A Great Afternoon at Book Camp

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IMG_1407Above is just one of the dozens of tweets that emerged from an event I attended today, Book Camp, known as an ‘unconference.’ The first time I heard about Book Camp was in 2010 when one was held in Toronto. I was unable to make that one, but I’ve participated in each of the four Book Camps that has been held in NYC, always on a Sunday. Here’s a blog post I wrote about last year’s Book Camp. It is a supremely ad hoc occasion where, by design, those attending don’t know what they’re going to talk about until the action gets underway. At the outset, a blank wall is at the front of the room and participants begin writing down descriptions of sessions they want to lead, taping these pages to the wall, and the schedule fills in with 4-5 sessions during each of the four 45-minute time blocks, with 10-minute networking intervals between each block. The discussions are invariably about the future of the book and publishing, whether print, digital or Web-based. Potential new initiatives are tabled that we can undertake individually or as an industry. Hosts lead the sessions they’ve offered and attendees decides what discussions they want to join, showing up at each session ready to listen and contribute. And if a session isn’t making it for you, or if you got all you needed after a few minutes, you’re encouraged to get up and move on to another one, with no aspersion cast on the host, or you for leaving. It’s like a no-fault divorce. All this stands in contrast to more scripted gatherings such as Digital Book World and Tool of Change (ToC)–with the latter handily following in the days after Book Camp. With lots of book and tech people in NYC from out of town for ToC, it’s an ideal time for this unconference, which charges no admission, though space is limited.

I led a session about ‘monetizing’ one’s website, an ungainly term that I’ll continue using until a better one comes along. I’ve begun making money with this blog and website, and am embarked on learning more fully how to convert the Web assets I’m creating in to income, and do it with greater focus and savvy. The session drew a good turnout and I’m grateful to everyone who came, with each person around the table speaking up and participating. I learned a lot, while also taking the opportunity to talk about The Great Gray Bridge and describe the curatorial impulse that drove me to create it in 2011, an impulse that continues to fuel my writing for it virtually everyday. I explained how, upon leaving corporate publishing in 2009, when I no longer had a publishing list to assemble of 20-25 books each year, I felt bereft and for a time, oddly uninspired. After a couple years of that arid feeling, I realized I needed a new garden to tend, and what’s more, that I could plant it with the seed of my own writing, and assemble my own little jewel box of a website.

Book Camp is organized by a posse that includes Chris Kubica, Ami Greko, and Kat Meyer, each denizens of the evolving digital book universe. This year we were fortunate to have space provided by Workman Publishing, in its light and spacious offices on Varick Street in Tribeca. If you’re interested in the concept of an unconference, and Book Camp in particular, I encourage you to visit the Book Camp website and follow today’s discussion on Twitter under the hashtag #Book2. I will try and add more to this post over the next day or two, but after a full day at it, I’m going to close my report for now, after first putting up a couple more of my grainy pictures. (Note to self: don’t forget to bring good camera next time!)IMG_1405IMG_1412

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Religious Intolerance Leaves Me Sputtering

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This is so ridiculous the tweet above couldn’t do justice to the wrong-headedness and narrow-mindedness of it.

The NY Times reports that Rob Morris, a Lutheran minister, has been forced by his denomination’s elders to apologize for violating “its prohibition against joint worship with other religions.” Morris participated in the ecumenical service held after the mass murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Though he’s said, “I believed my participation to be, not an act of joint worship, but an act of community chaplaincy,” he may still be punished. This, for lending succor to neighbors of all faiths at a time of great anguish, during the same event where President Obama met with grieving families and gave a moving talk.

Forced to apologize for consoling all people, not just his own tribe. That’s repellent. Intolerance and exclusionary theology are repugnant.

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Judith Butler, Magnet for Critics, Voicing Truths She Sees

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Judith-ButlerLast August I wrote about philosopher and author Judith Butler and her critics who wanted the Adorno Prize she’d been awarded by the city of Frankfurt to be denied her. I was glad that the critics’ demands were unavailing. My post from last summer focused on her beliefs about Israel and Palestine, and about the fact that in a twist of circumstance, I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, with Judith’s father as my dentist. I knew Judith’s sister, Diane. Our parents were friendly, too. As the tweet above indicates, this week Judith was again the target of critics, when a speech she gave at Brooklyn College drew protesters critical of her support for the B.D.S movement, which advocates Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel for its policies in the Occupied Territories and the West Bank.

