Beattie's Book Blog - unofficial homepage of the New Zealand book community

Sr Citizen by Charles Olsen

2012-01-31T12:39:00.001+13:00

Charles Olsen was born 1969 in Nelson, New Zealand. He then lived in England for many years before moving to Madrid in Spain in 2003, where he lives now.

He is a talented painter and poet and Sr Citizen, an attractive and appealing slender volume, is his first collection to be published . It features both his poetry and art.
Most of the poems are written in Spanish and have English translations.
You can read his poetry at pensamientoslentos.blogspot.

And for bio info go here - http://www.artreview.com/profile/CharlesOlsen

How To Read Poetry

2012-01-31T12:17:00.000+13:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqlPKnPTz7s&feature=youtu.be

Not to be taken seriously !

Outstanding Australian cook book publishers

2012-01-31T11:55:00.000+13:00

I reckon the Aussies publish the world's best cookbooks and leading the way are three book publishers who are hugely impressive in this field. There are others too of course but these guys are the trend setters. I refer of course to Hardie Grant Books, Lantern and Murdoch Books.
To illustrate my point I am looking today at three books currently on the dining room table, all from Hardie Grant Books.
They are Four Seasons - A Year of Italian Good by Manuela Darling-Gansser which I wrote about late last year when it was published.

And then the two that arrived just as I was heading off for the Christmas holidays, both large, spectacular and totally captivating.

MARQUE - a culinary adventure by Mark Best and Pasi Petanen
and
The Complete Asian Cookbook by Charmaine Solomon

MARQUE - a culinary adventure
Way back in 2000 Annie and I were fortunate enough to be warmly recommended this restaurant by some NSW friends so we made a booking (from New Zealand) and bowled along on one of our three nights in Sydney. Even then in its first year of operation bookings were heavy and the only time we could get in was at 6.30pm. A bit early but it was Hobson's Choice. What a wonderful experience it turned out to be even though the location was then in the rather down-at-heel suburb of Surry Hills. There has been much gentrification since!
Mark's wife Valerie was the host and when she found out that one of our main reasons for visiting Sydney was to eat at Marque she sat with us at our table a couple of times and we learned about the opening of the restaurant and how it was going. Then towards the end of our wonderful meal Mark emerged from the kitchen and we had a pleasant chat with him for a few minutes before he was called back.
We have never forgotten that experience and have been back twice in the intervening years although didn't make contact with Valerie or Mark on those visits.We are planning a winter visit to Sydney this year so I'll be calling them in advance to make another booking.
So you can imagine my delight when Mark's cookbook turned up.
Marque is a highly illustrated, contemporary recipe book, celebrating and reflecting on Marque, this highly succesful Sydney restaurant. Also included is the personal journey of chef and owner Mark Best and approximately 80 of Marque's signature recipes. Most are complete dishes but the book also contains a myriad of smaller recipes and techniques which are the backbone of Mark Best's creations. A stunning book to treasure as both a compilation of beautiful recipes and a record of one of the world's best restaurants. And for me a special souvenir.
I should add that Marque is one of only four Australian restaurants to make the coveted top 100 in the San Pellegrino World's Best Restaurant award. RRP $79.99

The Complete Asian Cookbook
Charmaine Solomon - $59.99

This is a completely revised and updated edition of Charmaine Solomon's influential and iconic book of the same title first published 36 years ago back in 1976.And what a handsome new edition it is - a big beauty I would call it.
It covers more than 800 classic and contemporary dishes from fifteen countries - India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, The Philippines, China, Korea and Japan.
Written with the home cook in mind, Charmaine's recipes are straightforward, simple to follow and work every time. Recipe and chapter introductions give valuable information about how local dishes are prepared and served, while the comprehensive glossary explains unfamiliar ingredients (which are steadily more commonplace in supermarkets today). The Complete Asian Cookbook is a book that should be in the kitchens of every household.

Accolade to publisher:
Hardie Grant I extend my warm thanks and hearty congratulations to you for all the outstanding cookbook publishing you deliver to us. I am proud to have your books on my shelf and to frequently use recipes from them as well as often just reading them for foodie reading pleasure.
I salute you and your chef authors, photographers, designers, editors, stylists, publicists and indeed all the team required to carry out such special publishing.

The Tuesday Poem

2012-01-31T11:54:00.003+13:00

Today's Editor, Helen Rickerby writes:

One of the cool things about the Tuesday Poem, and having your turn at being the editor of tis hub blog especially, is having the opportunity to share your favourite poems with other people. ‘Appointment with Sophie Calle’ is one of my favourite poems, and I would love to have shared the whole thing with you, but it’s a very long poem. So I’ve just chosen four little pieces, which are poems in themselves, to act as a taster. I hope you’ll go and seek it out and read the whole thing. You’ll find it in Making Lists for Frances Hodgkins, by Paula Green (left), which was published by Auckland University Press in 2007.

It's a wonderful book, but this poem (or poem sequence - with long poems divided into sections like this, there is always that dilemma of whether it's a poem or a sequence, or both) is a stand out for me, and one I've returned to over and over. The Sophie Calle of the title is a French conceptual artist - I hadn't heard of her before reading this poem, but her artwork is worth reading about. She is someone who weaves lives - her own and other people's - into art. One project involved getting her mother to hire a private investigator to follow Calle around and take photographs of her. He didn't know she knew he was following her, and she led him around places that meant something to her. The aim was an attempt 'to provide photographic evidence of my own existence'.

Full Tuesday Poem post - link here.

Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd

2012-01-31T11:40:00.000+13:00

Long-time book trade personality Andrew Rumbles reviews William Boyd's latest on his blog founded last November, AndrewTalksBooks .

J'aime Paris: A taste of Paris in 200+ culinary destinations

2012-01-31T11:07:00.000+13:00

Was there a more beautiful book than this one published anywhere in 2011? Not that I came across. Some adjectives that can be applied to this stunner include beautiful, alluring, awesome, magnificent, classy, dazzling, elegant, ravishing - I had better stop there but truly this is the most lavishly photographed book you will come across in a long long time.

I may never visit any of the famous and not so famous foodie haunts featured in it but I shall treasure this book as my souvenir of the twenty or so times I have been fortunate enough to visit that most appealing of cities. Believe me it is a stunning. And I must add too a snip at NZ$60.

In the book you join France's most celebrated chef, Alain Ducasse, on a personal journey around Paris as he reveals his favourite foodie haunts including restaurants, cafes, local bistros, patisseries and other artisanal stores. From a morning croissant on the Canal Saint-Martin to a magical dinner on the Eiffel Tower, Alain Ducasse takes you on a stunning gourmet tour of Paris. From his own 3-star restaurants to his favourite icecream store, to his insider's tip on the best local creperie in town, Ducasse share the stories, histories and encounters with the men and women who make up Paris' extraordinary culinary landscape. Spectacularly photographed, Paris by Alain Ducasse showcases the gourmet highlights of the capital, telling of the Chef's passion for cookery and his sincere love of Paris.

It is a work that will set all admirers of beauty, excellence and authenticity dreaming, wherever they may live. I am dreaming now, here in Auckland, NZ as I write this and again browse through the pages.

Also included, tucked handily in to the back inside cover, is a pocket size listing of all the places listed in the book complete with address details, websites, and a brief description of each. The book itself is 598 pages long - not one to take on a plane as it is likely to contribute to excess baggage problems! And the restaurant note book included runs to 56 pages.

Don't miss this one.

As Barnes & Noble Goes, So Goes the Future of Publishing

2012-01-31T10:44:00.001+13:00

From Sam Sattler's Book Case Blog. (always worth a visit).

A New York Barnes and Noble Location

Not all that long ago, I was able to choose between buying a a recently published book from Barnes and Noble, B. Dalton, Borders, Book Stop, Crown Books, and even a handful of really good, but much smaller, booksellers. Now there are just Barnes and Noble and the Books-A-Million chains, the latter of which has never had much of a presence in Houston. When they first appeared, all of the national chains were harshly accused of running out of business all the little guys that had been selling books locally for decades. The chains were most definitely cast as the bad guys, and they probably were. Now, however, I would kill to have them back because even the last standing giant, Barnes and Noble, may not be long for this world and the little guys are not likely to return even if that happens.

The CNBC website has posted a heartbreaking, and terrifying, New York Times article clearly presenting the predicament that traditional publishers are in today. The publishers recognize that the survival of Barnes and Noble is now closely tied to their own future survival. This is true, despite the fact, that the bookseller is walking a very fine line itself as it tries to compete with Amazon in the e-book market while not, as a result, entirely killing off so much of the demand for printed books that it has to close its brick and mortar bookstores. Without Barnes and Noble's bookstores, the future of printed books will be much different than today - and many experts are already predicting that Barnes and Noble has started down the path of a long, slow death spiral of its own.

Without Barnes & Noble, the publishers’ marketing proposition crumbles. The idea that publishers can spot, mold and publicize new talent, then get someone to buy books at prices that actually makes economic sense, suddenly seems a reach. Marketing books via Twitter, and relying on reviews, advertising and perhaps an appearance on the “Today” show doesn’t sound like a winning plan.

What publishers count on from bookstores is the browsing effect. Surveys indicate that only a third of the people who step into a bookstore and walk out with a book actually arrived with the specific desire to buy one.

While publishers’ fates are closely tied to Barnes & Noble, said John Sargent, the C.E.O. of Macmillan, it’s not all about them. “Anybody who is an author, a publisher, or makes their living from distributing intellectual property in book form is badly hurt,” he said, “if Barnes & Noble does not prosper.”

If, as a true book-lover, any of this scares you or makes you nervous, you should read the entire article. It will terrify you and make you wonder if Jeff Bevos, head of Amazon, is on the verge of killing off the industry dearest to our hearts...and yet, few of us can resist the lure of Amazon's cheap prices and quick delivery. Are we nuts?

‘The Help’ Wins Three SAG Awards

2012-01-31T10:43:00.002+13:00

By Maryann Yin on Galley Cat January 30, 2012

The film adaptation of Katheryn Stockett‘s The Help took three awards at the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards last night, including Best Ensemble Cast.
Follow this link for the full list of winners. Lead actress Viola Davis and supporting actress Octavia Spencer (both pictured, via) also won SAG Awards for their roles as Aibileen Clark and Minny Jackson. Spencer recently received the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress.
Both Davis and Spencer have been nominated for Academy Awards. The Envelope had this quote from Spencer: “I love taking men home. I would be lying if I didn’t say to you I would love to win an Oscar. But we have a group of brilliantly talented actresses, and it’s not a foregone conclusion that because I’ve won these [awards] then I’ll win [the Oscar].” (Via The L.A. Times)

Mary McCallum's Tuesday Poem: The Barn

2012-01-31T09:20:00.001+13:00

Tuesday Poem: The Barn

Here, it is that we are
a breath outwards
returning, the gate –
on a slant – the paint pulling
from the wood – closes –
we let it,
let go of the road,
the run of fences, the tin-cut
tilting hills, the world’s rim, let
the dog out to run,
and we drive
with the windows wound
down - lavender -
olive trees - cypresses.
The barn, at last. Blushes! – there
you are.

Here, it is that we are
a breath outwards
returning, and not much
more than a breath this time,
not much more than skin
and bone,
rubbed thin by all
our comings and goings, all this
living in the light. We can see
through our scraps of selves
to paint the colour
of ox-blood wrinkling
like the skin on milk around
the double-hung windows.
In the exposed
wood, in the beginnings of
rot, in the rare blushing light.

Here, it is – (breath outwards)
a glimpse (returning) – that time –
when the paint clung so
tightly the timber groaned,
and in the stampeding wind –
in the hot sun – under the welt of stars –
the barn was an instrument
filled with our spit and wild
breathing. Daughter, plump
as a pigeon,
flapping on the ground
by a tree in a bag for planting,
and her brothers
snickering like ponies
on their way back from the frogpond –
their tins and string and
percussive boots.

Light is trickery.
The paint
blisters and peels,
and it’s all we can do
not to help it off.
My knuckles
rest
on the warm wood.
I lean close.
I feel it - or someone - humming.

Mary McCallum

This is a poem I worked on over the summer up at the place we call The Barn. It's ours and it's blssful - as a place to be alone and with family, and to write. There are some photos of our summer here with a glimpse of The Barn.

The poem was written to contribute to an exhibition as part of the Fringe Festival here in Wellington. It's called Translucent Landscapes and it's opening March 1. There are 11 of us involved: a number of visual artists (including installation artists, videomedia artists etc), a composer, and me. I have written four poems for the exhibition so far and am wondering how to present them now (follow the link to Translucent Landscapes above for some thinking on that.)

In this poem, the theme of the exhibition is concentrated around the line: 'Light is trickery' - the way light can 'show' us what's real and what's not - shining onto the present and yet somehow 'lifting' it like paint - summoning the past as real as if it's there in front of us - the paint - the wood - the paint - the wood - and the way light, too, can wear away at what's there now - 'too much living in the light' - so, again, the past comes through - bidden and unbidden ... these things preoccupy me...

At the Barn there's no internet connection - although I can use my phone when I need to. There's also no Mac computer, just an old laptop which is rather slow. So, I write a lot by hand at the Barn without interruption, which means poems written there are different somehow.

Do go and read the Paul Green poem taster at the Tuesday Poem hub - and the fascinating commentary by Helen Rickerby. Truly it's worth it.

BLOG STATS

2012-01-31T09:08:00.001+13:00

Almost 14,000 visitors last week, around 2000 more than the average week.

They came from:

51% New Zealand

12% USA

8% UK

5% Australia

2% each France, Canada, India

1% each Germany/Italy/Spain

15% Spread across 51 other countries

Excitement at the post office

2012-01-31T06:58:00.001+13:00

Three individual parcels in the mail, each containing a book, all special books:

LETTERS OF FRANK SARGESON
Selected and edited by Sarah Shieff
Vintage
Hardback - $49.99
Enthusiastically reviewed by Patrick Evans in the Sunday Star Times yesterday so far I have only dipped into it but I must say what I have read I have found riveting.

PHANTOM
Jo Nesbo
Harvill Secker - $37.99
Hey hey hey, yes, being published in NZ on 3 February (nearly 6 weeks ahead of the UK publication) the much anticipated new Jo Nesbo thriller featuring Harry Hole. Can't wait to get into this so it is promoted to number three in the bedside pile!

THE DAY SHE CRADLED ME
Sacha de Bazin
Black Swan - $37.99
A debut novel from this Nelson-based author. An historical novel, which the publishers say has been exhaustively researched, featuring the life of Millie Dean, the only NZ woman ever to be hanged, and a legendary figure in Southland.

Accused of infanticide and awaiting trial and then sentence, Minnie confides in the Reverend Lindsay. Alternating between these two contrasting personalities, the novel tells Minnie's version of events. From her oppressive upbringing in Victorian Scotland to adulthood in Southland, Minnie battles her own nature and the hardships of colonial life and social hypocrisy. Once Minnie is tried, she has to face her impending execution, while the Reverend Lindsay, who has become her unlikely ally, fights to prevent her paying the ultimate price for society's sins.
This book is going to attract a lot of attention.

About the author:

Sacha de Bazin (right) is a 38 year old mother of 5 children, who range in ages from 12 down to 2. Previously she was a primary school teacher, with a BA in English. She grew up in Tokoroa, studied in Auckland, raised children in Canterbury and recently moved to Nelson. This is her first novel.

New publisher, new New Zealand author

2012-01-31T06:57:00.001+13:00

An appealing looking novel arrived in the mail last week from Hachette NZ published under the Two Roads imprint. I had not heard of the Two Roads imprint before, it just said inside the book, a Hodder & Stoughton imprint, so I wrote and enquired about it. Two Roads Publisher Lisa Highton has now replied:

When I started Two Roads books just a year ago I found whatI wanted in a book, either to read or to publish, came down to just four words:stories voices places lives. Like many readers I wanted a strongpage-turning story, told in an original voice, transporting readers toother places and telling us about other people's lives and, thereby, ourown.

People often ask me 'how do I know I want to publish a book - fiction ornon-fiction?' It's actually a kind of magic, almost a physicalreaction...I knew I wanted to publish TheSea on Our Skin from the moment I set foot on theisland's beach, I could hear the waves, smell the sea and the firstwords seemed to say... let me tell you a story...and this is avery beguiling story from a new and talented writer. It seemed a perfectfit for a new fiction list.

On themorning of the wedding of Ioane Matete and Amalia Hoko, it rained. The cloudsthat had been waiting, dark and swollen for days, gave in to their impatienceand a torrent of water pounded the island. The damp between Ioane’s toes madehis feet itch and the itch in his feet made him desperate to move on. He was anexplorer, not used to staying still. As soon as the wedding – by which he meantthe wedding night – was over, he would leave his new bride and set out oncemore on his travels.

Surprisinglyfew books are set in the South Seas and maybe it took a travelling Scottishgirl to write one (after all there is precedent, with Robert Louis Stevensonaka Tusitala). Madeleine's writing has a kind of island rhythm as wefollow the story of Amalia, her marriage to Ioane and their four unusualchildren.

About the author:

Madeleine Tobert
Originally from Scotland, Madeleine spent several years in the Pacific islands. She tried to leave but found she just couldn’t. She now lives in Auckland with her Fijian husband. The Sea on Our Skin is her first book.
Madeleine’s website here

Footnote:

Thanks Lisa, The Sea on Our Skin looks most appealing, and is now in my reading pile.Best wishes with your new imprint.

The self-epublishing bubble

2012-01-31T06:51:00.002+13:00

In August 2011, Ewan Morrison published an article entitled Are Books Dead and Can Authors Survive?. Here, he tracks the self-epublishing euphoria of the last five months and argues that we are at the start of an epublishing bubble

Ewan Morrison - guardian.co.uk, Monday 30 January 2012

Unlikely to last very long ... a bubble rises. Photograph: Dylan Martinez/Reuters

The internet is full of ironies. I, for one, could never have guessed that writing about the end of books would generate more income for me than actually publishing the damn things. I've been on an End of Books reading tour since August and it turns out that what the internet gurus say about consumers being more willing to pay for events, speeches and gigs, rather than buying cultural objects, is now becoming true.
At the other end of the political spectrum from me, among the epublishing enthusiasts and digital fundamentalists, similar ironies are playing out: there is now a boom industry in "How to get rich writing ebooks" manuals, as well as a multitude of blogs offering tips and services, and a new breed of specialists who'll charge you anything from $37 to $149 to get your ebook into shape.
This all seems like a repeat of the boom in get-rich-quick manuals and "specialists" that appeared around blogs and etrading. Did anyone actually get rich from writing blogs, you may ask? Well, according to Jaron Lanier (author of You are not a Gadget) there are only a handful of people in the world who can prove that they make a living from blogging: it's entirely possible that more money was made by those who wrote and sold the how-to manuals than by the bloggers themselves. But who cares, right? It's all part of the euphoria of digital change, and technological innovation is as unstoppable a force as fate. Reports show that paper book sales are "tanking" – down a massive 54.3% while ebook sales are up triumphantly by 138%. The revolution will be epublished, and we're all going to be part of it.
All of this ebook talk is becoming a business in itself. Money is being made out of thin air in this strange new speculative meta-practice: there are seminars, conferences and courses springing up everywhere, even at the Society of Authors (a writers' union which, until recently, was largely against epublication). Television and radio programmes are being made about self-epublishing (I've personally been asked to speak about it on 12 occasions since August). Everyone can be a writer now: it only takes 10 minutes to upload your own ebook, and according to the New York Times "81% of people feel they have a book in them ... And should write it"

Full story at The Guardian.

While at Galley Cat:

Should Entrepreneurs Self-Publish?

