’s day, generating a personal soundtrack to their life.” None of this may seem particularly exciting, but maybe AI will be able to improve our crystal balls!
We should perhaps all be relieved that the report concludes that “AI tools are not yet suitable for wholly replacing human-made content” and thus of course humans. However all in all I found the report rather underwhelming — if you’re really interested in AI, read it. If you don’t read it though, I don’t think you’ll be missing any epiphanies.
Scottish Clans and Tartans, published in 1973 by the Hamlyn Group in UK and in the USA by Harmony Books, is printed in four colors on coated paper by Mondadori in Italy. It’s still a tight little book, Smyth sewn as a book printed on coated paper really needs to be — the coating on the paper will affect the adhesion of the glue, thus making perfect binding a risky option. We inherited our copy from an aunt. It is one of the thousands of books which show you pictures of the tartans of Scotland and tell you a bit about the clans which from time immemorial are said to have sported these colors. Our author, Ian Grimble, who patently has a dog in this fight, starts off “The origins of Scotland’s clans and their distinctive dress are wrapped in controversy. Yet their story can be traced back with certainty to the middle of the 5th century, and to Ireland where the Scots then lived.” The controversy in which they might be said to be wrapped arises merely if you wish to deny reality.
Prior to the eighteenth century the Scottish Highlands and Islands, separated by high mountains from the more fertile southern and eastern parts of the country, were populated by Gaelic-speaking peoples regarded as ruffians and potential criminals by the rest of the country. At that time the Highlands were essentially part of Ireland whence they had been settled. Better to say that the Highlanders and their culture were Irish — until recently when roads were built communication by sea was the royal road to neighbourliness — and indeed the language the Highlanders spoke was referred to by outsiders as Irish or Erse. Their “distinctive dress” was, surprise, surprise, exactly what the Irish wore, a long plain nightshirt-like thing called a “liéne” belted at the waist. In the seventeenth century there evolved a garment called “breacan” — a plaid wrapped around you and cast over your shoulder, secured by a belt at the waist. In Scotland plaid just means a long piece of cloth thrown over one shoulder, with no reference to any kind of patterning. American usage takes plaid to be a synonym for tartan. In Scotland it’s not. (Nor is plaid pronounced in Scotland to rhyme with “sad” but rather with “suede”. See Plaid Friday for a picture of a modern-day plaid.)
The kilt was in fact invented in the 1730s by an Englishman called Thomas Rawlinson, a Lancashire businessman who had established a foundry in Invergarry in order to be closer to the wood he needed as fuel. He noticed that the “breacan” was an inconvenient form of dress for his wood-cutting and furnace-stoking workers, and had a local tailor make a garment which we’d all recognize as a plain old kilt. They called it “philibeg”. This garb became quite popular and caught on sufficiently for it to be worn extensively at the nearby Battle of Culloden in 1745. Determined to destroy once and for all a Highland society which they saw as distinctly non-cooperative and dangerously different, the victorious London government acted decisively in 1747 with the Disarming Act. Chiefs were deprived of hereditary jurisdictions, everyone was disarmed, the bagpipes were proscribed, and “plaid, philibeg, trews, shoulder-belts . . . tartans or parti-coloured plaid or stuff” were banned throughout Scotland under penalty of six months in jail, or for a second offense transportation for seven years. Philibegs were at that time made in variegated patterns. Plain men had plain brown pattered “tartans”, a word which originally designated a kind of cloth rather than any patterning, and the chiefs would sport more colorful patterns, which no doubt cost more. There was however no association of this or that pattern or sett with this or that clan or location. The ban worked very effectively, but there was one loophole in the legislation: army regiments were exempted, and from 1745 onwards there began to be many Highland regiments. The Black Watch, formed in 1725, were the first, and they all clung to their own, just made-up, tartan setts. Soldiers eventually changed from the “breacan” to the philibeg kilt, and this helped eventually to popularize the garb as typically Scottish.