For my part, I believe in co-existence and a two-state solution. I abhor the policies of the Netanyahu government, and believe that its construction of settlements on land that should be the subject of negotiation marginalizes reasonable voices on all sides, making a peaceful solution an ever-diminishing prospect. I condemn intolerance, hateful rhetoric, and violence. I do not share all of Judith Butler’s positions, but I emphatically support her right of self-expression and applaud the decision of Brooklyn College to uphold the principles of free speech and academic freedom, allowing her to speak this week, even in the face of critics who wanted the event canceled.

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Excited with a New Assignment–Helping Protect the Freedom to Read

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ABFFE logoI’m pleased to have a new consulting client, the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE), a non-profit organization that acts as the voice that independent booksellers and the book community raise in opposition to censorship and book banning. I’ll be working with them on fundraising and marketing, and over time, I hope their social networking. The funds ABFFE raises support programs promoting free expression, like their signature initiative, Banned Books Week. ABFFE also advocates for bookstore customer privacy. This has become a flashpoint several times over the past couple decades.

In the 1990s, Whitewater Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr subpoenaed the bookstore purchase records of Monica Lewinsky. Kramer Books & Afterwords in Washington D.C., was the target of Starr’s efforts. At a Book Expo America during the 1990s I recall picking up a t-shirt emblazoned with the message “Subpoenaed for Bookselling” that I wore for several years afterward.  Then, after 9/11 the Bush administration, in enforcing the Patriot Act, demanded that Denver’s Tattered Cover bookstore and several public libraries hand over the purchase records and circulation history of some of their customers and patrons. ABFFE was in the trenches throughout these instances, helping booksellers and librarians resist the demands.

The first assignment I’m working on with ABFFE is the expansion of their affiliate program. Under this banner, companies that sell sidelines to bookstores, such as their  newest partner Filofax, contribute to ABFFE a percentage of the sales they make to American Booksellers Association (ABA) member bookstores. Sidelines from Filofax include journals,  and planners, as well as Lamy pens and pencils and diaries from Letts of London. Other affiliate partners supply bookstores with such items as reading glasses and bookmarks. I’ve drafted a press release announcing ABFFE’s new partnership with Filofax, which also mentions my new work with the foundation. The release, posted on the news portion of ABFFE’s website, is being circulated to book industry news outlets and bookstores around the country. I will be reaching out to sideline companies to recruit them for the program, and to booksellers, asking them who their best sideline suppliers are. If you’re interested in ABFFE’s work, I encourage you to follow them on Twitter where their handle is @freadom, or to like their Facebook page.

This is a particularly welcome assignment for me, having started out in the book business as a retail bookseller. Undercover Books, which I ran with my sibling and our parents, was an active member store in the ABA. My late brother Joel served as an ABA board member. We were activist booksellers, and Joel especially relished working on issues like those that ABFFE often confronts. In 2000 he ran for Congress as a Libertarian party candidate, placing reader privacy high on the list of issues he campaigned on. When Joel died in 2009, my sister Pamela and I made ABFFE one of the organizations that friends of the family and longtime Undercover customers were encouraged to donate to in his memory.

Happily, yet another personal connection pertains here. Readers of this blog may recall my longtime association with author and notable diarist Edward Robb Ellis (1911-98), who stands still as the writer remembered for having kept a diary longer than anyone else in American history, from 1927 until the year of his death. Between 1995-98, I edited and published four of Ellis’s books, including  A Diary of the Century: Tales From America’s Greatest Diarist, with an Introduction by Pete Hamill, and The Epic of New York City, both of which are still in print today.

Eddie, as all his friends called him, was a passionate advocate and ambassador of diary-keeping, so much so that after the Guinness Book of World Records recognized him and his diary in their 1981 edition for his achievement in American letters, the aforementioned Letts of London, in the business of making diaries since 1796, arranged with Eddie to publish “The Ellis Diary,” a handsome red leatherette bound, gold-ribbon bookmarked blank diary. You can imagine then how tickled I was when as part of this new assignment I scanned the catalogs and materials ABFFE director Chris Finan gave me to read up on Filofax’s business, happily discovering their association with the venerable Letts of London. Moreover, when I called and introduced myself to Filofax USA’s Paul Brusser, I learned that Letts of London is actually now Filofax’s parent company–it’s clear this long-living British company is still going strong. I wonder if anyone with Letts of London today remembers Eddie Ellis and “The Ellis Diary.” One of the nice things about this new gig is it may offer me the chance to find out! Below you’ll find some artifacts illustrating my work with Eddie Ellis, and his relationship with Letts of London. Click here to see photos.