By Jason Boog on Galley Cat, January 30, 2012

Formula Capital managing director and author James Altucher wrote a TechCrunch post this weekend explaining “Why Every Entrepreneur Should Self-Publish a Book.”
In the article, Altucher bashed the Penguin publicity team that worked on one of his earlier books and urged entrepreneurs to abandon traditional publishing. What do you think of his provocative article?
Check it out: “You’re an entrepreneur because you feel you have a product or an idea or a vision that stands out among your competitors (if you don’t stand out, pack it in and come up with a new idea). You know how to do something better than anyone else in the world. How do let the world know that you are better? A business card won’t cut it. People will throw it away. And everyone’s got a website with an ‘About’ button. Give away part (or all) of your ideas in a book.” (Link via Publishers Weekly; Image via Google Plus)

Erotic books popular with e-readers

2012-01-31T06:48:00.005+13:00

CBC News - Posted: Jan 28, 2012

Lady Mechatronic and the Steampunked Pirates is one of many popular erotic e-books offered by B.C.'s eXtasy Books. ((Devine Destinies/eXtasy books))

Sales have soared for erotic literature with the advent of e-readers such as Kobo and Kindle, with one company in British Columbia reaping the benefits.
Tina Haveman, who's based in Squamish, B.C., north of Vancouver, owns a busy digital erotic publishing company and she says there are a lot of “closet readers” who would never admit to liking that kind of literature.
“Customers are starting to discover them and finding that they can read certain books that they do not want other people to see and in privacy,” Haveman, who runs eXtasy books, told CBC Radio.
The e-publisher notes that sales took off in early 2010 and doubled last year. She expects them to triple in 2012 with a majority of downloaders being female. Xtasy has more than 1,000 titles in its “store” including ones such as the paranormal Dragon’s Pearl, the hybrid fantasy/Victorian Lady Mechatronic and the Steampunk Pirates and the Western-tinged Dead Man’s Diamond.
“Women read a lot more than men. It’s always been that way.”
But within that group, interests are wide: from inspirational romance to stories involving werewolves to gay romance – each selling for between $3 and $4 online.
Nathan Maharaj, Kobo’s merchandising director, called eXtasy a Canadian success story.
“It’s reduced barriers to entry for publishers as well as for customers looking to get into it.”
“You can actually, in some ways, enjoy the fact that you’re doing something a little bit naughty in public,” Knabe said. “You could be reading your e-reader on public transit.”
According to Maharaj, sexy books are regularly cracking bestseller lists: “At any given moment in the list of the top 100 most popular titles on Kobo in any given territory there’s always some work of erotica in there."

Russian billionaire leads a London bookshop revolution

2012-01-31T06:41:00.004+13:00

Adam Sherwin - The Indpendent - Saturday 28 January 2012

It is a literary innovation that will delight London's influx of Russians – and intrigue the intelligence services. Waterstones will open a Russian-language "bookshop" within its flagship Piccadilly store next month.

Russian-speaking assistants will be recruited for the shop, which is the personal passion of Alexander Mamut, the Russian billionaire whose A&NN Group bought the high-street bookseller last year in a £53m deal.
Mr Mamut, who says he enjoys reading high-quality literature in Russian and English, has named the new store "Slova", Russian for "words". It will be housed on the ground floor mezzanine level of the Piccadilly branch and contain almost 5,000 titles.
Slova is expected to become a meeting point for the more literary-minded Russians in the capital. As well as stocking the classics of Russian literature – Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov – it will showcase commercial writers such as Boris Akunin and Polina Dashkova, Russia's most successful crime author, who has sold 40 million books. The move is the next stage in Mr Mamut's plan to revitalise Waterstones under James Daunt, its new managing director, by serving local communities.Mr Daunt told The Bookseller magazine: "For Russophiles and the large, vibrant Russian community in London, we aim to make Slova an irresistible literary and cultural destination. One won't be surprised at the source of the idea, given Waterstones' ownership."

Full story at The Independent.

A statement from Peter Robertson, President of Interlitq (now at www.interlitq.wordpress.com)

2012-01-31T06:28:00.002+13:00

“Itwas, of course, disappointing that Arts Council England did not choose to lookoutwards but, in any case, we were notdefeated, but only strengthened by thatapparent setback, and Interlitq has now regrouped successfully in order toengage in its essential undertaking—which is to publish the finestinternational literature. And, to that end, publication of Interlitq has, forthe time being, migrated to

www.interlitq.wordpress.com

Theobjective of Interlitq is to continue to publish fine literature, in an arrayof languages, and on a daily basis, instead of publishing only every threemonths which was, in fact, limiting. Let me stress that Interlitq is alsocommitted to providing a continuous platform for outstanding New Zealandliterature and, to this end, we have on our new site already published work byNZ writers such as Martha Morseth:

http://interlitq.wordpress.com/2012/01/12/interlitq-is-delighted-to-publish-its-poem-in-english-for-today-13-01-11-on-achieving-by-new-zealand-author-martha-morseth/

http://interlitq.wordpress.com/2012/01/19/interlitq-is-delighted-to-publish-its-poem-in-english-for-today-19-01-12-at-night-by-new-zealand-author-martha-morseth/

JaneSeaford:

http://interlitq.wordpress.com/2012/01/25/interlitq-is-delighted-to-publish-its-prose-in-english-for-25-01-12-the-story-one-of-those-days-by-new-zealand-author-jane-seaford/

andKaren Zelas:

http://interlitq.wordpress.com/2012/01/24/interlitq-is-delighted-to-publish-its-poem-in-english-for-23-01-12-desire-by-new-zealand-author-karen-zelas-a-contributor-to-issue-11-of-interlitq-2/

http://interlitq.wordpress.com/2012/01/25/interlitq-is-delighted-to-publish-its-poem-in-english-for-25-01-12-lunch-with-cook-by-new-zealand-author-karen-zelas-a-contributor-to-issue-11-of-interlitq/

andwe will be publishing a further two poems by Karen Zelas this week, with thepoem “Waiting” being Interlitq’s poem for 30.01.12.

Furthermore,we are now looking forward to publishing many NZ writers over coming weeksalongside outstanding artwork by NZ artists.

Ivery much hope that you will all continue to enjoy Interlitq, which will continueto look outwards, to nurture literary talent across the world.”

PeterRobertson

Franzen: E-books Bad for Society

2012-01-31T06:19:00.001+13:00

The Daily Beast

First it was the iPhone, now it's the e-book. Jonathan Franzen, (left-Neilson Barnard / Getty Images) the author of Freedom and The Corrections, launched a passionate defense of the printed book—and an attack on e-books—at the Hay Festival in Cartagena, Colombia. “The technology I like is the American paperback edition of Freedom. I can spill water on it, and it would still work! So it's pretty good technology,” said Franzen. “And what’s more, it will work great 10 years from now. So no wonder the capitalists hate it. It’s a bad business model.” Wondering whether nonelectronic print will be around in 50 years, he said he fears that “it’s going to be very hard to make the world work if there’s no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government.”

Read it at The Telegraph

The Bookstore’s Last Stand - everyone has something to say about Barnes & Noble

2012-01-31T06:18:00.000+13:00

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times -William J. Lynch Jr., chief executive of Barnes & Noble, with a wall full of e-readers at its site in Silicon Valley, where 300 employees are building the company's digital side.

By JULIE BOSMAN - New York Times - Published: January 28, 2012

A magazine display at a Barnes & Noble store. The company's C.E.O. says the idea that e-readers will make bookstores obsolete is nonsense.

IN March 2009, an eternity ago in Silicon Valley, a small team of engineers here was in a big hurry to rethink the future of books. Not the paper-and-ink books that have been around since the days of Gutenberg, the ones that the doomsayers proclaim — with glee or dread — will go the way of vinyl records.

No, the engineers were instead fixated on the forces that are upending the way books are published, sold, bought and read: e-books and e-readers. Working in secret, behind an unmarked door in a former bread bakery, they rushed to build a device that might capture the imagination of readers and maybe even save the book industry.

They had six months to do it.

Running this sprint was, of all companies, Barnes & Noble, the giant that helped put so many independent booksellers out of business and that now finds itself locked in the fight of its life. What its engineers dreamed up was the Nook, a relative e-reader latecomer that has nonetheless become the great e-hope of Barnes & Noble and, in fact, of many in the book business.

Several iterations later, the Nook and, by extension, Barnes & Noble, at times seem the only things standing between traditional book publishers and oblivion.

Inside the great publishing houses — grand names like Macmillan, Penguin and Random House — there is a sense of unease about the long-term fate of Barnes & Noble, the last major bookstore chain standing. First, the megastores squeezed out the small players. (Think of Tom Hanks’s Fox & Sons Books to Meg Ryan’s Shop Around the Corner in the 1998 comedy, “You’ve Got Mail”.) Then the chains themselves were gobbled up or driven under, as consumers turned to the Web. B. Dalton Bookseller and Crown Books are long gone. Borders collapsed last year.

No one expects Barnes & Noble to disappear overnight. The worry is that it might slowly wither as more readers embrace e-books. What if all those store shelves vanished, and Barnes & Noble became little more than a cafe and a digital connection point? Such fears came to the fore in early January, when the company projected that it would lose even more money this year than Wall Street had expected. Its share price promptly tumbled 17 percent that day.

Lurking behind all of this is Amazon.com, the dominant force in books online and the company that sets teeth on edge in publishing. From their perches in Midtown Manhattan, many publishing executives, editors and publicists view Amazon as the enemy — an adversary that, if unchecked, could threaten their industry and their livelihoods.

Full story at the New York Times.

While over at PublishersLunch they have this to say:

Everyone Wants to Write About Barnes & Noble

Towards the end of the NYT business sectionarticle that follows the standard narrative, they note that in BN's 300-personPalo Alto division, "engineers were putting final touches on their fifthe-reading device, a product that executives said would be released sometimethis spring." The story also says that ceo William Lynch "plans toexperiment with slightly smaller stores."

Meanwhile, Amazon offers another nebulousgrowth statistic to the paper. For the nine-week holiday sales period, endingDecember 31, "Kindle unit sales, including both the Kindle Fire ande-reader devices, increased 177 percent over the same period last year."(Amazon will report earnings for the quarter on Tuesday afternoon.)

Separately, though Bloomberg doesn'texactly nail the details, it appears that Barnes & Noble's deal withWaterstones to bring the Nook to the UK has become less of a secret, though thelaunch is still a ways off.
NYT
Bloomberg

And at Book2Book:

B&N to ink first overseas Nook deal with Waterstones?

Barnes & Noble is developing a partnership with U.K.'s Waterstones Booksellers Ltd. to sell the digital tablet in its 300 locations this year. Analysts are skeptical of the success.

Mary Ellen Keating, a spokeswoman for Barnes & Noble, and Fiona Allen, a spokeswoman for Waterstones, declined to comment.

crainsnewyork.com
theverge.com
Bloomberg

Perhaps the Greatest Comics Book Store in the World

2012-01-31T06:13:00.003+13:00

Publishing Perspectives

"People don’t revere the old comics enough," says Manuel Morin (above), ownerof Paris' BD Spirit, which offers 50-80,000 titles, many of them collectorsitems.
Link here for story.

DISCUSSION:
WhatMakes a Great Comic Book Store?
The one thing a great comics book store must do -- unlike a bookstore -- isensure you never forget your in a comic book store.

The Clark explores the art of copying ~ "Copycat: Reproducing Works of Art"

2012-01-31T06:10:00.005+13:00

Art Knowledge News - Posted: 29 Jan 2012 0

WILLIAMSTOWN, MA.- The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute opened itslatest exhibition, Copycat: Reproducing Works of Art, on January 29. Exploringthe line between innovation and imitation, the exhibition features 50 printsand photographs that are both original works of art and repetitions ofdrawings, prints, paintings, sculptures, and architecture created by otherartists. The exhibition highlights the complex process of copying by studyingreplications of many rarely seen works from the Clark’s permanent collection,including those by Albrecht Dürer, Paul Cézanne, Eugène Delacroix, Rembrandtvan Rijn, Roger Fenton, and Édouard Manet, among others. The exhibition alsomarks the first public presentation of one of the Clark’s recent acquisitions,Jean Dughet’s series The Seven Sacraments. Copycat will be on view in theClark’s Manton Research Center building through April 1st.

WHITE CLOUD WORLDS - NZ Science Fiction and Fantasy Art Exhibition and Book

2012-01-30T15:14:00.000+13:00

White Cloud Worlds is a never-before seen collection of science fiction and fantasy artwork from New Zealand, 'The Land of the Long White Cloud'.

Embark upon a journey of exploration into a wealth of visually rich worlds and imaginings, conjured to life by 27 established and emerging artists.

The artists are profiled with a selection of their art accompanied by text written in their own unique voice, sharing their origins, inspirations and a rare glimpse into how they work.

White Cloud Worlds includes written contributions from some of the world’s most celebrated leaders in the fields of science fiction and fantasy art, such as Guillermo Del Toro, Richard Taylor, Alan Lee and John Howe.

This book honours the imaginations of the artists it showcases and gives readers a unique opportunity to be a part of their worlds.

White Cloud Worlds is published by Harper Collins.It is also available in a special slipcase edition which includes a limited edition signed print by one of the artists.

The White Cloud Worlds exhibition will open at the Lopdell House Gallery in Titirangi, Auckland on February 16th and will run through until the 15th of April.

‘A Wrinkle in Time’ and Its Sci-Fi Heroine

2012-01-30T14:46:00.000+13:00

By PAMELA PAUL - The New York Times - Published: January 27, 2012

Bookish girls tend to mark phases of their lives by periods of intense literary character identification. Schoolgirls of the ’70s had their Deenie and Sally J. Freedman and Margaret moments, muddling through adolescence in the guise of one Judy Blume heroine or another. And for almost a century and a half, girls have fluctuated between seasons of Amy and Meg and Jo March, imagining themselves alternately with blond corkscrew curls, eldest sister wisdom or writerly ambitions.

But for those who came of age anytime during the past half-century, the most startling transformation occurred upon reading Madeleine L’Engle’s Newbery Medal-winning classic, “A Wrinkle in Time,” which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. It was under L’Engle’s influence that we willed ourselves to be like Meg Murry, the awkward girl who suffered through flyaway hair, braces and glasses but who was also and to a much greater degree concerned with the extent of her own intelligence, the whereabouts of her missing scientist father, the looming threat of conformity and, ultimately, the fate of the universe.

Meg Murry, in short, was a departure from the typical “girls’ book” protagonist — as wonderful as many of those varied characters are. Meg was a heroine of science fiction.

In 1962, when “A Wrinkle in Time,” after 26 rejections, was acquired by John Farrar at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, science fiction by women and aimed at female readers was a rarity. The genre was thought to be down-market and not up to the standards of children’s literature — the stuff of pulp and comic books for errant schoolboys. Even today, girls and grown women are not generally fans. Half of 18- to 24-year-old men say that science fiction is their favorite type of book, compared with only one-fourth of young women, according to a 2010 study by the Codex Group, a consulting firm to the publishing industry. And while a sizable portion of men continue to read science fiction throughout their lives, women don’t. Thirty-two percent of adult male book buyers are science-fiction fans compared with only 12 percent of women. When Joanna Russ, one of the few successful female science-fiction writers, died last year, her obituary in The New York Times referred to her as a writer who helped “deliver science fiction into the hands of the most alien creatures the genre had yet seen — women.”

Full story at The New York Times.

THE SISTERS BROTHERS

2012-01-30T14:38:00.001+13:00

So many people enthused to me about this book, it received so many positive reviews, and it was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, so in the end while on holiday I got myself a copy and read it. And I have to say I loved it.
From the terrific cover and great title to the captivating story I was enchanted; and even though the story is about a couple of hired killers,and is set in California during the gold rushes of the 1850's, it had me laughing out loud on several occasions.
I reckon the Cohen Brothers could make it into a great movie - that would have a nice ring to it - Cohen Brothers make the Sisters Brothers!
Allen & Unwin - $36.99

A local politician, a music reviewer and an author walk into a bar…

2012-01-30T11:28:00.001+13:00

Sound like the beginning of a good story?

Come along to True Stories Told Live on Monday 13 February and hear some fantastic stories, told by local politician Ray Ahipene-Mercer, renowned music store owner and reviewer Colin Morris, and authors Barbara Else, Fleur Beale (left), Catherine Robertson, with two artistic friends.

True Stories Told Live events brim with live, unrehearsed tales, told by people with a flair for storytelling. Stories make us laugh, cry and crinkle our foreheads – there is no better way to energise a quiet Monday evening.

The event, with the theme of family holidays, will raise funds for the Book Council’s Writers in Schools programme, which has been bringing books, authors and children together since 1973.

Education Manager Sarah Forster says ‘Family holidays bring out the best and the worst in people. Prepare to be enthralled and dismayed at the antics of these brilliant creative people.’

'At True Stories Told Live, the story must have a beginning, middle and an end, and it must be true, but that’s all’, says the Book Council’s Susanna Andrew.

Andrew says that past True Stories events prove that something happens in the exchange of a story. ‘What makes these events so special is not just the confessional quality of the performance. It's also the suspension of judgement that's required, a critical faculty we would normally employ, consciously or not, when we embark on a novel, start a film, or sit down in the theatre.’

Tickets are $15 for members of the Book Council, or $20 for non-members.
Go to www.bookcouncil.org.nz to book your tickets and learn more about us.

True Stories Told Live – Family Holidays
Where: Meow Café, 9 Edward St, Wellington
When: 6.15pm, Monday 13 February

Waitangi Day launch for Gavin Bishop's 'The House that Jack Built' in English and Te Reo Maori

2012-01-30T11:24:00.001+13:00

Gecko Press is pleased to launch a new edition of The House that Jack Built by Gavin Bishop, and the first Te Reo Maori edition - Koinei te Whare na Haki i Hanga - as part of Porirua's popular, multi-cultural Waitangi Day event, The Festival of the Elements . The Festival will take place from 11am till after 7pm at Te Rauparaha Park and Arena and Pataka Museum, Porirua on Monday 6 February.

Throughout the day, the book will be read in both English (by Gavin Bishop) and Te Reo Maori (by Moira Wairama) in the storytelling gazebo at NZ Community Trust Stadium (Te Rauparaha Arena). Readings will take place every hour from 11.30am to 4.30pm.

At 2.35pm, author/illustrator Gavin Bishop (left) and translator Piripi Walker will discuss The Story of the House that Jack Built: Art and Translation at the Helen Smith Community Meeting Room at Pataka Museum (duration: 45 minutes).

Throughout the day, children can help build a giant 'House that Jack Built' sculpture using natural materials, with artist Michelle Whale in the NZ Community Trust Stadium.

Martin Edmond reviews Road Markings

2012-01-30T11:19:00.000+13:00

A nation exacts a penance from those who dared to leave her wrote James Joyce, explaining why his only play was called Exiles; the line is much quoted but most people who do so leave off the next bit: payable on their return. Michael Jackson left his native New Zealand while still a young man, in the first instance for Melbourne, where he worked among the homeless and had his first encounters with Aboriginality. Later he did similar work in London and the Congo and later still went to Sierra Leone, beginning there the fieldwork that has distinguished his vocation as an anthropologist. He has been far more diligent in his repayments than JJ ever was, returning again and again and, each time, illuminating forgotten corners of what he calls the diffuse and dimly lit world of New Zealand’s collective imagination.

In Road Markings, published as a ebook by Rosa Mira Books of Dunedin and subtitled An Anthropologist in the Antipodes, Jackson sets out on a road trip through his natal land that is also an inquiry into the idea of firstness: the place of origin in our consciousness, the meaning of beginnings, the aura of the primary as a way of authenticating both personal experience and historical truth. This might sound daunting as a theme but his exploration of it is not: this is autobiographical writing of the highest order, in which the personal is resolutely explored but never just for its own sake: Jackson’s own history, that of his family and friends, his colleagues, his mentors, his literary heroes, are woven together to make, not so much a tapestry as a finely calibrated, gorgeously textured, many-coloured mahi harakeke.
To read Martin's full review link to his blog here.

