blog.rightreading.com

“Honour commercio’s energy yet aid the linkless proud, the plurable with everybody.” — Finnegans Wake

• Zebra tables and lists : Are alternating bands a good idea in table design?
• Wikipedia to require editing approval : The democratic dream dies, I guess
• Rejections — what to make of them? : Some writing is “engaging” and “enjoyable” but just not publishable
• Typography Art : Cool stuff
• Typedia : An attempt at a shared encyclopedia of typefaces

“Think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.” — Charles Dickens

• Yale UP capitulates : See also my publishing glossary under “spine”
• The F-Word : A lot of mileage in that word
• Gruesome original versions of popular fairy tales : Sleeping Beauty, for example, is raped and gives birth to two children before waking up
• Map_of_humanity : Terra cognita
• Who designed the Times New Roman typeface? : It might not have been Stanley Morison
• Congress deadlocked : Over how to deny health care (The Onion)
• A Photohop selection challenge : Two techniques for selecting hair
• About agent follow-ups : “It takes 15 minutes for an editor to know whether they want to read more or not–not 4 months, or 6 months”

“Think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.” — Charles Dickens

• Google Traffic Throttling : Does G traffic get shut off once you hit your designated plateau?
• Phasing out textbooks : Idiocracy moves another step closer to Socialist Realism
• On not linking to thin-content (spammish) sites : Do everyone a favor, dont be taken in
• The End of The Critic : Is there no value in educated opinion?
• Jamnitzer Perspectiva : Wonderful 16th-c geometric solid forms
• Listen to the Music of the Spheres : I find Freecorder works best with Explorer rather than Firefox
• Why are e-books so expensive : No, really, why?
• No this isn’t the Dude : It’s Thomas Pynchon narrating a trailer for Inherent Vice

Duly quoted

• “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.” — George Orwell

“Honour commercio’s energy yet aid the linkless proud, the plurable with everybody.” — Finnegans Wake

• The Unofficial Thomas Pynchon Guide to Los Angeles : Annotated with videos pictures, and commentary
• Princeton Online Arabic Poetry Project : Five great poets
• Designer Bookbinders’ First International Competition : “The best are like water” — Laozi
• An expensive book : Moon rocks will do that
• Larry McMurtry’s last hurrah? : “Not too many great novels are written by people over 75″
• How to disappear : Getting away from them all
• A librarian wants her tweets back : Where have they gone?
• Brand or bland? : “Don’t listen to your friends”
• Britney Spears writes to David R. Godine : And pigs are flying
• The ISBN is Dying : How will we live?

“Every separation is a link.” — Simone Weil

• Art, God, and copyright : Is copyright discouraging creativity?
• Amazon’s Bezos Apologizes : “Stupid, thoughtless”
• Introducing LGoogle : The plex joins the beltway
• Martin Engelbrecht’s home theater shows : From the 18th c.
• Down with verdana? : Another attempt at embedding fonts in web pages
• A lost Caslon type : Long Primer No. 1
• Monopsony : Your word for the day

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“Every separation is a link.” — Simone Weil

• Two authors tell reviewers where to get off : ““I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make.”
• Separated by a common language : Do Brits and Yanks place adverbs differently (or do they differently place adverbs?)
• Fight For Your Independents : Archipelago Books needs your help
• Harvard UP to sell 1,000 books on Scribd and 550 cut at McGraw-Hill : More signs of the times via GalleyCat
• Cecil Court : London’s booksellers’ row
• FastPencil : A new self-publishing platform
• Things to Take to a Writer’s Conference : “Bourbon” is my favorite among these suggestions
• Point Guards v. Sarah Palin : “I can’t let a politician denigrate the position I’ve come to love”

Duly quoted

• “I found out that all serious literary fiction MUST be written in the continuous historic present. Throughout the whole story, nothing must happen – in fact there must be no story at all – and the whole thing must be written in a tone of unremitting gloom. My book isn’t like that. It’s got a beginning, a middle and an end and everything.” — Andrew Nicoll
• “She didn’t finish her term as mayor, stepping down to run for Lt. Governor. She didn’t finish her term on the petroleum board ethics panel, she resigned in protest and then ran for Governor. She doesn’t want the office, she just likes running for office.” — Alaska Girl
• “The world is literally her oyster.” — Palin spokeswoman Meg Stapleton

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“Every separation is a link.” — Simone Weil

• Designer Humor : heartfelt message using Papyrus
• Bitterness as mental illness : Post Traumatic Bitterness Syndrome
• Why retranslate? : Well, why not?
• Sex with ducks : “Gonna Huey, Dewey, and Louie all over the room”
• Sex with flowers : The bee’s knees (photo at Frisco Vista)
• The Treasury of Ornament : Love ‘em like ducks
• Gender and sex : Language has gender, animals and plants have sex
• 70 percent of praise is sarcastic : Good one!
• University presses in trouble : Who’s surprised?
• Books as home furnishings: “I want the look of books”

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“Honour commercio’s energy yet aid the linkless proud, the plurable with everybody.” — Finnegans Wake

• Books from heaven : Books from earth
• 25 Intriguing Facts About Gabriel García Márquez : For example, his mother is most proud of “having a daughter who is a nun.”
• Wikipedia hoax points to limits of journalists’ research : Wikipedia is the new commons
• Harry Clarke : Illustrations for Poe
• Arial is everywhere : Even in Amsterdam
• Murakami’s novel a hit in Japan : Before it is published
• Translating Genji : On the occasion of its 1000th birthday

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“Honour commercio’s energy yet aid the linkless proud, the plurable with everybody.” — Finnegans Wake

• Book tour hits 100 indie bookstores : Smart idea
• Times are tough in the belly of the beast : Simon & Schuster has rough first quarter
• Typographica : Relaunched with a new look
• Designing a typeface for the Guggenheim : “unchecked, this might have grown into an overly stylized typeface”
• Google typography : Mapping the alphabet
• The powerful woman trivia quiz : test your knowledge
• Why people think it’s OK to cheat a little bit : Should I click my Adsense ad?
• You are in a designated public place : And that, apparently, is not a good thing
• So Long, GeoCities : Wait, Geocities still existed in 2009?