An important contributor to the myth of the ancient kilt was, untypically, Sir Walter Scott, who usually got his facts right. He asserted the kilt’s ancient origins in the course of his debunking review of James Macpherson’s Ossian poems in an 1805 Edinburgh Review. Macpherson, and a colleague also called Macpherson, this one a John, had set out to “prove” that the Irish of Ireland were descended from the “Irish” of Scotland — the exact opposite of the truth — and as a part of this initiative had “discovered” ancient bardic writings by a Scottish poet named Ossian whose work could thus be seen to be ancestral to all of Irish literature. All of Ossian’s oeuvre, published in Macpherson’s translation from 1760 to 1765, was however written by James Macpherson himself, not translated. Subsequently he had to publish the “original” Gaelic versions which he’d cobbled together from bits and pieces of original material. Caught on the rising tide of romanticism Ossian became a European sensation. In 1854 Mrs Wilde described her naming of her son Oscar Fingal O’Fflahertie Wills Wilde as positively Ossianic.
Strangely enough Sir Walter Scott it was who finally put the lock on the tartan kilt “tradition”. In 1822 King George IV visited Edinburgh and Sir Walter was the master of ceremonies. He got everyone to dress up in tartan kilts and thus cemented the idea that kilts were what Scots wore. The kilt had historically been held in pretty low regard, and everyone now scrambled to get decked out in their own tartan. The heir to the chief of clan Macpherson got a tartan off the peg: what is now known as Macpherson tartan had previously been No.155, before its name evolved to “Kidd” after a Mr Kidd had bought it in bulk to clothe his West Indian slaves. Purists were enraged at the tartanification of the country. Lord Macaulay, a Highlander by birth, snorted that King George “could give no more striking proof of his respect for the usages which had prevailed in Scotland before the Union, than by disguising himself in what, before the Union, was considered by nine Scotchmen out of ten as the dress of a thief”. Odd in a way for Sir Walter Scott to go whole hog like this; he was a Borderer, and it’s not like he filled the Waverly Novels with Highlanders in kilts. The running was finally taken up by the weavers, notably Wilsons of Bannockburn, and it is due to the commercial interest that every family name with even the remotest connection to Scotland now glories in the possession of its own unique tartan sett.
My tartan, Logan; courtesy of Lochcarron Co. Quite a pretty one!
When I was a youth, working vacation jobs at Lochcarron Handloom Weavers in Galashiels, (one of the contributors of samples of tartans to Ian Grimble’s book) I learned to recognize and distinguish say Ancient MacKenzie from Modern MacKenzie. One was alleged to be the tartan before it was buried after Culloden, and the other the result of color changes consequent upon being buried in the peat for many years. This nonsense (double nonsense since the MacKenzie clan had had no specific tartan before Culloden, nor of course had any other clan) was accepted by all — after all, who’s around to dispute the assertion? Its real meaning was that Bill McKenzie from Ohio needed to buy two ties, not just one. Marketing is not something only book publishers get up to.
So the kilt is only 290 years old, and clan tartans about 200. This is of course not nothing, but it is pretty insignificant when compared with the claims made by the enthusiasts, and the assumptions of the man/woman in the street. It wasn’t until Highland society had been obliterated by law, by emigration, and by clearances of people in favor of deer, that the Scots began to feel the need for a tradition celebrating the imaginary world they had lost.
Most of this has been cribbed from Hugh Trevor-Roper’s piece in The Invention of Tradition edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Trevor Ranger (CUP, 1983).
In the USA the belief has long been that a typeface is not copyrightable, although the computer code that generates it may be. Perhaps unsurprisingly in an area where the law is slightly vague and open to interpretation, Thomas “my other car is a sans serif” Phinney (as he styles himself at his blog) here answers the question Do companies get sued for using fonts illegally?. The answer he gives is “Yes, companies often get threatened with legal action, and (less often) if they do not pay for their font use, get sued. Many companies have been: (1) threatened with legal action, (2) pretty much forced to pay what they already should have, and/or (3) sued for using fonts in unlicensed ways.” It seems that some judges are willing to consider the possibility that a typeface may be copyright, or patented, or protected in some way or other.