My Week With Marilyn - reviewed by Nicky Pellegrino

2012-01-30T07:06:00.000+13:00

In the 50 years since her death the legend of Marilyn Monroe has lost none of its power to fascinate. One of this summer’s must-see films is My Week With Marilyn starring Michelle Williams, Kenneth Branagh and Judi Dench. It’s based on two diaries written in 1956 by Colin Clark, then an Oxford graduate who landed a job as a gofer on the set of The Prince And The Showgirl.

Usually I prefer to read the original book before I see the film and conveniently HarperCollins has just re-released the two diaries in one volume. My Week With Marilyn by Colin Clark ($24.99) is an engrossing period piece. It may not shed a great deal of light on who Marilyn really was beneath the veneer of fame and beauty – Clark like most men fell under her spell and this clouded his judgement – but it does provide a glimpse into an extraordinary and vanished world.

The reason two diaries cover the same period is Clark waited until after Marilyn’s death before publishing the details of his more intimate relationship with the star.

The first diary is the longest. It opens with Clark’s dogged attempts to get a job at Laurence Olivier’s film company. He gets his foot in the door partly because he is well-connected – his parents live in a castle and are friends with everyone from Olivier to Noel Coward. Still he seems likeable enough: cheeky but charming, a lover of parties and pretty girls, and breezily determined to break into the movies.

At first he’s unimpressed with the woman he refers to as MM. “She looked absolutely frightful,” he says of her first appearance on the film set. “Nasty complexion, a lot of facial hair, shapeless figure and, when the glasses come off, a very vague look in her eye.” Yet by the very next day she’s worked her magic and he’s describing her as looking “like an angel”. Soon he’s finding excuses for her behaviour: her chronic lateness, her reliance on her acting coach, her need for booze and pills.

Observant and smart, Clark is in pole position to record the few ups and many downs of filming. His insights are honest and interesting and he watches Marilyn especially closely, observing the contradictions in her character as well as her wonderful figure.

The second diary fills in the blanks Clark left in the first. It covers the nine days when Marilyn, whose new marriage to playwright Arthur Miller is already shaky, draws him close to her. First they share a chicken salad and confidences; then a day trip, a swim and a kiss on the lips; finally a night in bed.

Clark – who died in 2002 - is adamant “nothing improper” happened between them. I’m not convinced and neither does his account of their private conversations always ring true to me. Nevertheless I found both diaries intriguing and entertaining, and I’ll be queuing for my ticket for the movie version when it releases in New Zealand in March.

Footnote:

Nicky Pellegrino, (right NZH photo), a succcesful Auckland-based author of popular fiction is also the Books Editor of the Herald on Sunday where the above review was first published on 29 January, 2012

Five Hundred Buildings of New York

2012-01-30T07:05:00.000+13:00

Five hundred glorious photographs showcase the finest, most majestic and most interesting examples of architecture in my most beloved city outside of New Zealand, New York. The book represents a photographic neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood tour of the city, capturing stately and historic buildings, monuments and engineering structures. Each building is showcased on it's own page in a rich and beautiful fine resolution monochrome photograph. The accompanying text identifies location and date of completion/renovation, the building's distinctive features and historical context.

Having just come back from almost a month in that great city how could I possibly leave this stunning door-stopper of a book on the shelf at the wonderful Matakana Village Bookshop?

PS-I wonder how many photographs I own of the Flat Iron Building? Dozens!

Published by Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, NZ$50.

Women writers turn to the horror story - Jeanette Winterson and Helen Dunmore among famous names venturing into the horror genre this year

2012-01-30T06:51:00.001+13:00

Vanessa Thorpe - The Observer, Sunday 29 January 2012

Helen Dunmore: hoping to scare the wits out of her readers. Photograph: Christopher Jones / Rex Features

As an icy wind blows in from the east, the grip of a good horror story is tightening its hold on many of Britain's leading literary talents. Terrifying new novels from outspoken author Jeanette Winterson and from the acclaimed novelist and children's writer Helen Dunmore are at the head of a blast of chilling fiction heading for British bookshops.
Where once an accomplished "lady novelist" in search of a change might have attempted a neat whodunnit or perhaps a cosy "Aga saga", suddenly the unholy desire to create a horror or ghost story has seized a range of established talents. Even the television book club presenter Judy Finnigan has been drawn to the genre for her debut novel, a ghost story that will be out this autumn.
Winterson, who had her first success with the novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, will try her hand at scaring her readers witless this summer with a story based on the infamous Pendle witch trials held at Lancaster castle in 1612. Dunmore, the writer much loved for her children's books, poetry and award-winning novels, has followed suit. Her first horror novel, a supernatural thriller called The Greatcoat, has been published by Hammer Books, the imprint of the now revived film studios that brought British cinema audiences a succession of gory titles from the 1950s to the 1970s. Dunmore's debut marks the publisher's decision to commission a series of original works rather than rely on the novelisations of horror films which it also publishes.
"The interesting fiction at the moment is playing with genres, slipping between them," said Hammer publisher Selina Walker. "So we're approaching all the literary or established greats to see whether they would like to write something with a paranormal twist."
This week Hammer's film version of Susan Hill's 1983 novel The Woman in Black, one of the most popular British ghost stories of modern times, is out in cinemas, starring Daniel Radcliffe as the unfortunate solicitor Arthur Kipps. But for Dunmore the work of two other women writers with the gift of instilling fear provided the chief inspiration. "Elizabeth Bowen's work influences me a lot, particularly The Demon Lover. I also love Daphne du Maurier," said the writer, who has turned to horror after writing 11 mainstream novels, including the Orange Prize-winning A Spell of Winter and The Siege.
"I was drawn to the genre because it is intensely dramatic material," she said. "To some extent it is a psychological playground. You wonder what is the match between the ghost and the person who is haunted. What is there in the past that has driven them to this point?"
The key, Dunmore believes, is to make the experiences described as "palpable" as possible, to carry the reader into the darkness: "It has got to have a lot of sensory richness."
Full story at The Observer

The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Art Presents the First Major William Blake Exhibition in Russia

2012-01-30T06:44:00.000+13:00

Written by John Cairncross Saturday, 28 January 2012 - Art Knowledge News

Moscow.- The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Art is proud to present "William Blake and British Visionary Art" on view at the museum from November 29th through February 19th 2012. This is the first major exhibition to present Blake’s visual art in Russia as well as being the first exhibition to explore Blake and his legacy. The exhibition is a collaborative project between the Tate and the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Art in partnership with the British Council.Drawn mainly from Tate’s Collection alongside works generously lent from other British collections, the exhibition consists of approximately 110 of Blake's works, including many of his best known images such as The Ghost of a Flea c.1819-20. It also includes the recently discovered hand-coloured etchings from the major prophetic work The First Book of Urizen 1796 c.1818.

Although mainly overlooked during his lifetime, Blake's impact and influence on later generations of artists, writers and musicians has been enormous. His visionary ideas, and his ability to convey these in both poetry and painting, remain a major reference point in British culture today and this show aims to reveal his remarkable art and its visual legacy to a Russian audience. The expression of spiritual values through bodily form is the hallmark of Blake’s visionary art and came to influence both the Symbolist art of the later nineteenth century and the neo-romantic revival of the 1930s. Many of the artists associated with these movements saw Blake as a pioneer in imagining infinite possibilities for sensory and spiritual experience. His work has been a reference point for artists nationally and internationally and this exhibition will include over twenty works by British artists who have been influenced by Blake including Samuel Palmer, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Piper and Francis Bacon.

As part of the Blake in Russia project a new Russian translation of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience has been jointly published by the British Council and the State Library of Foreign Literature. Blake was not so much a poet, printmaker and artist but rather that his chosen form allowed all these things to come together on one page. His illustrations were never set along aside the poems, and the poems were not typeset. Rather he actually made prints of his poems and pictures together. This is the first time that Blake’s illustrations have ever been published alongside his poetry in Russia.

The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts is the largest museum of European art in Moscow, located in Volkhonka street, just opposite the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. The museum's name is misleading, as it has nothing to do with the famous Russian poet. It was founded by professor Ivan Tsvetaev (father of the poet Marina Tsvetaeva). Tsvetaev persuaded the millionaire and philanthropist Yuriy Nechaev-Maltsov and the fashionable architect Roman Klein of the urgent need to give Moscow a fine arts museum. The museum building was designed by Roman Klein and Vladimir Shukhov and financed primarily by Yury Nechaev-Maltsov. Construction work began in 1898 and continued till 1912. Ivan Rerberg headed structural engineering effort on the museum site for 12 years, till 1909. Tsvetaev's dream was realised in May 1912, when the museum opened its doors to the public. The museum was originally named after Alexander III, although the government provided only 200,000 rubles toward its construction, in comparison with over 2 million from Nechaev-Maltsev. Its first exhibits were copies of ancient statuary, thought indispensable for the education of art students. The only genuinely ancient items - Moscow Mathematical Papyrus and Story of Wenamun - had been contributed by Vladimir Golenishchev three years earlier.

After the Russian capital was moved to Moscow in 1918, the Soviet government decided to transfer thousands of works from St Petersburg's Hermitage Museum to the new capital. The entire collection of Western art from the Museum Roumjantsev was added too. These paintings formed a nucleus of the Pushkin museum's collections of Western art. But the most important paintings were added later from the State Museum of New Western Art. These comprised Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artwork, including top works by Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, Georges Dufrénoy and Henri Matisse. Among them Van Goghs "Le Vigne Rouge" apparently the only painting sold during the artist's lifetime. In 1937, Pushkin's name was appended to the museum, because the Soviet Union marked the centenary of the poet's death that year. The Pushkin Museum is still a main depositary of Troy's fabulous gold looted from Troy by the German archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann and taken by the Soviet Army (Red Army) from the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. The International musical festival Svyatoslav Richter's December nights has been held in the Pushkin museum since 1981. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.museum.ru/M296

Books in the Sunday papers

2012-01-29T16:50:00.000+13:00

After last week's almost total absence of space devoted to books it is nice to see Nicky Pellegrino back with her usual page in the Herald on Sunday while over at the more serious Sunday Star Times, Books Editor Mark Broatch has four pages including an excellent review by Patrick Evans of the just published, and most impressive, LETTERS OF FRANK SARGESON, selected & edited by Sarah Shieff and published under Random House's Vintage imprint.

Bookends: Doors of perception

2012-01-29T16:34:00.000+13:00

Marcus Berkmann - The Spectator -21 January 2012

Unlike most of the old rockers he writes about, the esteemed US critic Greil Marcus is becoming more prolific as he enters his twilight years. An eccentric monograph on Van Morrison was swiftly followed last autumn by a luxuriant collection of his writings on Bob Dylan, and now arrives The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years (Faber £14.99).

Marcus doesn’t just inhabit the more rarefied and cerebral wing of rock criticism: he pretty much defined it. Unlike most rock hacks he is not particularly interested in the musicians and their often tarnished legends. No, he listens and listens to the music, listens some more, thinks about it for years, listens some more and then finally commits his thoughts to print.
It doesn’t always work: some of his more olympian judgments on Morrison were quite barking, and suggested a need to get out more. But The Doors is a much better book. It probably helps that their time together was so compressed, and so long ago (1966-71), and that Marcus hasn’t written much about them before.
So this is a fresh set of unlikely connections, for every moment in every Doors song seems to remind him of something else — a car, a vista, a Thomas Pynchon novel, Charles Manson, Lady Gaga.
His book is therefore as much a journey through his mind as through their back catalogue. It’s a fascinating ride, although a working knowledge of Doors bootlegs would certainly come in handy.

And another review, from The Atlantic.

NZ's top chefs fess up in their books

2012-01-29T11:06:00.000+13:00

By Geraldine Johns - NZ Herald Jan 19, 2012

Geraldine Johns asks six of our top chefs what their favourite cookbooks are — the ones that really inspire them — and why.

Simon Wright, executive chef and co-owner of The French Cafe. Photo / Richard Robinson

Any frequent visitor to restaurants or cafes can attest that the talent of a chef does not lie in their ability to spell. Or punctuate. Menu-writing sins are themselves worthy of a book.
It doesn't really make a lot of sense when you consider that chefs - good ones at least - love nothing more than devouring a good cookbook. Their collections don't just provide information and inspiration; they catalogue their life's journey.
SIMON WRIGHT
Executive chef and co-owner of The French Cafe
One of the city's finest dining establishments, The French Cafe restaurant regularly takes home the big gongs when the major culinary prizes are dished out. A few years ago, Wright - who was born and raised in England - penned his own coffee table cookbook. He gave it the same title as his restaurant, which he co-owns with his wife, Creghan Molloy Wright.
"I collect cookbooks - I've probably got a couple of thousand - so it's hard to choose just three. I treasure them all. Every time I read one, I always find something I missed. I never really copy anything out, I think to myself 'oh, that looks good' and I might then go off on a tangent and do my own recipe".

CELIA HARVEY
Food writer, and chef at Greys Avenue Deli
When Celia Harvey lived and worked in London, she spent four years at, among other places, The River Cafe. There she earned tremendous (and deserved) high praise. We are lucky to have reclaimed her as one of ours, she has a gift for making all her food work beautifully with seemingly little effort. Harvey is the chef at Greys Avenue, recognised as the first Kosher deli in New Zealand.
"As a child - I would have been 9 or 10 - I remember reading Mum's cookbooks, especially one by [food writer and Britain's first television chef] Marguerite Patten, which I looked at a lot. Mum and Dad were going through a time of being vegetarians and I wanted to cook meat - a crown rib roast with little paper chef's hats.
"Then I got into cooking at intermediate school. I'd make bread for our sandwiches and chocolate cake for our lunch boxes. Mum bought me the Junior Cookbook series by Mary Pat Fergus. I still remember some of the recipes: lemon delicious pudding, chocolate self-saucing pudding.
"The books were spiral-bound, with step-by-step illustrations and kept in the bottom of the kitchen drawer, where Mum still keeps her cookbooks today.

SIMON GAULT

Executive chef and part owner of the Nourish Group
Everyone knows who Simon Gault is by now. Three seasons as a judge on MasterChef does that to you. But Gault had a culinary life long before the telly came calling. Long, long ago he had his own restaurant in his own name. Then came Euro. Gault is now executive chef and part-owner of the Nourish Group - a restaurant empire (including Euro) spanning the North Island. But Gault's stellar culinary career has not been entirely land-based. He's also enjoyed a few high seas adventures, as chef on a super-yacht to an ocean-going multimillionaire. And he likes to take to the skies too, he's a glider pilot instructor and pilot of vintage military aircraft.
"The Edmonds Cookery Book would definitely be my first pick. When I went to work on a super-yacht, I couldn't carry a lot of books. But that one is a good one. It has all the basics.
"The Edmonds is not a total chef's cookbook - but sometimes it's not about fancy food - it's about the simple things that you know will work, and if you want to fancy it up, you can. This is the cookbook that's my little secret weapon that I keep in the cupboard.
"I've also got a book called Food Lover's Companion [written by Sharon Tyler Herbst and Ron Herbst]. It offers comprehensive definitions of nearly 6000 food, drink and culinary terms. That sounds highly boring - but it is a fantastic tool. I can flick to any page in that book and it will tell you everything you need to know about anything you want; every trick there is.
"I know it sounds crazy, but it's a well-thumbed book - especially when I'm writing recipes.
Read their full comments plus those of three other top chefs at the NZH online.

Charlotte Bronte's lost love letters revealed

2012-01-29T09:13:00.000+13:00

Love letters which reveal Charlotte Brontë's infatuation with her Belgian professor are to be published. The Telegraph - 27 January, 2012

Charlotte Bronte as a young woman Photo: Mary Evans Picture Library / Alamy

The letters were sent by the Jane Eyre novelist to Professor Constantin Heger, an older man with a wife and children.Heger tore them up in shock, but they were retrieved from a rubbish bin by his wife who sewed them back together and preserved them.

One, composed in French, reads: "If my master withdraws his friendship from me entirely, I shall be absolutely without hope."

Another, with a postscript written in English, reads: "I must say one word to you in English - I wish I would write to you more cheerful letters, for when I read this over, I find it to be somewhat gloomy - but forgive me my dear master - do not be irritated at my sadness - according to the words of the Bible: 'Out of the fullness of the heart, the mouth speaketh', and truly I find it difficult to be cheerful so long as I think I shall never see you more."

The letter was written in 1844, two years after Bronte, then age 28, met Heger, her tutor, and three years before the publication of Jane Eyre, her first major work.

The story echoes the plot of her 1853 novel Villette, about a young women with an unrequited love for her Belgian teacher.
Full piece at The Telegraph.

Vladimir Putin plans 100-book Russian canon all students must read

2012-01-29T09:05:00.000+13:00

The Russian prime minister prescribes his top 100 books for the nation

Alison Flood
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 26 January 2012 1

Vladimir Putin talks to students in the Siberian city of Tomsk on January 25. Photograph: Alexey Druzhinin/AFP/Getty Images

Vladimir Putin has laid out his plans to compile a canon of 100 Russian books "that every Russian school leaver will be required to read" in an attempt to preserve the "dominance of Russian culture".
In an article running to more than 4,500 words in Russia's Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper, the Russian prime minister writes that "in the 1920s, some leading universities in the United States advocated something referred to as the Western Canon, a canon of books regarded as the most important and influential in shaping Western culture", adding that "each self-respecting student was required to read 100 books from a specially compiled list of the greatest books of the Western world".
Putin, who is running for a third term as president in March, says that Russia has "always been described as a 'reading nation'", and proposes taking a survey of the country's "most influential cultural figures" and compiling "a 100-book canon that every Russian school leaver will be required to read – that is, to read at home rather than study in class or memorise. And then they would be asked to write an essay on one of them in their final exams. Or at least let us give young Russians a chance to demonstrate their knowledge and world outlook in various student competitions."
Journalist Alexander Nazaryan, who is writing a novel about Russian immigrants in New York, called Putin's "cultural-unity-through-literature proposal" the Russian leader's "most chilling [plan] of all".
"Social engineering through state mandated literature: Nothing else that Putin has done has been quite so nakedly Soviet in its desire to manipulate the human intellect into docility," writes Nazaryan, predicting that "the books that will benefit from Putin's new cultural policy will almost certainly be Soviet-era schlock churned out by Writers' Union foot soldiers who glorified their compatriots' miserable existence".
Whether Putin's choices will feature in the specialist Russian bookshop due to open in Waterstones' Piccadilly branch next month remains to be seen. To be called Slova – Russian for "words" – the store will stock nearly 5,000 Russian language titles as well as Russian books in translation, covering areas from history to children's books and run by Russian-speaking booksellers.
"For Russophiles, and the large, vibrant Russian community in London, we aim to make Slova an irresistible literary and cultural destination," said James Daunt, who took over as Waterstones managing director last year when the chain was acquired by Russian billionaire Alexander Mamut. "One won't be surprised at the source of the idea, given Waterstones' ownership, but it is a good one and perfect for this magnificent shop."

Reconsidering the Genius of Gertrude Stein

2012-01-29T08:56:00.000+13:00

By LYNNE TILLMAN - New York Times - Published: January 27, 2012

Approaching Gertrude Stein’s writing critically is tricky. Because she strove to reshape literary conventions — syntax, language usage, narrative order and the sense of making sense — any comment on her choices may already be rebuffed in her poetics and practice. Stein is a trickster. This may be why, as I read “Ida” and “Stanzas in Meditation,” both reissued in corrected, authoritative editions from Yale University Press, I remembered a Jonathan Richman lyric I’ll paraphrase as “Pablo Picasso never got called a jackass.”