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A Nasty Legacy of Superstorm Sandy

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Cara Buckley’s New York Times story will make you squirm, including its dreadful detail on a basement one exterminator goes to work in, where others of his professional ilk had refused the job, so overrun with vermin was it.

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Excellent Opportunity For Aspiring Investigative Reporters

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Here’s a cool opportunity, from a website called Hartford Courant Alumni Association and Refugee Camp–Where The Latest On Former Hartford Courant Employees Can Be Found:

[Hartford] Courant alums Kate Farrish and Lynne DeLucia—now colleagues at the Connecticut Health Investigative Team—are starting to recruit high school students interested in learning investigative reporting in July at summer reporting camps offered at the University of Connecticut and Quinnipiac University by the C-HIT.org.
This is a program they have run before and that exposes potential journalists to some of Connecticut’s finest practicing reporters.

Ahh, if only I were a bit younger!

 

 

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Second Lives for Good Canadian Publishing Names

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douglas-and-mcintyreMany in the book business were distressed last fall when it was abruptly announced that Douglas & McIntyre (D&M), one of the finest indie publishers in Canada, had announced it was seeking protection from creditors and filing for bankruptcy. Making matters worse, when the list of their creditors was published, the names of many authors and publishing partners were included, a sad sign that the pain and financial loss was going to run deep and wide in the Canadian book community, bleeding in to the U.S., too.

Nonetheless, people looking for a bright side were hoping that the assets of the Vancouver, British Columbia-based company would somehow find their way more or less intact in to the hands of another publisher, and that the books they’d published might somehow stay in print without interruption, giving the authors a shot at making up some of their loss. But there was no certainty of this. What’s more, there were three separate companies involved–New Society Publishers, Greystone Books, and D&M. It was possible that the assets of one or more of the imprints might be bought and carried on, while one or more of the others could fall by the wayside. Early on, it was revealed that New Society would be sold back to its founders. In the months that followed, while many stalwart employees of the full company lost their jobs, the assets went in to receivership under supervision by provincial courts, and it became very quiet, at least looking at it from the outside.

Last week, the dam began to break when it was announced that Greystone Books was being bought by Heritage House of Victoria, B.C. This pleased me because I’m friendly with Greystone’s publisher, Rob Sanders, who will continue with the company under the new Heritage House arrangement. That left only D&M still awaiting a new home. Today, that was resolved too, with the welcome news that B.C.’s Harbour Publishing is buying D&M. I assume this will include backlist and current books, as well as potentially books D&M had signed up but not yet published. The sale pleases me too, because I’m friendly with at least one author who had signed with D&M last year, and now has a chance to continue with the new entity.

Considering the bleak prospects, and not forgetting that much pain and loss has already been felt, this is about as good an outcome as could have been hoped for. I wish everyone involved only the very best going forward.

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Feting Michael Jacobs, a Publishing Friend of Many Years, for a Good Cause

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Michael Jacobs program 4Last Thursday night the publishing industry finally had a chance to celebrate the career of Michael Jacobs, currently head of Abrams, who earlier had successful tenures at Scholastic, Simon & Schuster and Viking Penguin. I write “finally” because the event feting Michael–which was also designed to give his friends and colleagues the chance to contribute money for the good work of Goddard Riverside Community Center, a key provider of social services on the west side of Manhattan–was originally scheduled for Monday, October 29th, the night that Superstorm Sandy hit NYC.

In the aftermath of the devastating storm, I, and none of the friends I had been hoping to see that night, were sure that the event would be rescheduled. But just before Christmas it was announced the benefit would still be held, on January 31st. I was pleased, as many were, that we’d still have the chance to formally toast the honoree. On a side note, I picked up something interesting about event planning in NYC, and which may have pertained in this instance. A friend who seemed knowledgeable indicated that because the mayor’s office had officially shut the city down on the Sunday–shuttering subways and announcing school closures, all well in advance of the storm’s arrival–the bond that had been taken out on the event, the insurance against last-minute cancellation of it–did not have to be paid, at least not in full. The venue, Capitale on Bowery near Grand Street, never had to unlock its doors or turn on the lights, the caterer didn’t have to prepare a canape or uncork a bottle of wine, and the waitstaff didn’t have to don their livery and report for work. Thus, it seems that financial sacrifices for all parties were minimized and a make-up date could be scheduled, with donors’ contributions all going toward the benefit of Goddard Riverside, such a valuable community resource.