If you are contemplating “borrowing” a font for use in a potentially huge website — pause. Mr Phinney rounds up his survey of over twenty typeface-copyright lawsuits with the sentiment that in a 10,000-a-month-level website the licensing fee would probably be fairly low. He suggests to the person asking the question in his post title, that they would waste more money-as-time reading the links in his post “than just getting legal, either for a one-time fee, or something like $25/year (low-end rate for Adobe Typekit). Or even free if one uses Google Fonts, though that would not get [you] the commercial fonts you are talking about.”
This is a decidedly odd, wildly imaginative book — you can get it free from Project Gutenberg. The “Thrice Noble, Illustrious, and Excellent Princesse, the Duchess of Newcastle”, may be (slightly) better known as the poet Margaret Cavendish*. (Admire the three long esses in that author name.) The Blazing World is a crazy sci-fi romp, in which the author herself appears as a character.
OpenCulture invites us to “Read Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World: the first sci-fi novel written by a woman”. (Link via Shelf Awareness for Readers.) Their post comes with this video from The Great Books Prof.
If you don’t see a video here, please click on the title of this post in order to view it in your browser. It is quite interesting.
In the book a woman is kidnapped and transported on a ship which gets blown off course up to the North Pole. The pirates freeze to death; she being sustained by the “light of her beauty” and the “heat of her youth”. At the Pole they come upon a sort of elevator system which pulls her and the ship up into another world up above them. Here our heroine quickly becomes Empress of the Blazing World, as the new planet is named. She uses her position of authority to discover the scientific facts about this and her original world, interrogating the Bird Men, the Ant Men, the Worm Men, etc. each of which groups has expertise in a different science. Eventually she declares that she wants to write a new Cabbala, and is advised by her spirit advisors that the best person to help her in this task is the Duchess of Newcastle, who thereupon becomes a character in her own novel. The book ends with the reconquest of the women’s native country (ESFI — England, Scotland, France, Ireland) back in the “real world” and they arrange for power to be returned to EFSI’s rightful King. (Remember the Duchess was writing at a time of civil war.) In a final address to the reader the author regrets her inability to match the deeds of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, and proposes the creation of The Blazing World as her world conquest.
A member of a Royalist family, Margaret Lucas (1623 – 73) became a lady-in-waiting to Queen Henrietta Maria wife of King Charles I. In 1644 she left England with the Queen, and lived for a time at the court of the young King Louis XIV. There she met and married her husband William Cavendish in 1645. As well as her surprisingly modern poetry she wrote six respectable works of natural philosophy, as well as a number of plays and a biography of her husband. While she may not have been a great scientist, she was, be it emphasized, a woman, with all the contemporary disadvantages that implies, and was the first person in Britain to develop an original theory of atomism. Samuel Pepys called her “a mad, conceited, ridiculous woman”. John Evelyn on the other hand saw her as “a mighty pretender† to learning, poetry, and philosophy”. She was the first woman to attend a meeting of the Royal Society. Virginia Woolf writes of her “There is something noble and Quixotic and high-spirited, as well as crack-brained and bird-witted, about her. Her simplicity is so open; her intelligence so active.”
Her book opens with a sonnet in her praise by her husband. Cavendish was a less than brilliant general in the Civil War, and left for the continent after the defeat of the Royalists. His Dukedom was bestowed in 1665 after the restoration. He is the author of four plays as well as a manual on the training of horses. During his exile in 1640 he rented Peter Paul Rubens’ house in Antwerp, where he established a riding academy in which the art of dressage was invented and perfected. Ulrich Raulff (in Farewell to the the Horse, Liveright, 2018) opines that no desecration of Rubens’ memory occurred; all that was taking place was “simply one Baroque art form being replaced by another: a ballet danced by beautiful horses” rather than by the naked ladies disporting across Rubens’ canvasses.