Illustration by Joe Ciardiello

IDA
By Gertrude Stein. Edited by Logan Esdale.
Illustrated. 348 pp. Yale University Press. Paper, $18.

STANZAS IN MEDITATION - The Corrected Edition
By Gertrude Stein. Edited by Susannah Hollister and Emily Setina.
Illustrated. 379 pp. Yale University Press. Paper, $22.

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) is called a genius, and it’s from that vantage her writing is read — or not read, since awe and reverence are regularly met by dismissal and ridicule. Curiously, not every “genius” is equally suffocated by the label. Readers know the extraordinary reputations of Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf, but some prefer “Richard III” to “Richard II,” or “Mrs. Dalloway” to “Orlando.” They feel at liberty to discriminate.

Fewer readers imagine they can create their own Stein; many feel she is beyond their capacity to understand. Maybe this is because she has been claimed as the sine qua non of the avant-garde. But she aligned herself with her time. Being part of the “contemporary composition” was central to her work, a point she made in her trenchant essay (originally a lecture) “Composition as Explanation”: “The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything.” Here, Stein wielded the novelty and surprise of her prose partly to explain how novelty and surprise surface from generation to generation, and theorized why the new in art and writing may first be thought ugly, then later beautiful or classic. In that same essay, she declared: “No one is ahead of his time.” (Andy Warhol, who like Stein is both adored and mocked, once said, “I’m very much a part of my times, of my culture, as much a part of it as rockets and television.” There are other parallels between Warhol and Stein, including their renown as aphorists. Stein: “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” Warhol: “In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” But people have called Warhol a jackass, and everything else.)

Rest of story at the New York Times

Writers & Readers Week at the Festival

2012-01-29T08:43:00.001+13:00

Writers and Readers for all ages
With two special youth-focused days during the week, there’s plenty to enjoy for the next generation of Writers and Readers. On Friday 9 March an address from explorer and environmentalist Tim Flannery will head Schools Day – a series of three talks for secondary students. Other Schools Day events are Magic Realism from Kiwi writer Elizabeth Knox and American fantasy slipstream writer Kelly Link; and Terrific Characters, Dystopian Worlds from award-winning New Zealand young adult fiction writers Bernard Beckett and Jane Higgins. Teachers can make Schools Day bookings directly through the Festival website.

Sunday 11 March sees three family sessions at Young Writers and Readers Day at Downstage Theatre, with the rare opportunity to experience three of New Zealand’s most-loved children’s writers - Lynley Dodd, Gavin Bishop and Margaret Mahy.
Our two great Writers and Readers multi-passes, the Bookmark Pass and Take Five Pass, are on sale now. These multi-passes offer generous discounts to Embassy and Downstage sessions, with the Bookmark Pass also entitling holders to a preferential booking period from Friday 27 January 2012. Public bookings for Embassy and Downstage sessions open on Friday 3 February. Tickets to all other Writers and Readers Week events are available through Ticketek.

SAVE WITH A WRITERS AND READERS MULTI-PASS
Buy your Bookmark or Take Five Pass before the end of January and you could win a massive stack of Writers and Readers books!

A literary crime wave
There’s nothing like a good crime novel to get the mind ticking and the pulse racing. Bestselling Norwegian author Jo Nesbø heads up a crime strand that features some of the finest exponents of this most popular of literary forms. Scottish novelist Denise Mina will discuss her works set on the mean streets of Glasgow and three of New Zealand’s own crime writers – Paul Cleave, Vanda Symon and Paul Thomas - will talk taking crime into a distinctly local setting.
Don’t miss the Wellington debut of the feature film Headhunters, based on the Jo Nesbø novel of the same name, screening at 8.30pm on the same evening as Nesbø’s Embassy Session.

Photo - VUP.

Kevin Lawson R.I.P.

2012-01-29T08:29:00.000+13:00

David McGill writes to a friend:

They build a world
Out of collected years;

They shelter in rooms the dust

That will be their death.

Kevin Lawson ‘The Tennants’ (sic)

Miscellany Published by the Glenco 1961

Editor David McGill, who pleaded with Kevin to contribute, and he did, two poems.

David Mitchell also contributed, including:

I walk silent, silent

By the brooding lake

Watching the moon.

When Mitch died only months ago, I took out his collection Steal Away, Boy referencing his son, and really him too, and at the Open Mic Night at the local pub joined Gill Ward (a year ahead of us, contributor to Matika edited by Howard Patterson; she told me of Howard also coming round to another person in his gaberdine raincoat to mend a motor, as he had with my motorbike at Eastbourne in 1960-61) and Michael O’Leary in a spontaneous reading by each of us of a poem from the collection. I could not continue for tears.

Lawson contacted me some years ago asking for I think your address. I suggested we get together and he said no, blunt as always. Did he enjoy being Sphinx-like, mysterious? Did it give him a sardonic satisfaction still, as he had been wont to do all those years ago in Paekakariki, reducing the naive McGill. You always seemed on equal and different terms with him. I never did fathom him. Mind you, he is not alone. I soldier on, pretending I have not been insulted, pretending a thick hide, maintaining an unspoken belief that all of us are equal, some assume a superior tone, underneath we are all naked. I think he knew I knew that, which was only cause for further amusement for a man who had a curious sense of humour. He had too a certain dignity, certain standards, implacably so, like Mitch. Both were part of the singular mix of that amazing place, T Coll Kelburn, Kowhai Rd, The Glen, Ngaio Road.

I have been back there in different phases, with several lady friends disporting at the Glen, always thinking of those days of wine and musings. I went back to look at the foliage that has overcome the prefabs where Keith Fox and George Webby presided, where I smoked alongside Anton Vogt and Merlene Cutten at the Lit Club, waiting for James K Baxter to come and talk with the tongue of angels. Miscellany is dedicated to Anton (to my father’s horror – the man practises free love, Dad exclaimed: I didn’t tell him about The Glen lecturer trying to seduce me). Merlene did the cover of Miscellany and contributed a poem. I recently sought contact with her through Gill’s contacts with Paul Young and Barry Lett (she visits a sick Paul in Thames frequently, they write poems still). No luck tracing Merlene, who was soo sexy and so available and I was soooo dumb. Baxter is in the Miscellany collection too, as is Garth C. Carpenter (what’s the ‘C’ for? – I should have asked him when he asked if he could be the astrology columnist for a magazine I edited in 80s). Other contributors: Pat Craddock, who ended up a producer of radio programmes for RNZ; George Webby, retired in Wairarapa, like Lawson not responding to invitations from me (I was too straight for George); porky Peter Browne in his appalling Fair Isle jersey, where is he?; Ngaire Atkinson, an austere intellectual, I must ask of her from Maureen Birchfield, in Paekakariki and a friend of Gill Ward; Kevin B. Davies, the phys-ed chap with a sensitive streak; Howard P; David Mundell –two poems; Mark Young; somebody called J.Williams (Judy?); Caroline Hancock, dead; last, Peter J R Blizard.

We might get out when you arrive the rare surviving copy of the few hundred Miscellany printed by John Milne at a cost of 30 pounds – I raised the money by selling them around T Coll and in Cuba St. Milne Printers is still going. I used them with Grant Tilly for a publication Harbourscapes.

Roly Vogt came with Maureen Birchfield and Gill Ward to the 2010 launch of Shaking 1960 at Eastbourne, but said it was best if I didn’t see Rosie Vogt, whom he lives with in Lower Hutt. She is not well. Then she looked like a young Sophia Loren. The mechanic she returned to from me died in a car crash.

And later in a street

Waiting for a tram

I wondered what you felt

While we talked of

The sun climbing

Back into the sea.

Kevin Lawson, RIP.

Birds of Clay by Aleksandra Lane - an invitation

2012-01-29T08:28:00.000+13:00

VUP and Unity Books

warmly invite you to the launch of

Birds of Clay by Aleksandra Lane.

With wild gypsy music from Melbourne

band Vardos & mesmerising acoustic

sounds by Arsen Karalic.

Saturday February 11^th, 6:30pm,

Thistle Hall, 293 Cuba Street,

Te Aro, Wellington.

News from Galley Cat

2012-01-28T11:00:00.002+13:00

Facebook Timeline to Be Mandatory Soon

Facebook announced this week that the Facebook Timeline feature will be mandatory for all accounts soon, inspiring excitement, concern and a Jeffrey Koterba cartoon. Check it out: "Over the next few weeks, everyone will get timeline. When you get timeline, you'll have 7 days to preview what's there now. This gives you a chance to add or hide whatever you want before anyone else sees it." After editing... read more>>

Tom Isbell Lands 7-Figure Book Deal

Actor Tom Isbell has landed a seven-figure book deal at HarperCollins' children's division for a young adult fantasy trilogy. The first book is entitled The Hatchery. Literary agent Victoria Sanders negotiated the deal with acquiringeditors Alyson Day and Phoebe Yeh. A tentative publication date has been set for 2013. Isbell has starred in movies alongside Robert De Niro, Ed Harris and Harrison Ford. He has also written children's plays; he is currently adapting... read more>>

STUDY: Apple Has 58% Share of the Tablet Market

According to a new study from Strategy Analytics,the iPad is still the dominant tablet, but it has lost market share. The company estimates that Apple had a 58 percent share of the tablet market in the fourth quarter of 2011, down from 68 percent of the market in the same period the year before. Strategy Analytics director Peter King explained: "Global tablet shipments reached an all-time high of 26.8 million units... read more>>

First ever crime writing MA launched

2012-01-28T08:29:00.000+13:00

London's City University says creation of course is in response to student demand

Alison Flood - guardian.co.uk, Friday 27 January 2012

Den of crime writing ... City University in London. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

As the underworld steadily increases its grip on literary culture, City University in London is turning to crime, with the launch of an MA devoted to teaching crime fiction and thriller writing.
Launched in response to student demand, and to the growing popularity of the genre, the UK's first creative writing masters dedicated to crime and thriller novels is another harbinger of a "second golden age of crime writing".
The genre is the second biggest in the UK, according to official data, with sales of £87.6m in 2011, while debut thriller Before I Go to Sleep by SJ Watson topped the charts last week. The course will teach budding Agatha Christies and Ian Rankins everything from how to create suspense to new ways to tackle new crimes, thoroughly investigating all aspects of the genre, from police procedurals to psychological thrillers.
"Crime fiction is an increasingly popular genre. With writers like Tom Rob Smith and AD Miller appearing on Man Booker Prize long- and short-lists, the literary acceptance of the genre has never been higher," said programme director Jonathan Myerson, the novelist and playwright. "There is much talk that we are entering a second golden age of crime writing, though this time the country house has been replaced by the inner city estate. Social relevance is a major factor, as too is the quality and craftsmanship of the writing"
City already runs a masters on literary novels as part of its creative writing programme. Six years' worth of students have graduated, with six so far landing publishing deals. Tutors on the literary course include Sadie Jones, David Nicholls, Sarah Waters, Monica Ali, Naomi Alderman, Ronan Bennett, Sarah Hall, and Philip Hensher, and Myerson said he "would expect our tutors on the crime thriller MA to be of the same calibre". Authors are currently being approached, with the novelists Martyn Waites and Barry Forshaw already signed up.
"We take about 12 to 14 students each year on the literary course and would do about the same for the crime MA, and run them in parallel," said Myerson. "Both genres can learn from each other – literary novelists can learn an awful lot from the pacing of crime novels."
If the crime course takes off, Myerson said he would look at expanding the MA to include other genres. "We'll see how this goes, I think," he said. "Young adult would be the next market, though."

Fig Tree breaks with Lewycka cover style for new title

2012-01-28T08:26:00.000+13:00

27.01.12 | Charlotte Williams - The Bookseller

Penguin imprint Fig Tree is changing the famous retro Soviet-style cover for A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, as it prepares to reissue Marina Lewycka’s three backlist novels (£7.99 each) along- side her new hardback, Various Pets Alive & Dead (£12.99, 1st March).

Various Pets Alive & Dead is the story of a couple, Marcus and Doro, and of their children, who crave order, independence and wealth in defiance of their parents’ commune-dwelling, idealistic past. The new look uses bold fonts and stripped-back colour palettes, integrating objects from the novels into the lettering. Publisher Juliet Annan said that it was a big decision to move away from the original look as it was so successful: "We have had it since 2005; we felt we had to make a change.
"Not all of Marina’s books are about eastern Europe. Various Pets Alive & Dead only has one eastern European character, so now seemed a good time to make a break with the old look."
Annan promised the new title would appeal to existing fans and new readers, saying: "I think she writes extremely funnily, yet like all comedy it is extremely serious, there is a dark subject in every single book. She’s always got several hobby horses she is whipping on, and this novel is no different."

Keith Richards writes to his aunt

2012-01-28T08:23:00.000+13:00

In today's Delanceyplace excerpt - the letter below was written by eighteen-year-old Keith Richards to his Aunt Patty. It came to light in 2009 and had not been read by anyone outside the family prior to the recent release of his autobiography. In it, he describes meeting Mick Jagger in 1961. Almost immediately, they were regularly hanging out and "trying to learn how to do it." They went on to worldwide fame as the founding members of The Rolling Stones:

6 Spielman Rd

Dartford

Kent

Dear Pat,

So sorry not to have written before (I plead insane) in bluebottle voice. Exit right amid deafening applause.

I do hope you're very well.

We have survived yet another glorious English Winter. I wonder which day Summer falls on this year?

Oh but my dear I have been soooo busy since Christmas beside working at school. You know I was keen on Chuck Berry and I thought I was the only fan for miles but one mornin' on Dartford Stn. (that's so I don't have to write a long word like station) I was holding one of Chuck's records when a guy I knew at primary school 7-11 yrs y'know came up to me. He's got every record Chuck Berry ever made and all his mates have too, they are all rhythm and blues fans, real R&B I mean (not this Dinah Shore, Brook Benton crap) Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Chuck, Howlin' Wolf, John Lee Hooker all the Chicago bluesmen real lowdown stuff, marvelous. Bo Diddley he's another great.

Anyways the guy on the station, he is called Mick Jagger and all the chicks and the boys meet every Saturday morning in the 'Carousel' some juke-joint well one morning in Jan I was walking past and decided to look him up. Everybody's all over me I get invited to about 10 parties. Beside that Mick is the greatest R&B singer this side of the Atlantic and I don't mean maybe. I play guitar (electric) Chuck style we got us a bass player and drummer and rhythm-guitar and we practice 2 or 3 nights a week SWINGIN'.

Of course they're all rolling in money and in massive detached houses, crazy, one's even got a butler. I went round there with Mick (in the car of course Mick's not mine of course) OH BOY ENGLISH IS IMPOSSIBLE.

"Can I get you anything, sir?"
"Vodka and lime, please"
"Certainly, sir"

I really felt like a lord, nearly asked for my coronet when I left.

Everything here is just fine.

I just can't lay off Chuck Berry though, I recently got an LP of his straight from Chess Records Chicago cost me less than an English record.

Of course we've still got the old Lags here y'know Cliff Richard, Adam Faith and 2 new shockers Shane Fenton and Jora Leyton SUCH CRAP YOU HAVE NEVER HEARD. Except for that greaseball Sinatra ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Still I don't get bored anymore. This Saturday I am going to an all night party.

"I looked at my watch

It was four-o-five

Man I didn't know

If I was dead or alive"

Quote Chuck Berry

Reeling and a Rocking

12 galls of Beer Barrel of Cyder, 3 bottle Whiskey Wine. Her ma and pa gone away for the weekend I'll twist myself till I drop (I'm glad to say).

The Saturday after Mick and I are taking 2 girls over to our favourite Rhythm & Blues club over in Ealing, Middlesex.

They got a guy on electric harmonica Cyril Davies fabulous always half drunk unshaven plays like a mad man, marvelous.

Well then I can't think of anything else to bore you with, so I'll sign off goodnight viewers

BIG GRIN

Luff

Keith xxxxx
Who else would write such bloody crap

Author: Keith Richards with James Fox
Title: Keith Richards - Life
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Date: Copyright 2010 by Mindless Records, LLC
Pages: 77-79

About Delanceyplace

Delanceyplace is a brief daily email with an excerpt or quote we view as interesting or noteworthy, offered with commentary to provide context. There is no theme, except that most excerpts will come from a non-fiction work, mainly works of history, are occasionally controversial, and we hope will have a more universal relevance than simply the subject of the book from which they came.

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Just Google it! Questions dumb people ask online

2012-01-28T08:16:00.000+13:00

Check out the questions at CNN.

Why a Book Editor Becomes a Literary Agent

2012-01-28T08:12:00.000+13:00

Publishing Perspectives

Rebecca Carter (left) is leaving the editorial department at Random House to become an agent for Janklow & Nesbit. "My motivation comes from wanting to work with writers on editorial," she says.

Read her story.

DISCUSSION:
Who is More Responsible for a Book's Text, Agent or Editor?
Is the cliché that "editors no longer edit" overstated? Or does the job of shaping a book's text fall largely to the agent?

Frank Lloyd Wright archival reproductions now available at 1000Museums.com

2012-01-28T08:07:00.000+13:00

Art Knowledge News 26 Jan 2012

SCOTTSDALE, AZ.- The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation announced a new licensing agreement with 1000Museums, the premier provider of archival reproductions from museums around the world. Now, with the help of print-on-demand technology, never-before-printed selections from the Foundation’s Archives will be available to admirers of Wright’s work. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives is the most complete collection of materials related to a single artist housed under one roof anywhere in the world. Wright’s work ranged from residences designed in the Prairie style in the late 19th century, to modern works including 'Fallingwater', the 'Usonian Homes', and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City in the late 50's.

Bloomsbury launches high-flying Circus

2012-01-28T08:04:00.000+13:00

27.01.12 | Benedicte Page - The Bookseller

Bloomsbury is to launch a new literary imprint, Bloomsbury Circus, to accommodate its expanding publishing.
The imprint—which sports an aerialist logo adapted from the publisher’s traditional Diana—will feature fiction and very select non-fiction, with a focus on fine writing. It will include both début writers and established novelists, like Liz Jensen and Patrick McGrath, but not authors from the more traditional end of Bloomsbury’s stable. Alexandra Pringle, Bloomsbury’s editor-in-chief, said its books would be "fresh and sometimes surprising", comparing Bloomsbury Circus to “Picador when it started off”.
The books will be trade paperbacks in an unusual, square-ish format (royal width and demi height), with flaps and high production values, and all priced at £12.99. There will be just one title a month in 2012, growing to four a month thereafter. Bloomsbury currently publishes 30–35 fiction titles a year, which will rise to 50 in 2012 with the new imprint.
Pringle said it was unusual for a publisher of Bloomsbury’s size not to have had additional imprints up to now. "With our new global Bloomsbury, we are publishing a lot of books with our cousins in America, and that has meant we are growing the list," she said.
“With fiction, you can’t successfully publish more than four titles a month because, selling into the fiction buyer, you have to have your lead, second lead, dark horse and a crime title. If you do more, you lose the focus. If we are going to grow, we have to do it in an exciting, imaginative way. This is a way we can grow, and continue to offer the service we do.”
Bloomsbury Circus’ launch titles include The Trapeze Artist by Will Davis, whose début, My Side of the Story, won the Betty Trask Award in 2007. The story, featuring a gay love affair in a circus setting, is "incredibly accomplished" and narrated in the past, present and future tenses, Pringle said. Meanwhile, New Zealand writer Emily Perkins’ The Forrests is "reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves", telling of a woman’s life from birth to death "written in exquisite prose". Pringle said she had “the very highest hopes” for the novel, believing it has the potential to win a major prize.
Coming later on the list are novels from Liz Jensen and Jane Rusbridge, plus US début Wilderness by Lance Weller. All but one of the launch titles are being published with the US, and five of the first nine titles are US-originated.
Pringle said the imprint was intended to be very much one for the high street. "We hope Waterstones will love it, and it’s perfect for independents. It’s very much about the sort of books booksellers will read and recommend at Daunt’s, Foyles and Hatchards," she said.

