Admit it designers, you’re a bunch of playbabies. Witness:
Month: March 2009
“Honour commercio’s energy yet aid the linkless proud, the plurable with everybody.” — Finnegans Wake
- Designing for Google : It’s not a design-oriented company
- How Designers Fail : Let me count the ways
- The meaning of “free” : Money guy thinks book publishers are heading in wrong direction
- Advice from a Professional Book Repairer : I never knew Ingram did this
- Orhan Pamuk’s English translator discusses her work : With audio
- Le Clezio discusses language : Via David R. Godine
Latest inbound links
Via Craigslist:
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I received this unusual e-mail recently (subject line: “you ruined my life, sorta / an offer for karmic balancing”). I have edited it somewhat to conceal the identity of the author. I have no memory of the incident the writer describes. I will say that I think I have generally been courteous in rejecting manuscripts. I’m sure there were exceptions.
Hello, I think you are someone I met years ago, and you had a big (negative) impact on my life. I’m writing today to say hi, and to offer you a chance at karmic balancing.
“If Folly link with Elegance no man knows which is which.” – William Butler Yeats
- MLA style guide gives up on urls, says just describe the source : Is this the end of scholarship as we knew it?
- School of Quitetube : link to a YouTube video on an uncluttered page
- Mariah Carey is suddenly a rare book collector : Will she read them?
- Redesigning Content for Kindle : For the designer Kindle is a pain in the arse
- Metacovers : Book images on book covers
- Shakespeare portrait claim debunked? : Too much like a courtier to be a playwright?
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Just a week ago a portrait of Shakespeare emerged that was supposedly painted by a contemporary. Now a fellow named John Casson (“an independent researcher and psychotherapist”) who “spent three years studying writings thought to be connected to Shakespeare” (wow! three years!), claims to have discovered six “new” works by Shakespeare.
Considering that there has been a sizeable full-time Shakespeare industry churning away in academia for at least a hundred years, I think this claim must be taken with many grains of salt until verified. It would be interesting to see the works though. English writing has been all downhill since Shakespeare.
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According to a survey conducted by Spread the Word, a UK book advocacy group, two-thirds of respondents admitting lying about having read certain books. Which books do people most often lie about having read? Following are the ten top claimed-to-have-read titles. Orwell is the runaway winner — why?
1. 1984 by George Orwell (42%)
2. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (31%)
3. Ulysses by James Joyce (25%)
4. The Bible (24%)
5. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (16%)
6. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (15%)
7. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (14%)
8. In Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust (9%)
9. Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama (6%)
10. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (6%)
I’ve read all but 7, 9, and 10 (no. 2 in translation).
The mysterious thing about this list is why anyone would lie about having read Richard Dawkins. It must be a UK thing.
The picks of this litter, BTW, are 3, 4, 5, and 8.
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A fellow called “the magic of chutney” sure knows how to dominate a board. Saying “Some of you is so down on fonts..I’m gonna get my man Johannes to break it down for ya,” he laid down a bunch of images like the one below. Great stuff (even if Gutenberg didn’t really invent moveable type).
“Every separation is a link.” — Simone Weil
- “Newspaper publishers are idiots” : So says Dvorak (who has made some howlers of his own over the years)
- Six projects that could change publishing for the better : A slide talk by Michael Tamblyn
- The ultimate French intellectual : Hint: his wife was a friend of the Mallarmés and the niece of the painter Berthe Morisot
- Letters from Beckett : I’d subscribe to Sam’s blog
- Link to a specific part of a YouTube video : Handy tip
- Clive Custler must pay $13.9 Million to film company : For misleading them about the popularity of his books (Seems to me John LeCarre said that having your book made into a movie was like watching your oxen made into bouillon)
Latest inbound links
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There will be a reading from the Mutanabbi Street anthology that Red Hen Press recently published, tomorrow, March 11, at 7:30 at Overland Books in San Francisco. The book (which I haven’t seen yet) collects writing that commemorates the bombing of Baghdad’s booksellers’ row and celebrates freedom of expression. I have an essay in the anthology. Tomorrow’s reading, however, will be entirely of works by the Iraqi authors who are in the book, and I will be the proxy reader for “Escape from al-Mutanabbi Street” by Muhammad al-Hamrani.
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Broadside “Make Books Not War” by Sarah Bodman. Text translated into Arabic by Nejat Chalabi and handwritten by Nadia Chalabi. More info here.
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Right Reading received this e-mail from Olivia Sears, president of the Center for the Art of Translation.
I hope you are all enjoying The Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction. I wanted to send along some of the press the book has received. Martin Riker at Dalkey Archive Press has done a tremendous job of promoting the book.
Tim O’Reilly makes some points in its favor.
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Ten Speed Press, a mainstay of Bay Area Book Publishing for nearly forty years, has been sold to Random House, which means it is now part of the Germany-based megacorporation Bertelsmann AG, which is the world’s single largest owner of book publishing companies. This continues the long trend of independents getting swallowed by international entertainment conglomerates.
Ten Speed’s most popular titles include What Color Is Your Parachute and The Moosewood Cookbook. According to a report in the NYT, Ten Speed will retain its editorial staff — Phil Wood will be publisher emeritus — but there will be layoffs in the warehousing and distribution operations. If past experience with such sales is any predictor, for a while the company’s editorial program may seem little changed, but sooner or later it will lose its distinctive character.
Phil Wood says, “I am confident Ten Speed Press, the Company I founded and have owned for almost four decades, will thrive under Random House, whose highly professional people are committed to, and fully understand, publishing.”
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John Gall, book designer for B&N, shares some thoughts about book cover design.
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Before “upgrading” your Netflix instant-watch player, think about it.
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