Lord Cavendish with His Wife Margaret in the Garden of Rubens in Antwerp (1662) by Gonzales Coques. Photo: Wikipedia
The Blazing World was published in 1666. The picture at the top shows the 1668 reprint. 1611 is alleged to be the composition date of the first draft of the first real sci fi book, Somnium by Johannes Kepler. This was a sort of dream diary, and includes descriptions of what art looks like when viewed from the moon. Margaret Cavendish’s book focusses primarily on explaining the sciences, which she treats as identical in her imaginary Blazing World to those she was so familiar with in this sublunary world. Just knowing so much about science, quite apart from her extraordinary achievement of publishing twenty-three books in a world where less than half of one percent of works were by women, would tend to guarantee her being regarded by many as crazy.
Her epitaph in Westminster Abbey says she “was a wise wittie & learned Lady, which her many Bookes do well testifie”.
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* A selection of Margaret Cavendish’s poems is published by New York Review Books, at $16. This piece from Aeon discusses one of her plays in some detail — and emphasizes her feminism.
† NB: In earlier centuries “pretend” meant not what we today mean by that word; rather it meant to assert, allege, claim . . . Think “The Young Pretender”.
The trouble is that societal changes tend to be caused by demand for change, rather than by the availability of the technology that could bring about change. First lots of people show they like reading novels, then mechanical printing presses are developed to supply that demand. Despite this factor we still sit waiting for the flash-bang changes that are going to be caused in books by the invention of a new reading technology. (OK, not so new any more: I refer to the ebook.) My suspicion is that the form of the novel, of the book in general, is just fine as it is, thank you very much. Maybe we just haven’t woken up to the fact that online games are the twenty-first century evolution of the novel.
Still, innovators will still strive. PRINT Book Club brings notification of the launch of an imaginative new ebook. The author, Warren Lehrer, describes his book thus: “A new kind of ebook, Riveted in the Word is inspired by the true story of a woman’s hard-fought battle to regain language after a devastating stroke. Written and designed by Warren Lehrer, this multimedia book app places the reader inside the mind of a retired history professor as she recalls her journey with Broca Aphasia. The custom interface toggles between columns of text that readers navigate at their own pace, and animated sections that evoke gaps between perceptions (thoughts, memories, desires) and the words needed to communicate.”
It’s obviously good that designers should strive to expand the range of the experience of reading, and we’ve waited a long time to move beyond the early floppy disk books which would allow you to pick your own ending. There was a flurry of interest ten years ago in something called the enhanced ebook: I wasn’t overwhelmed by one example. In the case of Mr Lehrer’s book, I am a bit concerned that echoing the confusion in the subject’s mind may just result in an analogous confusion in the reader’s mind. This is I dare say part of the intention, but somehow I feel illustrating clarity would represent a stiffer challenge. The author’s site includes several images showing pages from the book.
EarSay is the publisher. Riveted in the Word is being issued simultaneously with Jericho’s Daughter, described as Lehrer’s anti-war, feminist reimagining of the biblical tale of Rahab. Sensibly Mr Lehrer is working both sides of the street. Jericho’s Daughter is printed in four colors, with images by Sharon Horvath. It is divided into two parts, and bound in a dos-à-dos binding.
Thus do we visit simultaneously extremes of modernity and of tradition.
The evidence they cite comes mainly from the Netherlands: “Booksellers in the Netherlands said that many young people prefer to buy books in English with their original covers, even if Dutch is their first language, because those are the books they see and want to post about on BookTok. . . . In some bookstores in Amsterdam, young adult sections carry mostly English-language books, with only a handful of Dutch options.” One bookseller, Leon Verschoor of Martyrdom in Amsterdam is quoted as saying of his young customers “they’ll never read in Dutch”.