Roald Dahl and CS Lewis among writers revealed to have refused honours

2012-01-28T08:02:00.001+13:00

Book2Book- Friday 27 Jan 2012

List of authors to turn down OBEs, CBEs and knighthoods also includes Aldous Huxley, Robert Graves and Evelyn Waugh. Photo left - Roald Dahl.

BBC

Guardian

Footnote: NZ poet Renee Liang suggested to me that a high percentage seem to be authors - interesting to muse on the reasons why, and whether there might be an equivalent list in NZ.

The Sex Diaries Project: What 1,500 Bedroom Diaries Can Teach Us About Sex

2012-01-28T07:57:00.000+13:00

Jan 27, 2012 - Jessica Bennett - The Daily Beast

What the not-so-private sex diaries of 1,500 Americans can teach us about relationships, love—and ourselves. Jessica Bennett on the new book The Sex Diaries ProjectArianne Cohen has learned a few things from poring over the sex diaries of 1,500 people.

For starters: relationships are a lot like careers. Sure, some of us work 9 to 5—but others stay home in pajamas all day, eating crackers in bed. It can get messy.

Second: Men and women aren’t all that different. (In fact, Cohen had trouble telling their diaries apart.) Except, perhaps, when it comes to one topic: porn. Men watch it. A lot.

Lastly—but perhaps most important—it turns out that what we think we know about American relationships and what we actually know are two wildly different notions. And what’s really going on is a lot less conventional than we might have imagined.

“There’s so much variation in how people do relationships,” says Cohen, a former magazine editor whose new book, The Sex Diaries Project: What We’re Saying About What We’re Doing, hits shelves next week. “We live in a society where there’s this idea that you’re either in a long-term relationship or taking steps to get there. But if you read diaries, what you find is, that’s not what a lot of people are doing.”
The full piece at The Daily Beast.

Image Source / Corbis

So Brilliantly Clever: Parker, Hulme and the Murder that Shocked the World

2012-01-27T16:30:00.001+13:00

Awa Press reports:

Last night a large space on the ground floor of Wellington Central Library was cleared to accommodate an unprecedented crowd who had turned up to hear Peter Graham speak about his new book, So Brilliantly Clever: Parker, Hulme and the Murder that Shocked the World. By 6pm with over 150 people present it was standing-room only. For over an hour and a half the spellbound audience listened to Graham describe the fascinating real-life events surrounding the 1954 murder of Honorah Parker in Christchurch by her teenage daughter Pauline and Pauline’s friend Juliet Hulme.

Graham then responded to numerous questions from the floor, including one from a retired policeman who wondered if Graham knew what had happened to the murder weapon. There was, Graham said, an unconfirmed report the half-brick had been used for some time as a paperweight on a detective’s desk in the Christchurch police station.

Afterwards, there was a long queue of people wanting Graham to sign the book, and, as commonly happens in his talks, a number turned out to have a long-term interest in or connection with the case. One woman showed Graham a caricature she had drawn of him during the talk.

So Brilliantly Clever, published by Awa Press in November, sold out before Christmas and an urgent reprint is now hitting bookstores. It was selected as one of the best books of the year by the Listener, Sunday Star-Times and Dominion Post and has been optioned for a television drama.

Photo courtesy Wellington Public Library.

Leading New Zealand Bookseller closing down

2012-01-27T12:32:00.003+13:00

From the Parsons Bookshop Auckland Newsletter January/February 2012

After 36 years of much fun and satisfaction selling books in Auckland and throughout New Zealand, Roger is retiring and Helen is morphing.

Roger says:

There are a number of mountains for me still to climb so I am off to Slovenia and Austria later in the year. Helen will run Parsons Library Supply from “The Alpine Hut” at home.

We have been unable to find someone to take over the shop.

So.... we now offer you the opportunity to obtain all those books you always wanted - at HALF-PRICE.

From 10am Saturday 28 January all existing stock is 50% discount.

We wish to thank you for all your support over many years.

Roger Parsons.

Please use any vouchers you may have.

A Little Parsons History:

Our New Zealand-wide business (50% mail order) has grown with the increasing interest and knowledge of New Zealand Art.

When Helen and I studied at Victoria University in the 1960's it was not possible to study Art History. Now the art world is a part of many kiwi lives. Our business was built on this interest.

Helen and I returned from overseas in 1975. I wished to move out of the diplomatic service - bookselling was a logical choice. Helen, as a young Mum had read every New Zealand book published in the Karori Library. My father, Roy Parsons, had the bookselling knowledge ( and the capital!). I had the passion to run our own business.

We started in large airy premises at the back of the National Insurance Building in Victoria Street in Auckland.

In the same year London Bookshop and the Book Corner came to Central Auckland. An article in the NZ Herald at the time questioned who would survive - we know the answer 36 years later.

From 1980 we also ran the Art Gallery Bookshop and Exhibition Shops in the Auckland Art Gallery.

In 1995 we moved in our current architecturally designed premises in New Gallery building.

The success of Parsons Bookshop Auckland has been very much the product of widespread support from our customers and from our well qualified and dedicated staff.

Bookselling has been our passion, our business and our livelihood. We have been very fortunate. And, somehow, Helen and I have succeeded in maintaining our personal and business partnership over all these years.

And from Helen:

At the end of last year we had builders around our home. One job was the refurbishing of our garden shed. It's now lined with plywood and fully wired and fit to live in.

And I'd been making noises about possibly doing 'order to order' library supply.

And suddenly it all fell into place over the last few days. Suddenly these two things literally came together......

From April 2012 I will work from home. I will morph into Parsons Library Supply. I will work from our garden shed, which we call ‘The Alpine Hut'. Photo below shows view from The Alpine Hut.

I will essentially do special orders for difficult to find titles - NZ, Maori & Pacific. I love sourcing those difficult titles. And I will continue supplying all NZ titles that I can find, to certain customers.

We do have standing orders for customers in place which can be carried on. I will also continue to send out lists of titles.

Roger says he will do the packing and write the cheques. It all sounds good fun. We're getting instant great responses from all our customers.

I also wish to thank our very dedicated and loyal staff. They have worked so hard for us; always with good grace and humour. Very special thanks to you all.

So....with kind regards.....

H.
PS This of course has no effect on Parsons Wellington which is owned and operated by Roger's siblings Julian and Beatrice

Parsons Bookshop Auckland

26 Wellesley Street East
Auckland 1010

New Zealand

Ph +64 9 303 1557
books@parsons.co.nz
www.parsons.co.nz
http://twitter.com/ParsonsBookshop

Footnote:The Bookman is feeling a little stunned by this news and I will write more about it during the next week.
At this stage .I will just wish Roger & Helen all the very best for the next stage of their lives and thank them most warmly for providing us with one of the best specialist art bookshops anywhere in the world and one of NZ's finest independent bookstores. We will miss you.

Pinterest Tips for Writers

2012-01-27T11:03:00.000+13:00

By Jason Boog on Galley Cat, January 26, 2012

The social network Pinterest is growing quickly–users post images and links to a virtual pinboard and share visual thoughts with other readers.
Check it out: “Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes. Best of all, you can browse pinboards created by other people. Browsing pinboards is a fun way to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests.”
Follow this link to request a Pinterest invite. We spent some time exploring the network to find out how writers, readers and publishers could use the new site.
1. Post your favorite books on your personal Pinterest page. You can add nice images of all the books you love in your life. Be sure to follow the site’s rule: “Pinterest is designed to curate and share things you love. If there is a photo or project you’re proud of, pin away! However, try not to use Pinterest purely as a tool for self-promotion.”
2. Find other writers on Pinterest and follow their example. Novelist Shiloh Walker has a great Pinterest page, complete with sections for Characters & Clothing, Research & Scenes, and various themes from her books.
3. On your page, create separate “boards” (collections of visual links) about your influences. Just like a high school locker, this is a vivid way to show your readers what inspires you. The site offered this handy tip: “If you notice that a pin is not sourced correctly, leave a comment so the original pinner can update the source. Finding the original source is always preferable to a secondary source such as Google Image Search or a blog entry.”
4. Look for book recommendations or comment on other users’ libraries in the Film, Music & Books section.
5. Share beautiful writing tools, stationary, journals, books and other crafty items in the Gifts section of the site.
UPDATE: For publishers interested in learning more about the site, Chronicle Books added this comment: “We love Pinterest at Chronicle Books! It’s a great way to find and share inspiration around books and the topics you love. Here are our boards. And feel free to email me at community@chroniclebooks.com if you need an invite.”

Saturday Morning with Kim Hill: 28 January 2012 on Radio NZ National

2012-01-27T10:53:00.001+13:00

8:15 Kate Camp in Berlin

8:30 Marcus Chown: tweeting the universe

9:05 Sharad Paul: skin and books

10:05 Playing Favourites with John Jamieson

11:05 Michel Tuffery: Pacific projections

Producer: Mark Cubey

Wellington engineer: Carol Jones

Auckland engineer: Jeremy Ansell

8:15 Kate Camp

Kate Camp is the 2011 recipient of the Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers' Residency. She is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently last year's The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls (Victoria University Press, ISBN: 9780864736215), which won the Poetry category at the 2011 New Zealand Post Book Awards.

http://poetkc.tumblr.com/

8:30 Marcus Chown

Writer and broadcaster Marcus Chown is cosmology consultant of the weekly science magazine New Scientist. His many books include last year's Solar System (Faber/Touch Press, ISBN: 978-0-571-277771-1), developed from the Solar System iPad App. His new book, written with Govert Schilling, is Tweeting the Universe: Tiny Explanations of Very Big Ideas (Faber, ISBN 978-0571278435).

http://www.marcuschown.com/

9:05 Sharad Paul

Dr Sharad Paul (left-Glenn Jeffrey photo) is director of the Skin Surgery Clinic in Auckland, and teaches skin cancer surgery in Australia and New Zealand. He is the Chair of the Skin Cancer College of New Zealand, owns the Baci Lounge bookstore café, and his latest novel is To Kill a Snow Dragonfly (Fourth Estate India, ISBN: 978-93-5029-139-9). Dr Paul is a finalist in the 2012 Kiwibank New Zealander of the Year Awards.

http://www.skinsurgeryclinic.co.nz/

http://www.bacilounge.com/ http://www.nzawards.org.nz/NewZealanderoftheYear/tabid/27939/Default.aspx

10:05 Playing Favourites with John Jamieson

Dr. John Jamieson is Senior Translator for NZTC International. He began his career working for the Translation Service of the New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs, then worked as a freelance translator before joining NZTC in 1988, specialising in the translation into English of legal, financial and business documents from over 25 western and eastern European languages.

http://www.nztcinternational.com/

11:05 Michel Tuffery

Michel Tuffery, MNZM, is a New Zealand-based artist of Samoan, Rarotongan and Tahitian heritage. His Siamani Samoa suite of paintings, sculpture and multimedia installations addressing Germany's brief history in Samoa is currently on show at Pataka Museum in Porirua (to 19 February 2012). His next project, First Contact, is a giant digital artwork projected onto the western wall of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. First Contact has been commissioned as the opening night free public event at the New Zealand International Arts Festival 2012, and will run nightly for the duration of the Festival (24 February to 18 March).

http://www.micheltuffery.co.nz/

http://www.facebook.com/MichelTuffery

http://www.youtube.com/MichelTuffery

http://www.pataka.org.nz/image/tid/42

http://festival.co.nz/family-events/first-contact-2012/

First Contact 2012 PIC CREDIT Artist Concept Image by Mi

Preview: Saturday 4 February

Kim's guests will include Wael Ghonim, Ted Noten, Megan Salole and Antony McCarten.

Monday 6 February: Waitangi Day Special at Puke Ariki, New Plymouth
On Waitangi Day from 8am to midday, Kim Hill and Paul Diamond (Curator, Maori, at the Turnbull Library) will host a Korerorero at Ouke Ariki, with invited guests.
On Sunday 5 February at Puke Ariki, we will be recording a one-hour panel discussion that will play as part of that programme.

Members of the New Plymouth public are invited to come along and be part of the audience on both the Sunday and Monday. Entry is free, but seating is limited.

The 5 Books That Inspire the Most Tattoos

2012-01-27T10:42:00.000+13:00

PW - Gabe Habash -- January 24th, 2012

Source: Rate My Ink

What’s just as interesting as a tattoo is the story behind the tattoo, and that’s certainly true for the subcategory of tattoos that are inspired by famous literary works. We spent an untold number of hours combing the Internet’s two most extensive literary tattoo sites: Contrariwise: Literary Tattoos and The Word Made Flesh, then cross-checking the most frequently occurring tattoos with Google searches and Google image searches, all to get to the bottom of what books inspire the most tattoos and why. And though this isn’t a scientific ranking, it’s the closest anyone’s come to tabulating which books inspire the most tattoos, given the Internet’s evidence.
What you’ll find below shows a fascinating effect: as you look past the superficial design, you’ll find a wholly specific reason, wholly specific to the individual. It’s why one person can have an “I am nobody” tattoo from Sylvia Plath and someone else can have an “I am I am I am” tattoo from Sylvia Plath–it shows how we all treat stories and writing differently.
For the five titles link here.

Washington DC Named America’s Most Literate City

2012-01-27T10:34:00.000+13:00

By Jason Boog on Galley Cat, January 26, 2012

For the second year in a row, Washington DC has been named America’s most literate city. New York City has moved up to the 22nd place on Central Conneticut State University’s annual list.
Here’s more about the study that began in 2003: “Drawing from a variety of available data resources, the America’s Most Literate Cities study ranks the largest cities (population 250,000 and above) in the United States. This study focuses on six key indicators of literacy: newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment, and Internet resources.”
We’ve listed the top ten most literate cities below–what do you think? (Via Publishers Weekly)

Top Ten Most Literate Cities in America
1. Washington, DC
2. Seattle, WA
3. Minneapolis, MN
4. Atlanta, GA
5. Boston, MA
6. Pittsburgh, PA
7. Cincinnati, OH
8. St. Louis, MO
9. San Francisco, CA
10. Denver, CO

Salman Rushdie case shows importance of book festivals

2012-01-27T08:51:00.000+13:00

After this week’s Salman Rushdie controversy, Hay director Peter Florence asks: who should literary festivals give a voice to?

Sir Salman Rushdie has been told he is the target of Mumbai assassins Photo: GETTY

By Peter Florence, Director, Hay Festivals

The Telegraph - 26 Jan 2012

There are two sides to what happened in Rajasthan last week, when Salman Rushdie pulled out of the Jaipur literary festival, after death threats that turned out to be dubious – and both sides are true. On the one hand, almost everything everybody did made an ugly situation worse. The nadir was reached when the decision was made that Rushdie could not appear even onscreen as a moving image. The next logical step would be to ban cartoons of him.

The flipside is that everyone involved won something. Nobody died, and in a country of extreme volatility the police will regard this as a blessed relief. Rushdie is now much more famous in India than he was this time last week. The government can say that they respect the values of the Muslim community in an electoral battleground where they need to win. And festival organiser Sanjoy Roy’s team can enjoy the notion that people across the world have now heard of a literary festival in Jaipur. Even the Imam and his extremist followers can claim they prevented a writer from visiting his homeland...

So is this the end of freedom of speech in the world’s largest democracy? Should India hang its head in shame? Follow the hashtags. The overwhelming response from the wry, unbullyable and free-thinking Indian tweeters is, more or less: It’s about time I got round to reading The Satanic Verses – if it gets people so engaged, it must be worth looking at.

Banning books doesn’t work. Not if you want people not to read them. It has never worked. Lady Chatterley, Madame Bovary, Harry Potter, The Golden Compass, Animal Farm, The Lorax, The Da Vinci Code, Catcher in the Rye… There’s a pattern here, and it’s a mystery that politicians are too stupid to see it.

Would it have been different at the Hay festival? Maybe. I hope so. We have the luxury in Britain, fought for over hundreds of years of hard-won democracy, of being able to tool up in defence of Freedom of Speech. When we’ve had to provide security for an event here, we’ve done so to protect the rights of people whose opinions I deplore – the former Pakistani president and general, Pervez Musharraf and George W Bush’s mastiff, John Bolton.
Full piece at The Telegraph.

Why Salman Rushdie's voice was silenced in Jaipur - William Dalrymple

2012-01-27T08:21:00.000+13:00

A planned videolink with Rushdie at the Jaipur Literary Festival presented the directors with an impossible decision: cause a riot or uphold a vital principle

William Dalrymple - guardian.co.uk, Thursday 26 January 2012

The debate after the videolink with Salman Rushdie was cancelled. Photograph: Getty Images/Himanshu Vyas/Hindustan Times

On Tuesday afternoon this week I was faced with one of the most difficult decisions I have ever had to make.
It was the last afternoon of the Jaipur Literature Festival, of which I am co-director, and more than 10,000 people were milling around the grounds of Diggi Palace, the festival venue, eagerly waiting to hear Salman Rushdie speak by video link from London. For three weeks we had waited anxiously for this moment, ever since Maulana Abdul Qasim Nomani of the Deoband madrasa had called for the Indian Muslim community to oppose Rushdie's visit to our festival. For those three weeks we had been negotiating with various government agencies, the police, a spectrum of intelligence agencies and local Muslim groups to try to make sure that Rushdie could still be heard. Despite a great deal of pressure, we had kept our invitation open and had refused to back down from our position that Rushdie had every right to return to the country of his birth and to discuss his work.
Then at about one o'clock a large number of Muslim activists appeared in the property and gravitated to the back of the lawns where a huge crowd had gathered to hear the videolink. Some of them went into the central courtyard of the palace to make their namaz (pray), and according to some reports, the maulana in charge told his followers that if anyone was killed that day they would die a martyr. Then they sought out our producer, Sanjoy Roy, and told him that they were prepared to use any amount of violence in order to stop Rushdie's voice being heard. Others talked to the press: one told a reporter from the Times of India that "rivers of blood will flow here if they show Rushdie", while the Muslim Manch representative Abdul Salim Sankhla was quoted as saying: "We will not allow Rushdie to speak here in any form. There will be violent protests if he speaks." While all this was happening, some of the other activists were turfing school children out of their seats and intimidating festival guests.
The videolink was due to start at 3.45pm. At three o'clock, as Rushdie was already on his way to the television studio, as crowds were gathering, and as the number of activists/thugs was increasing alarmingly, Sanjoy, my co-director, the author Namita Gokhale and I were called to the security control room by the Jaipur commissioner of police. He had more bad news for us. As well as the activists gathering inside the festival venue, hundreds of protesters were now massing threateningly in the municipal gardens just outside. He was quite clear: the videolink could go ahead, they had the resources to make sure it wasn't interrupted, but "there would be violence in the venue and worse outside" if we didn't call it off. We asked what exactly this meant. He said that his officers had asked if they could use force, and that they were expecting "serious trouble". What might this entail? Lathi (truncheon) charges and police shooting? It was a possibility, he said.
What do you do in this situation? The crowd is getting restless, more and more protesters are entering the property, Rushdie is now sitting in the studio in London waiting to speak and Barkha Dutt, the gutsy Indian television host who is to interview him, is all set to begin. You have three to five minutes, maximum, to make a decision. If you give in to the intimidation, you put at risk all the principles upon which literary life is based: what is the point of having a literary festival, a celebration of words and ideas, if you censor yourself and suppress an author's voice? But equally, can you justify going ahead with a literary event, however important, if you know that you will thereby be putting at risk the lives of everyone who attends – including the authors who have come at your invitation and hundreds of school children and elderly people – as well as knowingly igniting a major religious riot in one of the most crowded towns in northern India with a long tradition of tensions between different communities?
That tradition of tension lay in part behind the problems we were now facing. In 2007, when literary events in Jaipur were still in their infancy, Rushdie was our first big international star, and his presence at the festival was a milestone for us. It raised our profile beyond anything we could have hoped or imagined. Rushdie came unannounced, with no bodyguards or police protection, and spoke brilliantly, sitting drinking tea and signing books for his fans, while giving avuncular advice to younger writers who had never met a writer of his stature. No objections were raised, no politicians got involved, no problems arose.
This time, however, the political situation in India is much more volatile. The 2012 festival happened to coincide with a razor-edge election in the all-important north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, a poll in which the vote of the Muslim community was deemed to be crucial. It also came only four months after the Rajasthan government found itself in trouble with its Muslim voters after the Rajasthan police fired on a crowd of angry Muslim protesters at Gopalgarh, an hour's drive east of Jaipur, killing 10 people.
All this meant that when, at Rushdie's request, we announced his name on our website, and when Maulana Nomani of Deoband then called for Rushdie to be banned from India, not a single Indian politician was willing to state clearly and unequivocally that he was welcome in the country in which he was born, which he loved, which he had celebrated in his fiction and to whose literature he had made such a ground-breaking contribution.
Full story at The Guardian.