Capitale is a grand venue–a former bank–designed by architect Stanford White.*  The high, vaulted space looks like it could have been the set for a depression-era film, such as “American Madness,” where Walter Huston plays a bank president trying to avert a crippling ‘run’ on his institution. The evening began with a cocktail hour, where almost 500 guests began assembling right at the opening time of 6 PM. Even in this huge space it became cramped quickly, making it a challenge to get around and say hello to the friends and familiar faces one hadn’t seen in a long time. Still, it was very convivial, even shoulder to shoulder, elbow to elbow, all at close quarters. I just wouldn’t have wanted to be one of the waiters serving those canapes. I saw Michael Jacobs and told him how glad I was this event was at last coming off. He was beaming. As with many people I know in the book business, I met Michael, then with Viking, sometime between 1978-85 when with my family I ran Undercover Books, a 3-store chain of indie bookstores in Cleveland, Ohio. Abrams was then known for publishing the most opulently printed art and coffee table books, and our store did great business with their whole list. The company has changed a lot since, but Abrams remains one of the finest publishers of illustrated books, along with childrens’ books and a range of nonfiction.

Around 7:00 we were asked to head through a curtain dividing the room and find our tables. I was at #37–a prime number, I thought–at a table put together by my friend, longtime rights maven, publisher, and agent, Mildred Marmur.** The program portion of the evening kicked off with an amusing short film made by Michael’s exceptional executive assistant, Merle Brown, with a crew made up of family members of hers. It was a scenario where Merle, as dinner benefit wrangler ‘stalks’ Chronicle Books president, Jack Jensen, to enroll his support. Jack continually dodges her and pleads with her to leave him alone. It was quite funny, with Merle speaking directly to the camera at points, feigning fatigue from chasing Jack all over, in apartment building lobbies, at an airport, and on the street. When it ended Merle introduced Jack, who quickly assured us he wasn’t really reluctant to be feting his good friend Michael. He and Michael had gotten to know each other around 1980, when they roomed together. Jack was followed by a number of speakers, including Abrams author Jeff Kinney, creator of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. Kinney explained how glad he was when Michael and he had capitalized on the launch of Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Cabin Fever in 2011 to benefit programs at Goddard Riverside. The materials handed out to guests included Goddard Riverside’s annual report for 2011, from which I learn that the Center’s roots reach back to the settlement house movement of the 19th century, in their case to 1887. Their annual budget is more than $20 million, supporting a day care center in a brownstone; a mobile mental health unit; a residence for low-income adults; and a center devoted to training college counseling professionals all over the city. There is also their signature book industry event, the annual holiday book fair, to which publishers contribute thousands of books, drawing New Yorkers every year.

Amid the remarks, salad, dinner and dessert were served and eaten. The program concluded when Michael was introduced by JP Leventhal, of Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, and he took to the podium. It was a warm talk, full of affection for the book business that’s given him his career, and fondness for the many people who’ve befriended him along the way, especially for the folks who’d organized the dinner, even after its near-cancellation. He thanked lots of people by name, told us that more than $600,000 had been raised for Goddard Riverside, gave shout-outs to his family, and closed by reading a Wallace Stevens poem.

In a long line to retrieve my coat and bag, I found myself waiting with Penguin editor-in-chief Kathryn Court, and Elliott Figman, executive director of Poets & Writers, whom I had never met before, though I enjoy his magazine. The three of us discussed how Sandy had displaced us to varying extents. I was tickled to learn that Elliott, who went to Oberlin College, clearly remembered Robert Fuller, now my author client, who was president of Oberlin for 4 years.  We enjoyed meeting and agreed to talk again another time.

It was a great night for Michael Jacobs, and a grand night for publishing, affirming once again that the book business is still a collegial world, filled with people who care for one another, and for their city.

*I recall that the ill-fated White was played by Norman Mailer in Ragtime, the 1981 movie adapted from E.L. Doctorow’s historico-literary novel. The plot covered, in part, the murder of White by Harry Thaw, who was jealous of White’s affair with his wife Evelyn Nesbit, played by Elizabeth McGovern, nowadays playing Cora in “Downton Abbey.”

**In 1975, while Marmur was Director of Subsidiary Rights at Random House, the company published Ragtime in hardcover. She auctioned the rights to Doctorow’s novel to Bantam, for what was then the largest deal ever made for a paperback reprint of a literary novel, $1,850.000.

Please click through here to see all photos.

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