TPM’s IdeaLab has a very thorough analysis covering the controversy buffeting web hoster GoDaddy in the past week. Until today they’d been supporting the controversial SOPA bill that failed as Congress ended its recent session. SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) has been criticized by netizens who fear it will just allow large content owners to dominate the streams of […]
I just got an email from Montreal comics publisher Drawn & Quarterly, a company that produces exceptionally fine graphic novels and comic nonfiction, announcing their first entry into the ebooks space with two books by artist/writer Chester Brown. I think their email is worth quoting at length, because this is a fine print publisher stepping in to ebooks and because of their ebook royalty, which they explain will be an equal share with their authors. This is especially topical, in light of Michael Chabon’s new arrangement with Open Road Media, which I’ve discussed in an earlier post today. Bravo to D&Q and Kobo! This is an exciting publishing collaboration. //more
I suggest that the book industry view the cost savings from the diminishment of print as a kind of “peace dividend” for authors and publishers and other stakeholders like retail booksellers. Parties should share fairly in whatever windfall is to come. I would accuse the major publishers of being shortsighted and dumb and in thrall to old ways, but I fear that hyperbole like Chabon’s will only further degrade the debate and discussion that must proceed between publishers and authors, lest Amazon eventually become the monopoly publisher and bookseller many bookpeople nowadays fear is looming in our collective future. //more
Consider this remark from Dave W. of Wax Tracks Records in Denver: “I have noticed that at least two or three times a week some father or mother comes in saying that their kid asked for a turntable for their birthday or Christmas present. So it’s not a case of the older generation just giving their turntables to their kids and saying ‘Here’s what we used to play music on,’ but rather the kids saying ‘This is what’s cool and happening right now and I want in on it.'”
Literary, social and cultural history are all fascinatingly preserved in an old wooden door from a 1920s Greenwich Village bookstore. In Frank Shay’s Bookshop at 4 Christopher Street the proprietor was surprised one day in 1921 when writer Hedrik Willem Van Loon, an author with the publishing house of Boni & Liveright, signed his name to the door and for good measure added a little drawing to his contribution. Soon, Shay began routinely asking visiting writers and other cultural notables to sign the door. Ultimately, it would bear hundreds of signatures, including such figures of the day as John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, Sherwood Anderson, Heywood Broun, Christopher Morley, Edward Arlington Robinson, Frank Conroy, artist John Sloan, explorer Vilhalmur Stefansson, poet Don Marquis (creator of “The Adventures of Archy & Mehitabel”), and Henry Seidel Canby (editor, Saturday Review of Literature).
When the shop closed in 1925, the door was removed from the premises before the contents were auctioned to pay creditors. In subsequent decades its value as a cultural artifact became evident, with this advertisement appearing thirty-five years later: “Mrs. Frank Leon Smith has a door for sale. On the door are the autographs of about sixty people who in the early Twenties were important, famous, talented, unusual. Im [sic] telling you, this is a fabulous door….Want a door? Ask Mrs. Smith at 321 East 52nd Street, New York 22. —’Trade Winds’ in the Saturday Review, 1960”. Note that money would evidently not have been required to become custodian of the door.
Eventually, by steps unknown, the door reached the Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin, where it is housed today. Organizers there have created a terrific website devoted to it, to the shop, to Greenwich Village, and the period that produced it. Jennifer Scheussler’s New York Times Book Review article in September, with a neat slideshow, alerted me to the door’s colorful history and I’ve visited the Ransom website many times since. I love that Van Loon’s spontaneous signature became an inspiration for hundreds of contemporaries, all eager to scribble on a plank of wood, leaving a small imprint of their existence. It’s a veritable time capsule, or even better, a time machine taking us back to bookselling and publishing ninety odd years ago.
Until recently, I had not read even one of the fourteen books by the early- to mid-twentieth-century American writer Jim Tully (1886-1947) and knew little about him. Given my personal interest in Tully’s subject matter, which included circuses, hoboes, and riding the rails, springing from his twin milieux, rural Ohio and early Hollywood, I’m surprised at myself for having been slow to pick up on him. Now having sampled his work and discovered what an important and successful literary career he made in his life by reading the excellent new biography of him, Jim Tully: American Writer, Irish Rover, Hollywood Brawler, I’m going to do my part here to redress this widespread case of historical amnesia. I believe that now–especially in light of the Occupy movement and the attention it’s drawing to the economic distress afflicting millions in our society–is an ideal time for Jim Tully to be rediscovered. / / more . . .
In June 2006 I was sitting in a parked car listening to Terry Gross’s “Fresh Air” while my wife and son were in a store finishing up some shopping. I didn’t mind the wait because I was transfixed by the interview and the voice of her compassionate guest. Dr. Paul Epstein was speaking about what for me were the hitherto unknown effects of climate change on public health. He described the advent of startling conditions such as malaria occurring at high elevations in Africa where mosquitoes were previously not even known to breed; tick-borne diseases occurring at latitudes where they were never known before, fueling the growth of Lyme disease and West Nile virus; and diesel particulates attaching to ragweed that was proliferating because of increased CO2 in the atmosphere and lodging in the airways of asthmatic city-dwellers. These signs all pointed to warming temperatures enabling the spread of disease vectors that were unknown until recent years. 
I recognized this was the special voice of a healer, for patients and the planet, and I was eager to sign him up to write a book on this imperative subject. When I cold-called him in his office at Harvard, he was very open to speaking with me, though he knew little about me at first. It would take a couple years, and a change in publishing houses for me, but I finally paired him with a co-author and commissioned a book that would be titled Changing Planet, Changing Health: How the Climate Crisis Threatens Our Health and What We Can Do About It. The authors had delivered virtually the entire manuscript and I’d nearly completed my edit when my job with that publisher ended in 2009, and the book contract was then canceled. Fortunately, it was soon resettled and finally published this past April by the University of California Press, with a Foreword by Jeffrey Sachs and endorsements from Al Gore, Bill McKibben, Elizabeth Kolbert, and Dr. Paul Farmer. Paul sent me a copy of the book and I was proud to note his personal acknowledgment of me. We exchanged congratulations and shared the satisfaction of knowing that after five years the book was at last making its way into the world.
Sadly, I learned yesterday that Paul had been ill for some time, and died last Sunday in Cambridge, MA. I am so sorry for the loss of Paul and very grateful for the chance to have known him and worked with him. His humanistic contributions have been detailed in a New York Times obituary, on Joe Romm’s Climate Progress blog at Think Progress, in a Toledo Blade column by Tom Henry, and in this message from Physicians for Human Rights, which concludes with these words:
“For several generations of medical students and young professionals, he was a model of the physician activist, caring for the individual, one patient at a time, and at the same time crusading for the world so that we might leave behind us a chance for the health and well-being of entire populations and of the planet itself.
His knowledgeable and daring voice inspired countless health professionals and activists to campaign for basic human rights, to ban landmines, to prevent disease, and to preserve the planet. We will always remember opening up the paper and reading yet another important piece from Paul—he will be sorely missed.”
Dr. Paul Epstein investigating human rights violations among Kurdish refugees in 1991
Gotta love a story like this: Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues was mired at bankrupt publisher Key Porter, then rescued by Patrick Crean at Thomas Allen Publishers, and now has vaulted to win Canada’s Giller Prize. Picador will be bringing it out in the U.S. A foundling to a prize-winner! This is what I’ve always loved […]