The future of books, today

2012-01-27T07:34:00.000+13:00

There is much talk of bright tomorrows for publishing at New York's Digital Book World expo, but how optimistic are readers?

Richard Lea - Thursday 26 January 2012 guardian.co.uk

Reading the runes about the digital future. Photograph: Ocean/Corbis

While we've all been thinking about Andrew Miller and the Costa's new enthusiasm short stories and Rushdie's troubles in Jaipur, in New York, publishers have been looking to the future.

Many reports from the Digital Book World conference are brimming with positivity, with the independent publisher Dominique Raccah singing the praises of books created "at the end of a community-building process", the author and futurist David Houle celebrating the astonishing fact that "more books [were] published this week than … in all of 1950" and Barnes and Noble's James Hilt suggesting that the flood of data sweeping through an industry which is finally catching up with the digital age "helps us all". But gloom isn't that far behind – optimism "wanes" when executives are asked about the future for publishing and readers alike.

When I phoned Neil Gaiman last week to ask him about the stramash over Apple's new iBooks Author app , he said publishing these days was like "the Klondike. Nobody knows what's going on. All they know is that there's gold in them thar hills and they want to try to get hold of it."

Gaiman gives "traditional publishing" five or "maybe 10 years … But that isn't going to mean fewer books. There'll be a lot more books – people will just find them differently." After seeing a Kindle in 2007 and downloading 14 books between waiting in the departure lounge and the plane doors being shut he's convinced electronic books will "dominate the world", but he wouldn't begrudge Apple a slice of his income. "You don't write books to make money," he said. "You do it because this is what you love doing." The music industry shows a possible future for publishing, he continued. "There are fewer rock stars travelling the world in their private jets than there were in the old days, but there's a lot more good music."

With Amazon's hit man on their trail and the customers they're all supposed to be focusing on signing up for Amazon's latest cult in droves, hearing the future of books being compared to the present travails of the music industry can only deepen publisher gloom. But what does it mean for readers? The future is coming, whatever device you're reading it on, but does Gaiman's future of "a lot more books" that you "find differently" fill you with despair or delight?

INFOGRAPHIC: Most Quoted Books of 2011

2012-01-27T07:28:00.000+13:00

By Jason Boog on Galley Cat, January 25, 2012

Bookstore owner and novelist Ann Patchett wrote the most quoted passage on Goodreads last year in State of Wonder: “Never be so focused on what you’re looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.”
During the same period, City of Fallen Angels by Cassandra Clare was the most quoted book on Goodreads. Nearly 130,000 quotes were added to the social network last year–we’ve included a Goodreads infographic linking to all the most popular quotes of 2011.
If you want to share book quotes on Facebook, you can also follow this link to enable Goodreads on your Facebook Timeline. The new app connects with your Goodreads account, making the books and quotes you read a permanent part of your Facebook memories.

The New York (Mayor’s) Review of Books

2012-01-27T07:25:00.000+13:00

By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM - New York Times - Published: January 25, 2012

He controls a global publishing empire, but few would call him bookish. His city is a hotbed of writers and critics, but when it comes to literature, he pleads ignorance.

Librado Romero/The New York Times

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg

"Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy," was written by John le Carré.

Jack English/Focus Features - Gary Oldman stars in the film adaptation of "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy."

So it came as something of a plot twist last week when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, visiting a high school English class in the Bronx, confessed that he was not averse to a spy novel now and again.

“Have any of you ever read ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,’ by John le Carré?” the mayor, a touch of excitement in his voice, asked a classroom of wide-eyed 11th graders.

The reply came in the form of a deafening silence, but Mr. Bloomberg was unfazed. “I like spy stuff,” he said, then offered praise for another book by Mr. le Carré, “The Honourable Schoolboy”: “It’s 600 pages, it’s mostly description, there is almost nothing that happens. But it’s fascinating!”

Indulging in a tale of make-believe is rare for a time-is-money workaholic whose regular literary diet consists of periodicals (The Economist, The Financial Times, Aviation Week), political histories (“The Power Broker,” by Robert A. Caro), and entrepreneurial bibles (he has been known to hand out “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” by the Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen, to friends and colleagues).

Virtually the only other work of fiction publicly endorsed by the mayor has been “Johnny Tremain,” the 1943 patriotic children’s story that Mr. Bloomberg frequently cites as a favorite. His personal library now has several first editions, gifts from friends.

But most of the mayor’s reading material is news and nonfiction, according to aides, colleagues and friends who spoke about his habits. One former colleague, informed that the mayor had admitted to reading a novel, responded in shock: “That’s not the Mike Bloomberg I know.”

When Mr. Bloomberg began planning a run for the mayor’s office, his advisers gave him biographies of Fiorello H. La Guardia and Robert Moses. The mayor is currently reading “On China,” by Henry Kissinger, according to a City Hall spokesman; others said he had enjoyed histories of Prohibition, the Bronx in the 1970s, and World War I aviators.

The mayor likes his iPad, but prefers his books on the printed page. He reads at night and on the road. And in what appears to be a lifelong habit, he often tears out magazine articles that he wants to read later and carries around the torn pages in a folder.

Full story at The New York Times.

Random House and Sesame Workshop Step into Digital Reading

2012-01-27T07:20:00.000+13:00

By Karen Raugust - PW - Jan 26, 2012

Random House Children’s Books and Sesame Workshop are expanding their four-decade-plus licensing relationship, adding e-books and apps to their extensive Sesame Street print publishing program. The first of 19 initial ebook titles, Elmo Says Achoo! and Elmo’s Breakfast Bingo, were released on Wednesday.

“E-books are a major initiative for us,” says Chris Angelilli, v-p and editor-in-chief, Golden Books. “We want to publish licensed and original titles alike in every conceivable format for young readers.”

Random House is Sesame Workshop’s oldest licensee. “We’re very proud that books were the first licensed product for Sesame Street,” says Jennifer A. Perry, v-p worldwide publishing at Sesame Workshop. “Now we’re taking that longstanding program into the digital realm. It’s the next logical step.”

The initiative will focus on early learning and reading readiness titles, with digital editions available in all channels where Random House distributes e-books. The first raft of titles, to be released through June 2012, will be mostly Step into Reading books, along with some from the Happy Healthy Monsters series. “We publish a lot of board and novelty books, but those don’t translate as well to ‘e’,” Angelilli says.

Of the 19 initial titles, six have audio tracks—voiced by longtime Sesame Street actor Bob McGrath—and one is interactive, with the rest being read-alongs. The bulk are based on print titles, but some original e-books are planned as well, including a Step into Reading digital storybook app in the works now.

The digital-origin titles may eventually make their way into print. “Our hope is that we can work in both directions, both print to digital and digital to print,” Perry says.

Random House is the first of Sesame Workshop’s 30 print publishers to which it has granted e-book rights, but an announcement of a deal with a second publisher is forthcoming. “Where our publishers have a digital publishing program, we want to support that strategy,” Perry explains.

Meanwhile, the licensor has a number of digital-only e-book licensees, including Impelsys, which currently publishes 160 titles for Sesame Street’s own e-book site and the iOS platform; Callaway Digital Arts for the two bestselling Sesame Street e-book apps to date, The Monster at the End of This Book and Another Monster at the End of This Book, both available on iTunes; ScrollMotion for 10 iOS ebook apps to date; and Nokia Research Center for mobile apps that run on Nokia Lumia phones. As with the television show, the Workshop researches and tests all of its digital content and shares many of its findings with the industry at venues such as this week’s Digital Book World conference.

“Digital certainly plays a supplemental role in children’s reading,” says Perry, who notes that Sesame Workshop’s digital revenues are growing every quarter. “It’s all about storytelling, both in digital and print.”

Random House has acquired e-book rights from several of its other licensors aside from Sesame Workshop, including Mattel (Barbie) and Mattel’s newly acquired HIT Entertainment division (Thomas & Friends), Henson Productions (Dinosaur Train), Cartoon Network (Generator Rex), and Zinkia (Pocoyo).

“It’s true that most preschoolers don’t have their own Nook or Kindle, but their parents and caregivers do, and young kids are fascinated and mesmerized by digital devices,” Angelilli says. “It’s intuitive and comes naturally to them. It’s difficult to predict exactly where it will go, but e-books are an exciting new format and it’s impossible to deny their importance.”

2012 Hippocrates Awards for Poetry and Medicine

2012-01-27T07:10:00.001+13:00

One week to go to the 31st Jan deadline for entries to the 2012 Hippocrates poetry & medicine awards for unpublished poems on a medical theme of up to 50 lines written in English in either of 2 categories: an Open International Prize and a UK NHS-related Prize for an unpublished poem. With a 1st prize for the winning poem in each category of £5,000, the Hippocrates prize is one of the highest value poetry awards in the world for a single poem. In each category there is also a 2^nd prize of £1,000, 3^rd prize of £500, and 20 commendations each of £50. Anyone in the world may enter the Open category. The NHS category is open to UK National Health Service employees, health students, and those working in professional organisations involved in education and training of NHS students and staff. The Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine is a major supporter of the 2012 Hippocrates Awards, which are also supported by the Cardiovascular Research Trust.

For these entries, medicine may be interpreted in the broadest sense. Themes for prize entries may include the nature of the body and anatomy; the history, evolution, current and future state of medical science; the nature and experience of tests; the experience of doctors, nurses and other staff in hospitals and in the community. Other topics might include experience of patients, families, friends and carers; experiences of acute and long-term illness, dying, birth, cure and convalescence; the patient journey; the nature and experience of treatment with herbs, chemicals and devices used in medicine. In the 2010 and 2011 awards, winning entries covered themes ranging from recollection of effects of his own stroke by New Zealand Poet CK Stead; to a relative’s experience of cancer; reflections on the early days of the NHS; and the impact of ageing.

Walcott and Hargreaves promote literacy for NLT

2012-01-27T07:03:00.000+13:00

26.01.12 | Charlotte Williams - The Bookseller

Theo Walcott, Owen Hargreaves and Joey Barton are among the football stars helping to promote reading this year through The National Literacy Trust's annual Premier League Reading Stars programme.
Each of the 20 players, one from each of the Premier League clubs, has chosen his favourite adult and children's titles, with choices including seven books by Roald Dahl, plus authors such as J K Rowling, Julia Donaldson and Dan Brown. Other choices include classics such as To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, chosen by Tottenham Hotspur player Niko Kranjcar; The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, chosen by West Bromwich Albion's Paul Scharner; and Dracula by Bram Stoker, chosen by Joey Barton of Queens Park Rangers.
More recent titles were chosen by Norwich City's David Fox who picked Operation Mincemeat by Ben Macintyre as his adult title, and Liverpool's Charlie Adam who chose May I Have Your Attention Please?, James Corden's 2011 memoir.
Theo Walcott picked his own children's book, TJ and the Hat-trick, and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J K Rowling as his adult title, with Fulham player Mark Schwarzer choosing the children's title he co-authored, Megs and the Vootball Kids, as well as Destined to Live by Ruth Greuner. Stoke City Carlo Nash is the other author in the squad, choosing his book Family Adventures in Style, written with Dr Jill Nash, as his adult title.
The website will showcase 20 films featuring the players, who set 100 literacy challenges and explain why they chose their books and what they enjoy about reading. Children are offered prizes to complete the challenges, with a child who completes all 100 given the chance to win some signed memorabilia.
National Literacy Trust director Jonathan Douglas said: "Our research shows that a quarter of boys (28.3%) say that a sportsperson could inspire them to read. So getting footballers on board gives us a new and powerful strategy to get boys reading."
The programme, launched today at Arsenal's Emirates Stadium by player Theo Walcott and Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Cornwall, is delivered by the National Literacy Trust and funded by Arts Council England and the Premier League, and has run since 2003. This year, it has been funded to work with 1,000 schools and libraries in need, and will reach 30,000 young people. Any school or library can fund their own resource pack to take part.

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David Nicholls: 'I'm desperate that the next book shouldn't disappoint people'

2012-01-27T06:57:00.002+13:00

Tim Walker - The Independent - Thursday 26 January 2012

It's death to think about a perceived demographic when you write a novel. With One Day, I just wrote the book that I wanted to write; I didn't think "I might have to expand on this section to appeal to men" or anything like that. I was anxious that it might only make sense to people aged between 38 and 44, who lived in London and had been to university or had certain political and cultural experiences. Thankfully that turned out not to be the case.

Most of the books and films I love walk a knife edge between romance and cynicism, and I wanted One Day to stay on that line. I wanted it to be moving, but without being manipulative. I wanted it to be quite a big emotional book, funny and sad, and for people to respond out loud. That can be quite a nerve-racking thing to strive for. You don't want to tip over into mawkishness or be unamusing when you're trying to be funny.
One Day has quite a following among 17, 18 and 19-year-olds, which is interesting and unexpected. It obviously sums up people's anxieties about the future: their intentions and idealism. I think a connection with people's own lives is important [in a hit novel]. It's not necessary; some of the most successful books at the moment are fantastical and otherwordly. But the fact that people connected One Day very specifically to their own friendships, relationships, regrets and anxieties about getting older was important.
I've only ever been recognised in the street once. In Sweden, strangely. There's no photograph of me in the book. And as an actor I was uniquely bland and unmemorable.
I'm desperate that the next book shouldn't disappoint people, but there's an expectation that it might not be so well-read, that critics might be a little harsher, that anything which sells less than One Day might be perceived as disappointing. To sit down in the morning and for those to be the first thoughts in your head can make it difficult to write.
The only thing I know about the next book is that it won't be a love story set over 20 years. It may have a romantic element but it won't be primarily a romantic comedy. I'm 45 now and I have a family, so first dates and the awkwardness of relationships in your 20s are quite distant to me. I'm interested in mothers and daughters, fathers and sons. One thing that it will have in common with One Day is a mixture of comedy and dramatic material.avid Nicholls: 'A lot of novelists improvise, and I'm quite envious of that ability'
Full story at The Independent.

REED EXHIBITIONS, ORGANIZER OF BOOKEXPO AMERICA, PURCHASES BOOK BLOGGER CONVENTION

2012-01-27T06:43:00.000+13:00

Press Release

Annual Event Continues to be Co-Located with BookExpo America

Norwalk, CT, January 26, 2012: Reed Exhibitions has purchased the Book Blogger Convention, an annual day-long conference devoted to providing support, instruction, and social time for people who blog about books. The Book Blogger Convention was founded by Trish Collins of Hey Lady! Watcha Readin’? and Michelle Franz of Galleysmith, both devoted book bloggers who sensed a need for bringing the community of book bloggers together so that they might share information and learn from each other. In order to capitalize on the captive community of book industry professionals who attend BookExpo America (BEA), North America’s largest annual book industry gathering, the Book Blogger Convention was launched in 2010 in co-location with BEA. It will continue to be co-located with BEA and it will be fully integrated into the overall activity of the convention itself.

“We are delighted with this purchase and we look forward to advancing and building what Trish and Michelle have so effectively created in the Book Blogger Convention,” notes Steven Rosato, Show Manager for BookExpo America. “Trish and Michelle are devoted to their community and they have invested a tremendous amount of their own personal time and energy into building a major presence for their colleagues at BEA. We are pleased to be able to take this responsibility over for them and to build even greater recognition for the Book Blogger Convention by fully merging it with our BEA marketing efforts, programs, and attendee outreach.”

This year, the Book Blogger Convention will take place at the Javits Center on Monday, June 4 just as BEA is getting underway. Previously, the conference and reception were held just after BEA concluded. “We feel this positioning will provide greater continuity for the book bloggers and will afford them more opportunity,” notes Rosato. “This way, the book bloggers can attend their own event and then immediately participate in BEA or BlogWorld East which gets underway Tuesday, June 5 and which is also co-located with BEA.” Convention officials note that pricing for all events has been structured to allow easy access including an “All Access Super Pass” as well as a “New Media Super Pass”. Further details about pricing and how to attend individual events and/or any combination of events at BEA are available at:

http://www.bookexpoamerica.com/Register-Now/

The first Book Blogger Convention which took place in 2010 attracted just over 200 people and featured a line-up of speakers including online marketing specialists from most of the major publishing houses. Sponsorships by HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, Crown Publishing Group, Peachtree, and Unbridled Books reinforced the industry’s embrace of book bloggers. Attendance in 2011 grew to 340 people. “Book bloggers have emerged as a critical constituent in our universe,” concludes Rosato. “We look forward to serving them as thoroughly as possible in the years ahead.”

Caviar, Vodka, Books: Waterstones to Open Russian Mini-store

2012-01-27T06:35:00.000+13:00

Publishing Perspectives

Waterstones is to launch a Russian bookshop called Slova within its London flagship store, offering 5,000 Russian language titles and translations.
Read here.

DISCUSSION:
What Can Waterstones Learn from Russian Bookselling?
For a westerner, Moscow's bookstores can feel like returning to a lost world and, with a new Russian owner, Waterstones might benefit from their example.

Do-It-Yourself-Digital Book World Kit

2012-01-27T06:32:00.000+13:00

PublishersLunch

Whether you were there or not, some of the Digital Book World presentations and data are available online in a variety of forms.

It's very rare for us to use the phrase "must read," but Nielsen's white paper on The Link Between Metadata and Sales that accompanies president of Nielsen Book Jonathan Nowell's Wednesday presentation certainly qualifies. First presented at our Publishers Launch event in Frankfurt and now expanded and revised, it demonstrates with great precision the clear extent to which more quality metadata increases book sales (based on UK data). Fiction shows the greatest improvement when four key "enhanced" elements--short and long descriptions, review and author biography--are included in the record. Online sales for titles with all four of those pieces of information included are 178 percent higher.
PDF download

Verso Digital's survey of book-buying behavior is viewable here.

From futurist, author and Wednesday speaker David Houle--who is working with Sourcebooks on their just-announced agile publishing initiative--there is a free download of a special edition of his 2007 book THE SHIFT AGE. The DBW edition includes a new introduction tied to his speech and 15 of his past columns "that pertain to the the publishing industry and its move into the Shift Age."
Sourcebooks

At the Digital Book World site, a short video presents brief interviews with presenters including Ellen Archer at Hyperion, James McQuivey of Forrester, Steve Potash at OverDrive and Evan Ratliff from The Atavist.
DBW video

New Zealand International Arts Festival’s Writers and Readers Week Programme Announced

2012-01-26T18:31:00.001+13:00

A dynamic and diverse group of the finest international and national writers will converge on Wellington in March for the New Zealand International Arts Festival’s Writers and Readers Week (9-14 March). This eagerly anticipated Festival week begins with world-leading environmentalist Tim Flannery who will open the Town Hall Talks.