Further evidence for the Englification of Europe is provided by Jennifer Egan who reported that when she was in a Dutch bookshop signing copies of The Candy House a couple of years ago, she noticed that most of the books she was signing were the English edition. Her Dutch publisher, De Arbeiderspers, confirms her suspicions: they claim that around 65% of Netherlands sales for the book were in English. Now of course it is possible that De Arbeiderspers is exaggerating because they don’t really know. They are after all the publisher of the Dutch translation and just the Dutch translation. The English language original was published in 2022 by Scribner’s, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, and one might not expect them to be telling the Dutch publisher exactly how many copies had been sold in this or that market. No doubt a few booksellers might anecdotally have shared their opinions with the publisher, but firm numbers can’t really come into it — though I suppose the publisher may have sold fewer copies of their Dutch translation than they had expected.
Now, if you are a Dutch publisher, this sort of trend, if real, represents a serious threat. It’s not much of a business model if having paid a premium to sign translation rights for a book by a bestselling author, you find after you’ve translated it that nobody wants anything but the original English version. Find yourself thus positioned more than once and you might be forgiven for refusing to buy any translation rights next time Frankfurt comes around. The article carries reactions from a couple of German publishers who’s take on it all is a sort of “well if that happens it’ll be a problem” rather than “Yes we’d noticed that too”. My suspicion is that this is a sort of storm in a teacup story, but I suppose it could become a problem that a world language, English, really does become the world language, and everybody everywhere becomes fluent.
The potential damage is double edged. European language publishers, like all publishers, want to grow. I have a suspicion that the only publishing community which has access to more manuscript that it can handle is the English-language publishing community. If you are a French, German, Dutch, Swedish, Czech language publisher, in order to keep your title count up to a level where sales have a chance of exceeding your costs you have no alternative but to publish lots of translations. English language books thus represent a huge opportunity — and if your readers just want the original, well, you’re scuppered. Sure you can publish translations from all the other languages, but many world bestsellers do tend to start out in English don’t they?
From the other end of the telescope English language publishers and agents would face difficulties in selling translation rights in their books. This in turn hits the authors, because while they would be happy to get a royalty for all the extra English language copies sold in European countries, they wouldn’t be getting those advances to which they have become accustomed.
I have previously suggested that given the logistical changes in the book business territorial rights might become a dead letter. Maybe the original publisher should aim to sell copies anywhere. If a translation into Tagalog is called for, maybe the original publisher could do that. This makes things tidier, but still doesn’t cure the foreign-language publishers volume problem. Maybe De Arbeiderspers could be negotiating for the English-language rights in the Netherlands, in Europe? Luckily I suspect it will in fact be a long time before people in the Netherlands lose the ability and desire to read in Dutch, so The Times’s red flag can be stowed away.
Such was the power and success of Webster’s Dictionary that “Webster” began almost to be a synonym for the word dictionary. Clearly it was a label with value. The Grolier Club’s Dictionary show has a section devoted to the copyright battles occasioned by this fact.
Noah Webster (1758–1843) who was born in West Hartford, Connecticut, had by 1809 published A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, but his real work, the basis for all the trouble, American Dictionary of the English Language was not published until 1828. It had 70,000 entries and was published in two volumes by S. Converse of New York. A second edition came out in 1841, and after their father’s death his children sold the remaining sheets from this printing to J. S. & C. Adams of Amherst, MA. A third printing of the second edition was by made by George and Charles Merriam of Springfield, MA. The Merriams hired Webster’s son-in-law Chauncey A. Goodrich to oversee revisions, and the New and Revised Edition appeared in 1847, with a Revised and Enlarged edition in 1859. Already in 1829 Webster’s assistant Joseph Emerson Worcester, along with Goodrich, had published an abridgment of Webster’s 1828 American Dictionary, with the same number of words and Webster’s full definitions, but with truncated literary references and expanded etymology. This abridged version was quite successful, and was reissued in 1841 by White and Sheffield and in 1844 by Harper and Brothers.