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“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

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“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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“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)

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“If Folly link with Elegance no man knows which is which.” – William Butler Yeats

• Collectanea Botanica : Illustrated herbals are the perfection of print publishing
• Are the Humanities Becoming Irrelevant? : Maybe we need a new vocabulary for addressing this perennial question
• To Sleep, Perchance to Dream : Get cosy with the Folger Shakespeare Library
• Locusts and biblipphiles : They both swarm
• Recognizing political blogging : Blogs now in running for Orwell Prize
• What are the oldest words of English? : I’m not really sure what that question means
• Journalism is Dead, Long Live Journalism : Is the news-blog the newspaper of the future?

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I have been busy constructing an index to my 7 Junipers site, which is devoted to Asian Art and Culture. The index in process is accessed via one of the site’s navigation tabs. Tag clouds are often seen in sidebars, but I think they work better as pages. At 7J I made a brief post summarizing the steps involved creating an index page  via the tags function.

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“Every separation is a link.” — Simone Weil

• In celebration of the farmer poet : But no Wendell Berry?
• What’s on Bruce Springsteen’s Bookshelves? : Books, I’m guessing
• Don’t Work for Arseholes : Excellent advice from Derek Powazek
• Internet Famous Class : When your grade depends on getting famous
• Books and the web : Together at last?
• The poems of Barack Obama : “… caverns / Filled with apes / That eat figs …”

Duly Quoted

“Not in the history of mankind has the government ever created a job.” — RNC Chair Michael Steele

“One of my sons … was more interested in Alexander’s stilted delivery which paused. After. Every. Word. He wanted to know if Alexander had had a stroke.” — Ron Silliman

Incoming

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“Honour commercio’s energy yet aid the linkless proud, the plurable with everybody.” — Finnegans Wake

• Book publishing, literature, and the economy : Is it the end of days?
• The demise of dead tree media and the future of PR : “”Public relations is a fluid concept”
• Another great bookshop closes : Harry W Schwartz, Milwaukee
• 7 Publishing Myths : “Myth 2: Your Publisher is all-powerful and all-knowing” — wait, that’s not true?
• Götterdämmerung means “twilight of the gods” : Does today’s expand-your-vocabulary word apply to McClatchy Publishing?
• Championing Platonov: A writer who elides boundaries
• Criticizing Alexander’s inaugural poem : “Inauthentic, bureaucratic, rhetorical” (via The Wooden Spoon)
• The White House is now blogging : No outlinks though — an abundance of caution?

Duly quoted

Dear World,

The United States of America, your quality supplier of ideals of liberty and democracy, would like to apologize for its 2001-2008 service outage. The technical fault that led to this eight-year service interruption has been located, and the parts responsible for it were replaced Tuesday night, November 4th.

– more at The Ester Republic

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Today’s guest post at ForeWord Magazine is about how book publishers can increase traffic to their websites.

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“All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.”  ~Anatole France

• Barnes & Noble cuts nearly 100 employees : Hard times
• And more cuts : At O’Reilly Media
• Shadow art : Come over to the dark side
• Hanging Bush : The outgoing president as literary stylist
• Would you give a search engine a 3D model of your body? : It knows all about you already
• Christian Science Monitor goes web : another print publication down
• Bookporn : A treasure trove in Singapore for SE Asian specialists
• My colleague Jason Jose is “The Weary Traveler” : Be very afraid, Rick Steves
• Blog for Darwin : Will only the fittest posts survive?
• Typos de graphistes : C’est très bien, selon M. Porchez

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“The weakest link in the chain is also the strongest. It can break the chain.” — Stanislaw Lec

• Dharma : almost : swallowed
• Poets on the peaks : Snyder at the summit
• A dangerous publisher : Barney Rossett
• Five books of Latino poetry : Chosen by Francisco Aragón
• Another print magazine goes online only : Financial Week, an unfortunate name for these times
• Obama channels every president : Continuity we can believe in
• Tweetwasters Hall of Fame : Is fame the right word?
• Google loses trust : Such a cuddly monolith
• A cephalopod : Very cool

Duly quoted

• “One half the nation is mad — and the other half not very sound.”
  – Tobias Smollett

Incoming

• Thank you

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“If Folly link with Elegance no man knows which is which.” – William Butler Yeats

• Michael Dirda’s 10 Commandments of book giving : It’s a good list
• Book publishing death watch : Reports from the trenches
• BEA at a crossroads : Per the BEA
• Art museum toilets : Plumbing plumbing
• The dumbest generation? : It might not be the one you think
• Karaoke singer killed by his audience : Probably was singing John Denver
• Google Dictionary : Good for checking spelling
• Big Ugly Review : An online litmag
• History of Hollywood logos : A good logo is paramount
• The problems with direct messaging on twitter and facebook : Sometimes it’s better to go old school — e-mail
• An honest viral e-mail : Nothing will happen! Everyone needs to know!

Duly Quoted: Three quotes from Moses Hadas

• I have read your book and much like it.
• Thank you for sending me a copy of your book. I’ll waste no time reading it.
• This book fills a much-needed gap.

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