Inspirational feminist Germaine Greer will deliver a life and times session, and three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman will give the closing address.
Wellington’s Embassy Theatre, home base for Writers and Readers Week, hosts an impressive array of writers discussing secrets and crimes, says Programme Manager, Anne Chamberlain. “Secrets about writing, secret histories, and secrets about exploring the world in fact, fiction and fantasy.”
Man Booker prize-winner Alan Hollinghurst discusses his recently released highly-acclaimed novel The Stranger’s Child; British biographer Selina Hastings reveals The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham; Kate Grenville and Kim Scott dig deep into Australia’s past; German writer Jenny Erpenbeck explores Germany’s dark history; Columbian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez discusses The Secret History of Costaguana; Ron Rash reveals life in the moody, rugged Appalachians and Kelly Link explores other worldly realms of fantasy and magic realism.
British screenwriter and playwright Robert Shearman discusses how he famously returned the Dalek to Doctor Who in 2005, in an episode initially viewed by 8.6 million people. This session includes a screening of his Dalek episode.

International best-selling Norwegian Jo Nesbø (right) heads up a crime strand including Scottish novelist Denise Mina and three of New Zealand’s own crime writers - Paul Cleave, Vanda Symon and Paul Thomas.
British poet and translator Michael Hulse, Toronto’s Poet Laureate Dionne Brand and New Zealand poet Harry Ricketts share their poetry. New Zealand’s first Poet Laureate Bill Manhire hosts a public poetry masterclass, and the famous dead poet is included in a session where Germaine Greer examines the life of women in Shakespeare’s day.

Where Were You in 72? brings together Germaine Greer, Marilyn Waring and Sandra Coney to discuss past, current and future social and political issues. Chris Bourke uncovers the history of New Zealand’s popular music and Auckland scientist Michael Corballis journeys around the human mind.
Image: Richard Haughton

New Zealand fiction writers include Patrick Evans delving into the imagined world of Janet Frame and Frank Sargeson, Fiona Farrell on working and living with the Christchurch quakes, and Paula Morris and Linda Olsson (left) discussing their life and work. Also featured are emerging writers Eleanor Catton, Hamish Clayton and Craig Cliff.

The Festival’s Art on the Move programme includes sessions with New Zealand’s Emerging Writers in Masterton and International Poets at Paekakariki Dionne Brand and Michael Hulse.

Tim Flannery (right - Photo Adam Bruzzone) will also address secondary school students at the Wellington Town Hall on Friday 9 March. Other Schools Day writers are Elizabeth Knox, American fantasy slipstream writer Kelly Link, and award-winning New Zealand young adult fiction writers Bernard Beckett and Jane Higgins.
Young Writers and Readers Day at Downstage Theatre on Sunday 11 March provides a rare opportunity to experience three of New Zealand’s most-loved children’s writers - Lynley Dodd, Gavin Bishop and Margaret Mahy.
Three lunchtime sessions at Downstage focus on the business of writing - Why Isn’t Theatre Dead Yet?, The Art of Translation and Are We the Last Real Book Readers?
The Town Hall Talks; Young Writers and Readers Day; Art on the Move; Schools Day; Bookmark Pass and Take Five Pass are on sale now. The multi-passes offer generous discounts to Embassy and Downstage sessions, with The Bookmark Pass entitling holders to a preferential booking period from Friday 27 January 2012. Public bookings for Embassy and Downstage sessions open at 9am on Friday 3 February.
Teachers can make Schools Day bookings directly through the Festival website (festival.co.nz/schoolfest). Tickets to all other Writers and Readers Week events are available through Ticketek.

Writers and Readers Week is supported by the Lion Foundation, Victoria University of Wellington, Unity Books, Museum Art Hotel, Australian High Commission, Canada Council for the Arts, Embassy of Spain, Goethe Institut, John F Kennedy Memorial Fellowship and Instituto Cervantes.

Rare book on birds sells for $7.9M

2012-01-26T18:31:00.000+13:00

Last week we mentioned the sale of a full-size, complete first edition of John Jmaes Audubon's The Birds of America which was coming up for auction at Christie's in New York. We can report that the book sold for $7.9 million to a private American collector. Francis Wahlgren, Christie's international head of books and manuscripts, said the $7.9 million sale on Friday was the third-highest price for a printed book at auction.

Christie's said the book was originally purchased by William Henry Cavendish-Scott-Bentinck, the fourth Duke of Portland sometime after 1838.

Book experts estimate that the entire first edition consisted of just 200 completed copies produced during an 11-year period. Christie's said 120 complete sets are known to exist with 107 in institutions and 13 in private hands.

Captain Scott's fateful expedition to Antarctica

2012-01-26T16:07:00.000+13:00

From National Library of Scotland - via Ibookcollector

The story of Captain Scott's fateful expedition to Antarctica is being told at the National Library of Scotland (NLS) almost 100 years to the day that his party made it to the South Pole.

The team arrived at the Pole on 17 January 1912, only to discover a Norwegian flag. They had lost the race to Roald Amundsen who had beaten them by more than a month. All five of the British polar party lost their lives to the extreme Antarctic weather on the return journey.

It is a story of courage, selfless sacrifice and tragedy that has captivated generations. 'Scott's Last Expedition' which opened (12 January), features a wide variety of material from the NLS collections including a copy of Scott's published diary, photographs of the expedition, letters and newspaper cuttings from the time.

It commemorates all the men of the British Antarctic 'Terra Nova' expedition of 1910-1913 who found themselves hauling sledges in a race, not of their making, to reach the South Pole. It was a round trip of 1600 miles through one of the most hostile environments on earth.

The exhibition runs until 25 March at the National Library of Scotland, George 1V Bridge, Edinburgh EH1 1EW. Entry is free.

More realistic browse-flicking through ebooks demonstrated

2012-01-26T16:06:00.002+13:00

From John MacGibbon of Ngaio Press:

I far prefer browse-flicking through real books. (But note that the KAIST Institute of Information Technology has demonstrated a 'Smart E-Book Interface Prototype' that would let you more naturally browse through an ebook on the iPad. It lets you scan 20 or 30 pages at a time, do multiple page flips that are controlled by the speed of your finger swipe, and even holding your thumb on one page and flipping through the book with your fingers. There's a video demonstration here. It's something to look forward to on the iPad and other tablets, but I can't see it flying with the current crop of e-ink readers.)

This would help get around a huge drawback to ebooks. The video is quite impressive. The YouTube demo link is in the text above, but in case it doesn’t work, here it is again: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=rVyBwz1-AiE

Brian Phillips on that Hierarchy of Book Publishing - New Zealand's Top twenty...

2012-01-26T12:52:00.000+13:00

Hard to resist responding to that earlier post on Beattie's Book Blog this morning…
Whilst I agree with most of Kauri Bookends’ selections I would venture to add a few more..
In no particular order [as they say on the X factor] I would offer:

*The two Fionas – Farrell (right) and Kidman (left). Wonderful women writing wonderful books

*Carole Beu – if all booksellers were as active and enthusiastic we would sell more books….
*The retirees – especially David Elworthy, Ros Henry and Bob Ross. They may no longer be involved in commercial publishing but all continue to do ‘bookish’ things. Long may they flourish.
*The broadcasters – especially Kim Hill and a special mention for the incomparable Elizabeth Alley.
*Jill Ewing at Random House. This company is regularly voted Distributor of the year by booksellers. Jill runs Random’s distribution. Enough said.
* Belinda Cooke at New Holland – quietly running a small but perfectly formed company.
* The third party book distributors – big and small – without them many smaller publishers would have no cost-effective way of getting their books into the marketplace. As I am a naturalised Cantabrian special mention must go to Nationwide Books at Oxford.
* Those who run Writers Festivals throughout the country. Love them all.

*Finlay Macdonald (left). Also Guy Somerset, Philip Matthews, Iain Sharp (right) and David Eggleton.

Peter Wells starts out on his next quest, his next book

2012-01-26T12:34:00.001+13:00

(The gates to Napier's historic Prison)

Peter Wells, author of the widely praised biography of Colenso, 'The Hungry Heart', used his blog to talk through his writing and research methods while writing the book. In this way readers of his blog shared the experience - both the sudden joys of finding an illuminating fact, or the longeurs when he seemed not to be making headway or even lost his way.
He is now starting out on his next quest, looking at the defence of Te Rau Kereopa, called Kaiwhatu 'The Eye Eater'. Te Rau Kereopa was the Hau Hau prophet warrior who ate the eyes of the Rev Carl Volkner in 1865, thus becoming an object of media hysteria in the 1860s Pakeha world. Two dissidents chose to stand by his side, offering insight and support. These were two remarkable early Pakeha New Zealanders - the French-born nun Sister Mary Aubert and the Cornish-born William Colenso.

Wells was awarded the Michael King Fellowship in 2011 to write a book on the subject. The book is titled 'Sparrow on a Rooftop'.

Readers can follow the journey of his search on http://www.peterwellsblog.com/

(The gates to Napier's historic Prison)

Peter Wells, author of the widely praised biography of Colenso, 'The Hungry Heart', used his blog to talk through his writing and research methods while writing the book. In this way readers of his blog shared the experience - both the sudden joys of finding an illuminating fact, or the longeurs when he seemed not to be making headway or even lost his way.

He is now starting out on his next quest, looking at the defence of Te Rau Kereopa, called Kaiwhatu 'The Eye Eater'. Te Rau Kereopa was the Hau Hau prophet warrior who ate the eyes of the Rev Carl Volkner in 1865, thus becoming an object of media hysteria in the 1860s Pakeha world. Two dissidents chose to stand by his side, offering insight and support. These were two remarkable early Pakeha New Zealanders - the French-born nun Sister Mary Aubert and the Cornish-born William Colenso.

Wells was awarded the Michael King Fellowship in 2011 to write a book on the subject. The book is titled 'Sparrow on a Rooftop'.

Readers can follow the journey of his search on http://www.peterwellsblog.com/

How Dr. Seuss Got His Start 'On Mulberry Street'

2012-01-26T12:34:00.000+13:00

by NPR Staff - January 24, 2012

Seventy-five years ago, before Theodor Geisel rocked the culinary world with green eggs and ham or put a red-and-white striped top hat on a talking cat, Geisel (whom you probably know better as Dr. Seuss) was stuck on a boat, returning from a trip to Europe.
For eight days, he listened to the ship's engine chug away. The sound got stuck in his head, and he started writing to the rhythm. Eventually, those rhythmic lines in his head turned into his first children's book: It was called And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street.
The story, which turns 75 this year, is about a boy named Marco who wants to tell his father an interesting story about what he saw that day on his walk home from school — but the only thing Marco has seen (other than his own feet) is a boring old horse and wagon on Mulberry Street.

Courtesy Random House Children's Books

Marco laments:

That's nothing to tell of,
That won't do of course ...
Just a broke-down wagon
That's drawn by a horse.
That can't be my story. That's only a start.
I'll say that a ZEBRA was pulling that cart!
And that is a story that no one can beat,
When I say that I saw it on Mulberry Street.

Soon Marco's imagination is running wild — the zebra morphs into a reindeer, and the wagon becomes a golden chariot and then a fancy sleigh.

Courtesy Random House Children's Books

Read full story at NPR

The $5 Poetry Shot

2012-01-26T12:28:00.000+13:00

David Houle: “There were more books published this week than there were in all of 1950″

2012-01-26T10:14:00.000+13:00

By Dianna Dilworth on Galley Cat,January 25, 2012

At Digital Book World conference in New York this week, publishing experts have been revealing some very poignant data. For instance, today, author and futurist David Houle said, “There were more books published this week than there were in all of 1950,” he said.
eBookNewser has been covering the event for the past two days. Yesterday, Kelly Gallagher, VP, publishing services at R.R. Bowker, gave a presentation in which he revealed that eBook sales increased 17% in 2011, a bit less than people might have imagined at the conference last year.
eBookNewser has more: “Interestingly, 74% of book buyers have never bought an eBook, though 14% of these people own either a tablet or an eReader. ‘They may have gotten them as a gift, but haven’t used them yet,’ said Gallagher.”

Competition captures Burns

2012-01-26T10:03:00.001+13:00

By Charmian Smith, Otago Daily Times, Thu, 26 Jan 2012

Dunedin has a special relationship with Scottish poet Robert Burns, so it's not surprising the city celebrates his birthday with an annual poetry competition. Charmian Smith talks to one of the judges, 2011 Otago University Burns Fellow Fiona Farrell.

Robbie Burns (1759-96) was one of the rare poets who encapsulated the mood of his time, Fiona Farrell says. She and Michael Harlow judged this year's Robert Burns Poetry Competition, which is a collaboration between the Dunedin Public Libraries and the Dunedin Burns Club.
"They become the voice of that time and they encapsulate that time - he obviously did that, and he spoke to people, and still does, in a way that has enormous emotional power. I think that's what poetry does, at its best, it gathers up the mood of the time, the mood of people and expresses it through the individual but it speaks to the whole. I suppose I was looking for poems that were heading in that direction," Farrell says.
In judging the competition, she and Harlow were looking for poems that followed the spirit of Burns but were not pastiche, that did not just mimic Burns' Scots dialect or where the impulse to write the poem was not clear, she says.
"What we were looking for, I suppose, was poetry that took the qualities that made Burns' poetry vivid for his contemporaries, so it would be written from a strong passionate feeling, it would have a sense of place, it would have passion, and not poetry that is a kind of fake tartan phoney Scots written in 21st-century New Zealand."
Full story at the Otago Daily Times today.

Judge Fiona Farrell and published-poet winner Lynne Hill at the Robert Burns Poetry Competition prizegiving yesterday. Photo by Craig Baxter.

2012 Australian Indie Awards shortlist announced

2012-01-26T09:40:00.000+13:00

Australian Bookseller and Publisher - 25 January, 2012

The shortlisted titles in each category are:

Fiction

Caleb's Crossing (Geraldine Brooks, HarperCollins)
The Street Sweeper (Elliot Perlman, Random House)
Foal's Bread (Gillian Mears, A&U)
Five Bells (Gail Jones, Random House)

Nonfiction

Worse Things Happen at Sea (William McInnes & Sarah Watt, Hachette)
Notebooks (Betty Churcher, MUP)
After Words: Post Prime Ministerial Speeches (Paul Keating, A&U)
A Private Life (Michael Kirby, A&U)

Debut fiction

Past the Shallows (Favel Parrett, Hachette)
All That I Am (Anna Funder, Penguin)
The Roving Party (Rohan Wilson, A&U)
Watercolours (Adrienne Ferreira, HarperCollins)

Children's

The Jewel Fish of Karnak (Graeme Base, Penguin)
The Little Refugee (Anh & Suzanne Do, illus Bruce Whatley, A&U)
The Coming of the Whirlpool: Ship Kings 1 (Andrew McGahan, A&U)
The 13-Storey Treehouse (Andy Griffiths, Macmillan).

The Indie Awards recognise independent booksellers' favourite Australian authors from the past 12 months. Category winners are chosen by 'expert panels' of readers and independent booksellers. Independent booksellers from around the country then vote on the 'Book of the Year'.
The category and overall winners will be announced on 10 March at the Leading Edge Books conference in Melbourne.
Last year's Book of the Year winner was The Happiest Refugee by Anh Do (A&U).

Hierarchy of Book Publishing - New Zealand Top twenty...

2012-01-26T07:45:00.000+13:00

Following my post yesterday on the international Hierarchy of Book Publishing Kauri Bookend has left a new comment suggesting his/her NZ top twenty. My thanks to Kauri Bookend. Here it is for your amusement and/or comment with a few pics I have added:

1. Unity Books Auckland and Wellington: Simply the best
2. Bill Manhire : Done more to raise the quality of NZ Fiction and Poetry than anyone else
3. Geoff Blackwell : Shame he isn’t running one of the local multi-nationals. He should be
4. Lloyd Jones : Our pre-eminent novelist with a five star track record.
5. The Editors: especially Barbara Larson, Jane Parkin and Anna Rogers: Making good books better.

6. Neil Cross{Wellington]: Lead writer on Spooks, creator of Luther, author of nine great books including the Booker listed Always the Sun. Photo-SST
7. The other independent booksellers: apart from that grumpy bugger in Timaru.
8. The Reps- a diminishing breed but still a vital link between publishers and booksellers who care.
9. Karen Ferns – keeping Random House head and shoulders above the rest.
10. Neil Hyndman – proving it is possible to make real money out of publishing.
11. The Agent – Ray Richards. Are there any others?

12. Tony Fisk – probably the smartest MD in NZ Publishing – why isn’t he Prime Minister?
13. The team at Craig Potton – Carrying the flag for quality small publishers after the disappearance of Godwit, Shoal Bay, Tandem, Longacre and Mallinson Rendell
14. Bill and Phil [Noble and King] University Booksellers Supreme
15. Publishers – The Magnificent Seven : Harriet Allan, Fergus Barrowman, Jane Connor, Sam Elworthy, Nicola Legat, Rachel Scott, Bridget Williams. Quality rules.
16. Elizabeth Knox : An author with a great depth and breadth of talent and a hard-won international reputation
17. Joan Mackenzie : Has it in her power to make a real difference for New Zealand Publishers. I am sure she will use it wisely

18. Maurice Gee: now why hasn’t he been knighted?
19. The bloggers: especially Rachel King, Vanda Symon, Chris Bourke, Auckland and Christchurch libraries. Oh alright – also that Beattie chap.
20. The readers – where would be without them??

What’s the Hurry?

2012-01-26T07:27:00.000+13:00

A book was launched last night regarding the use of urgency by the New Zealand House of Representatives has already resulted in changes to parliamentary procedure.

What’s the Hurry? Urgency in the NZ Legislative Process 1987-2010 (VUP, Wellington, 2011) is the result of a major research project at Victoria University’s Faculty of Law and was funded by the New Zealand Law Foundation. The Project researchers (Claudia Geiringer, Polly Higbee and Professor Elizabeth McLeay) examined the use of urgency in the New Zealand House of Representatives over a 24-year period – from 1987-2010.

Questions the Project addressed included: what exactly is urgency and why do politicians use it? How much is it used? What factors constrain its use? In particular, to what extent has MMP had an effect on the use of urgency? Why, if at all, should we be worried about urgency, and in what circumstances? How robust is the regulatory framework that governs the use of urgency? Should it be amended and, if so, how?

In essence, urgency enables the government to extend the sitting hours of the House and to prioritise certain items of business to be conducted within those hours. As such, it is an extremely important tool for governments seeking to progress their legislative agendas. On the other hand, urgency also enables governments to dispense with the various stand-down periods (or breathing spaces) between the different stages of the legislative process and, indeed, to dispense with the select committee stage in its entirety. The use of urgency, therefore, raises issues of considerable significance for the quality and integrity of New Zealand’s lawmaking processes. Urgency motions can be a means to foreshorten democratic deliberation – both amongst parliamentarians and with the wider community.

“The Urgency Project found that, during the 24-year period of the study, urgency was relied on with regularity by governments of all stripes,” says Project researcher, Claudia Geiringer. “But its use was not distributed evenly across various parliaments and governments.” The study showed that the MMP voting system constrained somewhat the extent to which governments could resort to urgency but that two post-MMP governments bucked that trend: the 1996-1999 National-led government and the 2008-2011 National-led government. “For that reason, we reached the conclusion that the current constraints on the use of urgency were inadequate and that amendments to Parliament’s Standing Orders (its self-imposed rules of procedure) were desirable in order to better regulate the use of urgency,” says Geiringer.