Thus even by Webster’s death in 1843 the situation was fairly complicated. In 1889 when copyright in the 1847 edition had expired, Merriam’s published simultaneously in UK and USA their International Edition which became the flagship of the brand. (The 11th edition of Webter’s International was the spelling authority in the U.S. typesetting industry back in my days.) Seeing a bandwagon to be jumped on George W. Ogilvie began producing cheap lithographic reprints of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, the big work (prior to the International edition). Various lawsuits won by Merriam failed however to see off Mr Ogilvie. In 1894 Merriam licensed its London agent, the publisher George Bell & Sons, to issue an abridgment of the International, under the title, Webster’s Brief International Dictionary, abridged from Webster’s International Dictionary. They also published the same abridgment in the U.S. as Webster’s High School Dictionary. Ogilvie pounced and announced an offset reprint of the Brief International, claiming he had the right to do this because the British publication contained a U.K. copyright notice, but no U.S. notice. The Supreme Court eventually ruled that this tricky argument was nonsense. In 1909, a federal court gave Merriam a victory over Ogilvie saying that any “Webster’s dictionary” issued by Ogilvie or his successors must contain the following disclaimer on its title page: “This dictionary is not published by the original publishers of Webster’s Dictionary or by their successors.” Ogilvie, a downy bird, walked right past this by avoiding the word “Webster’s” — thus he did one called Websterian Dictionary, and another Ogilvie’s Dictionary, by Noah Webster.
Further complication comes via the Rev. John Ogilvie, a Scot and no relation, who made an expanded edtion of the 1841 version of Webster’s. This was published by W. G. Blackie of Glasgow in 1847-50 as The Imperial Dictionary of the English Language: A Complete Encyclopedic Lexicon, Literary, Scientific, and Technological. A further expansion of the Imperial was made by Charles Annandale and was published by Blackie in 1882 in four volumes. The Century Company of New York acquired US rights to this work and used it as the basis for the much larger American work, the Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia, published 1889–1891. The 1883 American edition of the Imperial, published by The Century Company of New York, had contained a copyright notice stating: “Certain owners of American copyrights having claimed that undue use of matter so protected has been made in the compilation of the Imperial Dictionary, notice is hereby given that arrangement has been made with the proprietors of such copyright matter for the sale of this work in this country.”
Another adaptation of the Imperial made by George W. Ogilvie, which he entitled Webster’s Imperial Dictionary, was published in 1904, versions and revisions of which have been issued under various titles, including Webster’s Universal Dictionary and Webster’s Twentieth Century Dictionary.
In 1914 Ogilvie was still at it. He lobbied for federal legislation to allow the free use of the Webster’s label. Chairman of the House Committee on Patents, William A. Oldfield (Dem., Arkansas) had the decisive vote. He suggested that either Merriam or Ogilvie should pay him $10,000 to make up his mind. Who ever heard of a corrupt American politician? The proposed bill was never voted on. In 1917 a US court ruled that the name Webster’s had effectively entered the public domain in 1834 when Noah Webster’s 1806 dictionary’s copyright had lapsed. Thus did Webster’s became a generic trademark which allowed anybody to use the name on their own works. Several did, notably Random House, who in 1991 published a Random House Webster’s College Dictionary. After legal to-ing and fro-ing, latterly centered on the issue of “trade dress”, the courts decided in 1997 that anyone could use the label.
Until it was kind of knocked on the head by the internet, the dictionary publishing business was an enticing honeypot, and thus a wonderfully complicated story. As an example take, Webster’s New World Dictionary, with which at one time I had some professional involvement. This book was first published in 1951 by the World Publishing Company, Cleveland, OH. A thinned down, one-volume edition called Webster’s New World College Dictionary, came out in 1953. A second edition of this College Dictionary was published in 1970. In 1989 Simon & Schuster published a third edition. Mike Agnes edited a fourth edition which John Wiley & Sons published in 1999, and a fifth edition was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2014. Since 2022 this fifth edition has been published by HarperCollins.