Earlier this year, the Project made a submission to Parliament’s Standing Orders Committee, which was conducting its tri-annual review of the Standing Orders. The Committee issued its report in September and made recommendations in line with some of the Project’s suggestions. These recommendations have now been adopted by the House.

In particular, the Standing Orders Committee recommended that the House be able to sit for extended time to pass bills through a single stage, without having to resort to urgency to achieve this. The Urgency Project had suggested that an “extended time” provision of this kind would enable urgency itself to be reserved for situations of genuine urgency in relation to a particular bill. The Project anticipated that this would promote better public and media scrutiny of the use of urgency and, therefore, stronger disincentives against its misuse.

What’s the Hurry? concludes with an extended analysis of the Standing Orders Committee’s recommendations. The authors welcome the amendments to the Standing Orders but express the view that the changes do not go far enough. In particular, the authors express concern that the regulatory framework fails to constrain effectively the most democratically troubling use of urgency: to bypass the select committee stage of legislative scrutiny.

VICTORIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
PO Box 600, Wellington
www.vuw.ac.nz/vup

25 Things I Learned From Opening a Bookstore

2012-01-26T07:18:00.000+13:00

From Open Salon

jlsathrer -

I'm a lawyer in my past life, who got the kids through college and decided to try something different and a little more fun. A used book store sounded like a good idea, so that's where I am for now. I just hadn't counted on a recession or E-readers and am a little afraid there's going to be a third act. In the meantime, I have plenty to read and a little time to write. Not a bad way to spend a day.

1. People are getting rid of bookshelves. Treat the money you budgeted for shelving as found money. Go to garage sales and cruise the curbs.
2. While you're drafting that business plan, cut your projected profits in half. People are getting rid of bookshelves.
3. If someone comes in and asks where to find the historical fiction, they're not looking for classics, they want the romance section.
4. If someone comes in and says they read a little of everything, they also want the romance section.
5. If someone comes in and asks for a recommendation and you ask for the name of a book that they liked and they can't think of one, the person is not really a reader. Recommend Nicholas Sparks.
6. Kids will stop by your store on their way home from school if you have a free bucket of kids books. If you also give out free gum, they'll come every day and start bringing their friends.
7. If you put free books outside, cookbooks will be gone in the first hour and other non-fiction books will sit there for weeks. Except in warm weather when people are having garage sales. Then someone will back their car up and take everything, including your baskets.
8. If you put free books outside, someone will walk in every week and ask if they're really free, no matter how many signs you put out . Someone else will walk in and ask if everything in the store is free.
9. No one buys self help books in a store where there's a high likelihood of personal interaction when paying. Don't waste the shelf space, put them in the free baskets.
10. This is also true of sex manuals. The only ones who show an interest in these in a small store are the gum chewing kids, who will find them no matter how well you hide them.
11. Under no circumstances should you put the sex manuals in the free baskets. Parents will show up.
12. People buying books don't write bad checks. No need for ID's. They do regularly show up having raided the change jar.
13. If you have a bookstore that shares a parking lot with a beauty shop that caters to an older clientele, the cars parked in your lot will always be pulled in at an angle even though it's not angle parking.
14. More people want to sell books than buy them, which means your initial concerns were wrong. You will have no trouble getting books, the problem is selling them. Plus a shortage of storage space for all the Readers Digest books and encyclopedias that people donate to you.
15. If you open a store in a college town, and maybe even if you don't, you will find yourself as the main human contact for some strange and very socially awkward men who were science and math majors way back when. Be nice and talk to them, and ignore that their fly is open.
16. Most people think every old book is worth a lot of money. The same is true of signed copies and 1st editions. There's no need to tell them they're probably not insuring financial security for their grandkids with that signed Patricia Cornwell they have at home.
17. There's also no need to perpetuate the myth by pricing your signed Patricia Cornwell higher than the non-signed one.
18. People use whatever is close at hand for bookmarks--toothpicks, photographs, kleenex, and the very ocassional fifty dollar bill, which will keep you leafing through books way beyond the point where it's pr0ductive.
19. If you're thinking of giving someone a religious book for their graduation, rethink. It will end up unread and in pristine condition at a used book store, sometimes with the fifty dollar bill still tucked inside. (And you're off and leafing once again).
20. If you don't have an AARP card, you're apparently too young to read westerns.
21. A surprising number of people will think you've read every book in the store and will keep pulling out volumes and asking you what this one is about. These are the people who leave without buying a book, so it's time to have some fun. Make up plots.
22. Even if you're a used bookstore, people will get huffy when you don't have the new release by James Patterson. They are the same people who will ask for a discount because a book looks like it's been read.
23. Everyone has a little Nancy Drew in them. Stock up on the mysteries.
24. It is both true and sad that some people do in fact buy books based on the color of the binding.
25. No matter how many books you've read in the past, you will feel woefully un-well read within a week of opening the store. You will also feel wise at having found such a good way to spend your days.

Charles Dickens's world of home interiors

2012-01-26T07:10:00.001+13:00

Charles Dickens wasn't just a stickler for the intricacies of plot and character development. Home decoration was also a lifelong obsession, writes Hilary Macaskill

Hilary Macaskill
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 24 January 2012

Charles Dickens in his study at Gad's Hill Place. Photograph: Everett Collection / Rex Feature

It was only when I read his article on wallpaper that I realised a hitherto unappreciated aspect of Charles Dickens: his interest in interior decor. Charles Dickens at Home, the book I was writing about the houses and areas where he'd lived, took on a much more literal meaning.
That article, "Household Scenery", for Household Words, the journal Dickens launched in 1850, comprised 6,000 words on all sorts of wall covering from tapestry to gutta percha (a solution to rising damp) but focused mainly on wallpaper, in more aspects than one could have imagined. It was one of the journal's "process" pieces, on the manufacture of familiar domestic items such as pottery. But it also exhibited his personal taste, alluding to "what we owe to the designers of good paper hangings", and including his impressions of American ways of wallpapering, gleaned from his 1842 tour with his wife, Catherine.
Dickens recounted how they stood "in perplexed contemplation of our chamber wall", musing on the bad joins and disregard for matching patterns. He even gave his own idea for a wallpaper design: "a hanging which, being dark near the floor, becomes gradually lighter towards the ceiling. At present," he went on, "decorators depend on a dark carpet and a light ceiling to give the effect indicated by decorative principle and required by a trained eye, some aid being given by a dark skirting board, and a cornice of light and bright colors; but there seems to be no reason why the hangings on the walls should not do their part."
Dickens had more than a journalistic interest in the subject. From his time at 48 Doughty Street, his first house and now the Charles Dickens Museum, his firm views on interior decor were apparent. The drawing room, restored to its appearance during his tenancy from 1837-1839, shows the changes he made, with the then-new fashion of "new-papering" to the floor after removing the dado rail, and the shade of pink chosen for the woodwork.
He clearly enjoyed home-making – and shopping. Early in his relationship with Catherine, for example, he wrote with satisfaction of preparations for her visit to Furnival's Inn, his first independent home, describing his purchases of "a pair of quart Decanters, and a pair of pots, a chrystal Jug and three brown dittos with plated tops, for beer and hot water, a pair of lustres and two magnificent china Jars – all, I flatter myself, slight bargains".
Full story at The Guardian

The Guardian Dickens walk four: Heart of the City
Follow a walking route through the City of London to see key sites from Charles Dickens' novels – with Jon Henley and Veronica Horwell

Canongate bags Gray short stories

2012-01-26T07:07:00.000+13:00

24.01.12 | Benedicte Page - The Bookseller

Canongate is to publish the complete short stories of Lanark author Alasdair Gray, after editorial director Francis Bickmore bought world rights in a deal with Zoe Waldie at RCW and Bill Swainson at Bloomsbury.

Every Short Story by Alasdair Gray will include his entire oeuvre in the short form from 1952 to 2012, namely 75 stories, 12 of them new, and illustrated throughout by the author. Work from his six previously published collections will also be included in the anthology. The book will be published in August as a £30 hardback, alongside the paperback of his "autopictography", A Life in Pictures.
Bickmore said: “This is going to be a lavish and wonderful book, and a landmark from one of the world’s most important writers. I am passionate about Gray’s stories and feel evangelical about getting others reading them too.
'There’s such an astonishing range, from sexual comedy to science fiction, social realism to flights of fancy, but they all share Gray’s generosity of spirit, his sense of humour in adversity and a desire that our culture flourish by telling the truth.
'I believe future historians will find in Gray a visionary of the stature of Blake, Scott or Joyce.”

U.S. digital reader ownership doubled over holidays

2012-01-26T07:03:00.000+13:00

Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet computer, right, is displayed with an Apple iPhone 4. Scott Eells | Bloomberg

Reuters -First published Jan 23 2012 - Salt Lake Tribune

The number of Americans owning a tablet computer or e-reader nearly doubled over the holidays as Kindles, Nooks and iPads proved to be popular gifts, a new study found.

In early January, 19 percent of Americans surveyed owned an e-reader, up from 10 percent in December, with identical results for tablets, according to a report released on Monday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

As a result, the percentage of Americans owning at least one digital reading device rose to 29 percent in January from 18 percent, according to the survey.

Amazon.com Inc. and Barnes & Noble Inc. each introduced new tablets and cheaper versions of their Kindle and Nook devices, respectively, ahead of the holidays, while Apple Inc.’s iPad continued to be popular.

The report also found that men and women were equally likely to own a device but that ownership was more likely among people of higher education and higher income.

The figures are from several surveys conducted by Pew. The first, pre-Christmas survey of 2,986 Americans 16 and older was conducted in November and December, while the second and third surveyed about 2,000 adults in January.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Licenses Amazon NY's Adult List for New Imprint

2012-01-26T06:59:00.006+13:00

PublishersLunch

The deal that Amazon Publishing's New York adult line has been mentioning to agents since it started acquiring has formally come to pass: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has executed a broad "print licensing agreement" and will issue the unit's entire list in print form in North America, including through Amazon.com itself. HMH will publish the books under a distinct new imprint, called New Harvest. (There is some confusing wording in the press release, so you should be clear on two points: HMH is licensing rights and will be the print publisher, not just the distributor, and the HMH editions will be the print versions available via Amazon.com.)
The deal applies to adult books only from Amazon New York. HMH already has a first-look option on print rights for the Amazon West Coast imprints, and will continue to publish any titles picked up through that arrangement through their Mariner line. One agent doing business with Amazon surmised that "it allow HMH to publish more books, without the risk of putting upfront advances on their side of the deals." The new agreement does not cover the children's titles from Marshall Cavendish that Amazon has a deal to acquire.
Under the new agreement, like any licensee, it is expected that HMH has control over the format and pricing of their print editions. With Amazon New York's first list set to debut this September, HMH publisher Bruce Nichols says he does not expect to add any dedicated staff immediately for New Harvest, and anticipates adding personnel only modestly as the Amazon NY program builds. He indicates that publicity for the titles will be handled by Amazon's new team.
As a licensed HMH imprint, rather than a distribution agreement with print books physically published by Amazon, the arrangement may affect how retailers approach stocking the titles that Amazon NY has been signing, including high-profile books by Tim Ferris, Penny Marshall, Deepak Chopra and James Franco. For those who want to carry the high-profile titles, it allows them to do business with HMH rather than a retailing competitor. To clarify another important point of confusion, an Amazon executive confirms to us that the New York list will be made available in all major ebook formats as well; the titles will not be Kindle-exclusive (contrary to how the Amazon West Coast ebooks have been handled so far). Amazon has not finalized the technical and vendor details for how those general market ebook files will be handled yet.
That decision will put Barnes & Noble in an interesting position on the New Harvest print list as well as the ebook editions, however they come to market. In the past, BN spokesperson Mary Ellen Keating has said "our policy is that unless we receive all formats of a title to make available to our customers, we will not sell those physical titles in our stores." BN chief merchandising officer Jaime Carey has said that "to sell and promote the physical book in our store showrooms, and not have the ebook available for sale would undermine our promise to Barnes & Noble customers to make available any book, anywhere, anytime." Those statements certainly imply that BN would carry product that is available to them in both physical and digital form.
As an additional, practical consideration, the licensing agreement with HMH also spares Amazon creating any sales tax nexus via additional warehouses or sales reps.
As a licensing arrangement, it does naturally raise questions about how authors' compensation will be handled (since under a standard print sub-license, the originating house would retain a substantial share). Amazon New York publisher Larry Kirshbaum says that "the authors get full royalties," however (after any earn-out, we would expect). In the press release, Kirshbaum notes, "Our goal has been, and remains, to introduce authors to as many readers as possible. This new agreement with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt enables us to broaden our distribution and get our books into more readers' hands."
Tangentially, as some reports have noted, Moody's downgraded their rating on the debt of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt last week, to Caa2 from Caa1, with a "negative" outlook.

Scots literature to be made compulsory part of school exams

2012-01-26T06:57:00.000+13:00

Scots text will be a compulsory part of school exams from 2014. Published on Wednesday 25 January 2012 - The Scotsman

ALL pupils taking Higher English exams will be required to answer a question on Scottish texts, Education Secretary Michael Russell said today.

The announcement, coinciding with Burns Night, confirms the Scottish Government’s acceptance of the recommendation from the Scottish Studies Working Group, and Higher English will include a specific element on Scottish texts from 2014/15 onwards.
Currently students have the option of answering a question on a Scottish text, however this new measure will make this a compulsory part of the exam.
Mr Russell said: “Our country has a rich and world-renowned literary tradition and it is fitting to be able to make this announcement on Burns Night, when we celebrate the national bard.
“Scotland’s contribution to literature is marked down the generations, Burns, Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson have provided work that has lasted the test of time, along with contemporary writers like Irvine Welsh and Liz Lochhead.
“We want our children and young people to have the chance to learn about our literary tradition and to inspire the future generations of Scottish writers.”
Scotland’s Makar Liz Lochhead, who is the national poet, said: “In common with just about every English teacher, academic, and certainly every fellow writer that I’ve consulted informally for their opinion, I am delighted that Scotland seeks to ensure that some Scottish texts are included in the literature taught in our schools. And that it will be a requirement to answer an examination question on at least one of these.
“Remembering that such texts may be in English, Scots-English, Scots, or any mixture of these, may come from any historical period, including the present, and are certainly not required to reflect a chauvinistic or uncritical view of Scottish society, it can only benefit our future citizens to so engage with their own culture.”

Beattie's Book Blog - unofficial homepage of the New Zealand book community

Sr Citizen by Charles Olsen

How To Read Poetry

Outstanding Australian cook book publishers

The Tuesday Poem

Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd

J'aime Paris: A taste of Paris in 200+ culinary destinations

I may never visit any of the famous and not so famous foodie haunts featured in it but I shall treasure this book as my souvenir of the twenty or so times I have been fortunate enough to visit that most appealing of cities. Believe me it is a stunning. And I must add too a snip at NZ$60.

It is a work that will set all admirers of beauty, excellence and authenticity dreaming, wherever they may live. I am dreaming now, here in Auckland, NZ as I write this and again browse through the pages.

As Barnes & Noble Goes, So Goes the Future of Publishing

‘The Help’ Wins Three SAG Awards

By Maryann Yin on Galley Cat January 30, 2012

Mary McCallum's Tuesday Poem: The Barn

Tuesday Poem: The Barn

BLOG STATS

Excitement at the post office

About the author:

Sacha de Bazin (right) is a 38 year old mother of 5 children, who range in ages from 12 down to 2. Previously she was a primary school teacher, with a BA in English. She grew up in Tokoroa, studied in Auckland, raised children in Canterbury and recently moved to Nelson. This is her first novel.

New publisher, new New Zealand author

The self-epublishing bubble

Should Entrepreneurs Self-Publish?

Erotic books popular with e-readers

CBC News - Posted: Jan 28, 2012

Susan Knabe, who teaches women’s studies at the University of Western Ontario in London, says amateur erotic writing is thriving online and now it’s becoming more accessible.

Russian billionaire leads a London bookshop revolution

Waterstones owner turns a page in its history and opens a UK store devoted to his native language

A statement from Peter Robertson, President of Interlitq (now at www.interlitq.wordpress.com)

Franzen: E-books Bad for Society

The Bookstore’s Last Stand - everyone has something to say about Barnes & Noble

By JULIE BOSMAN - New York Times - Published: January 28, 2012

B&N to ink first overseas Nook deal with Waterstones?

Perhaps the Greatest Comics Book Store in the World

The Clark explores the art of copying ~ "Copycat: Reproducing Works of Art"

WHITE CLOUD WORLDS - NZ Science Fiction and Fantasy Art Exhibition and Book

‘A Wrinkle in Time’ and Its Sci-Fi Heroine

By PAMELA PAUL - The New York Times - Published: January 27, 2012

THE SISTERS BROTHERS

A local politician, a music reviewer and an author walk into a bar…

Waitangi Day launch for Gavin Bishop's 'The House that Jack Built' in English and Te Reo Maori

Martin Edmond reviews Road Markings

My Week With Marilyn - reviewed by Nicky Pellegrino

Five Hundred Buildings of New York

Women writers turn to the horror story - Jeanette Winterson and Helen Dunmore among famous names venturing into the horror genre this year

The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Art Presents the First Major William Blake Exhibition in Russia

Books in the Sunday papers

Bookends: Doors of perception

Marcus Berkmann - The Spectator -21 January 2012

NZ's top chefs fess up in their books

By Geraldine Johns - NZ Herald Jan 19, 2012

Charlotte Bronte's lost love letters revealed

Love letters which reveal Charlotte Brontë's infatuation with her Belgian professor are to be published. The Telegraph - 27 January, 2012

Vladimir Putin plans 100-book Russian canon all students must read

The Russian prime minister prescribes his top 100 books for the nation

Reconsidering the Genius of Gertrude Stein

By LYNNE TILLMAN - New York Times - Published: January 27, 2012

Illustration by Joe Ciardiello

IDABy Gertrude Stein. Edited by Logan Esdale.Illustrated. 348 pp. Yale University Press. Paper, $18.

STANZAS IN MEDITATION - The Corrected EditionBy Gertrude Stein. Edited by Susannah Hollister and Emily Setina.Illustrated. 379 pp. Yale University Press. Paper, $22.

Writers & Readers Week at the Festival

Kevin Lawson R.I.P.

Birds of Clay by Aleksandra Lane - an invitation

News from Galley Cat

Facebook Timeline to Be Mandatory Soon

Tom Isbell Lands 7-Figure Book Deal

STUDY: Apple Has 58% Share of the Tablet Market

First ever crime writing MA launched

London's City University says creation of course is in response to student demand

Fig Tree breaks with Lewycka cover style for new title

27.01.12 | Charlotte Williams - The Bookseller

Keith Richards writes to his aunt

Just Google it! Questions dumb people ask online

Why a Book Editor Becomes a Literary Agent

Frank Lloyd Wright archival reproductions now available at 1000Museums.com

Bloomsbury launches high-flying Circus

Roald Dahl and CS Lewis among writers revealed to have refused honours

Book2Book- Friday 27 Jan 2012

The Sex Diaries Project: What 1,500 Bedroom Diaries Can Teach Us About Sex

So Brilliantly Clever: Parker, Hulme and the Murder that Shocked the World

Leading New Zealand Bookseller closing down

Pinterest Tips for Writers

IDA
By Gertrude Stein. Edited by Logan Esdale.
Illustrated. 348 pp. Yale University Press. Paper, $18.

STANZAS IN MEDITATION - The Corrected Edition
By Gertrude Stein. Edited by Susannah Hollister and Emily Setina.
Illustrated. 379 pp. Yale University Press. Paper, $22.