Maybe the huge big bucks are gone, but book publishers are always going to be drawn to anything like a dictionary which can sell in fairly large numbers over years and years without any need for other than minor changes. Merriam-Webster still exists as a division of Encyclopedia Britannica and remains the main publisher of Webster’s (though they never had anything to do with the New World College Dictionary).
OK — it’s trending in the wrong direction of course. Yet lots of books keep on being sold — and we hope, read. Reading books for pleasure was always a minority activity; and always will be. In a way, given the explosion of social media, one might even consider the picture better than it might have been. If you think of all the non-readers maybe an average across the whole population of sixteen minutes a day represents an immense commitment on the part of those who are readers! After all if you Imagine ten people waiting at a bus stop, with you the only reader, that means that you’ve got to keep reading for two hours and forty minutes that day to keep the average going. Such responsibility.
Just why reading a tweet isn’t included in “Reading for Pleasure” I’m not sure — no doubt the Bureau of Labor Statistics was asking about books. Statista’s story accompanying this infographic suggests that books were indeed the focus, though whether, say, magazines are included is at best ambiguous.
Of course we know reading is good for you. It’s scientifically proven. Mental Floss gives us a little list of six scientific benefits of reading more:
Reading reduces stress.
Reading (especially reading books) may add years to your life.*
Reading improves your language skills and knowledge of the world.
Reading enhances empathy.
Reading boosts creativity and flexibility.
Reading can help you transform as a person.
I guess number 3 covers my immediate reaction to “scientific benefits” of reading — that you’d discover more about science.
Have you fallen into a reading drought? If you need help to get going again, The Economist suggests that the best way is to tackle a short book. They provide a list of six suggestions which they claim may each be read in a single day. Six reasons, and six books, sixteen minutes, six days — that digit must have some occult connection with reading. Might it be that six pages is the ideal chapter length? I do find that I get impatient with books which won’t give me a break for page after page of lengthy and lengthier chapters. I’m rereading War and Peace, certainly not one of The Economist‘s six, — I keep thinking “What need is there for any other novel?” — and I would be willing to bet that the chapters average out to less than six pages each: eventually I did the math, and it’s just under three and a half pages per chapter in my Everyman edition which uses an anonymous 19th century translation. That Tolstoy guy knew what he was doing! But of course my edition isn’t a HarperCollins book; they’d no doubt be able to get the chapters down to two pages.
I just read that bookstore sales are down after a surge during the pandemic — must be that all those reluctant readers are still working the way through the piles of books they bought then! New bookstores are still opening though, faster than old ones exit the scene. Sixteen minutes a day we hope will be enough to sustain them all.
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* LATER: It’s not just in America that they think reading’s good for you. Here from Britain is Michael Mosely in The Guardian telling us to read fiction for longevity. (Thank you Annabel Hollick for the link.)
Plagiarism Todaylooks into the question of when it becomes too late to file a U.S. copyright infringement suit. The answer, if you want to get as fully compensated as possible, is after three years. But the question then becomes, three years after what? Lower courts have tended to favor “the discovery rule”, while the Supreme Court seems to favor “the injury rule”, though it has never formulated an unambiguous opinion in its favor. Under the injury rule the harm occurs when the infringement occurs (i.e. when the material is first published), while the discovery rule allows that the party whose copyright material has been infringed cannot be expected to know about it, and thus be harmed, until they know about it (i.e. when they first discover the infringing item). I guess that makes some sense, but of course the harm doesn’t really depend on the copyright owner being conscious of the theft. After all, you may not become aware your house has been burgled until you get home from your vacation. Still, on the other hand, doing something about it does require that you become aware of the problem.
It gets more complicated. When it comes to damages, some courts will allow damages back to the time of original infringement, while others will only go back three years. The situation calls out for clarification, but the Supreme Court just recently dodged a case which might have elicited such a ruling. As Plagiarism Today sums it up “Though lower courts have been relatively consistent in applying the discovery rule, one word from the Supreme Court could completely abolish it. The injury rule could literally become the law of the land overnight.” Another item to be included in our urgent need for fresh copyright legislation.
Making Book 