Design and engineering are, indeed, often in opposition — engineering constraints affect design; design goals affect engineering tradeoffs. But they are not separate endeavors. The philosophical question is which one is a subset of the other. What Schiller is telling Isaacson is that prior to Jobs’s return to Apple, design was what happened at the end of the engineering process. Post-Jobs, engineering became a component of the design process. This shift made all the difference in the world.

Isaacson does not understand this, and his telling of the Antennagate saga illustrates this perfectly.

t was dandy with him, too. The Hardy Boys were to be a brief, inconsequential meal ticket. They would take a few days apiece; he would expend no intellectual energy on them, and he would use the pay to underwrite more serious work. He would launch a family and a writing career, and in time be recognized as a man of letters.

Briefly, things went swell. And then came 1929. A bad time to be a writer without a steady paycheck.

"We had no car. We had no coal. My mother always had food on the table, but sometimes it was spaghetti with tomato juice on it."

This is Brian McFarlane, Leslie McFarlane's son. Brian McFarlane would grow up to be a hockey player, and later, a sports broadcaster and prolific writer of books about hockey. He is a member of the Canadian Hockey Hall of Fame.

In his father's diary there is an entry from the early 1930s. He took baby Brian for a walk, but had to return. Brian's only shoes had fallen apart. Another entry: He had to mail out a manuscript, but he had no money, so he borrowed 10 cents from Brian's piggy bank.

Another entry: "We are hoping for some money in time to go to the dance Friday night. It is humiliating to be so hard up."

McFarlane was writing good fiction, but few places were buying. He had only one steady patron, a syndicate that was paying him peanuts to write according to a formula it supplied.

There were children's books at the time written with eloquence -- Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House on the Prairie," for example -- but the Stratemeyer editors weren't interested in that, certainly not willing to pay enough to achieve it. They wanted simple and dumb.

In the early volumes, McFarlane gamely tried invention. As a foil for the ingenious Hardy Boys, he created two stumblebum local police officers, Chief Collig and Deputy Smuff, who dithered and blundered and misinterpreted clue after clue. It was a technique used by detective writers from Conan Doyle to Christie. But the Stratemeyer Syndicate was not amused. This was fostering a disrespect for authority, it said. McFarlane was ordered, in subsequent volumes, to give the cops a brain.

The message was clear. These were not McFarlane's books. They belonged to men named Edward Stratemeyer, who wanted bilge, and Franklin W. Dixon, who did not exist.

Why would a bestselling author, capable of garnering a six-figure advance on a book, forgo the money, the media, and the mojo associated with a big publishing house?

Because it would make my book twice as expensive for you, half as profitable for me, less purposefully written, and unavailable until about two years from now. In short, the traditional publishing system is nearly dead. And publishing a book under its rules can mean the death of ideas within it, as well. Until it utterly reworks its method, gets rid of a majority of its corporate dead weight, releases its publishing houses from the conglomerates that own them, and embraces direct selling models, the publishing industry will remain rather useless to readers and writers alike.

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He gives a joyful account of “tearing around to theater, supper parties,” including a production of Caesar and Cleopatra with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh: “Very good, very pure,” although “the audiences here are just as stupid as they are in New York.” Afterwards he had supper at the Oliviers’ in Chelsea, “a marvellous little house, very posh evening—formal clothes, and all that.” Olivier was a “very nice guy, very bright. He’s knocked out about his wife, which was nice to see. She’s a charmer. Naturally, while we were having drinks in the living room, some gin went up my nose. I damn near left by the window.” This is a Salinger whose voice—snappy and funny, at once worldly and naïve—hasn’t been seen in print before, except in the guise of Holden Caulfield.

During the gathering Dr. Francisco, known in childhood as Little Eddie, described how Faulkner stood in front of that window and said, “ ‘She’s still here,’ like she was a ghost,” Professor Lowe recalled.

Dr. Francisco, speaking by telephone from his home in Atlanta, remembered hearing Faulkner rant as he read Leak’s pro-slavery and pro-Confederacy views: “Faulkner became very angry. He would curse the man and take notes and curse the man and take more notes.”

"Now, his address and his phone number are in the Rolodex on your desk," Phyllis explained. "People are going to call and ask for his number. You think it won't happen, but it will." She paused to light another cigarette. "Grad students. Reporters. Just … people. They may try to trick you or manipulate you. They may give you some song-and-dance routine." She laughed a throaty laugh, then fixed me sharply in her pale blue eyes. "But you can never, ever give out that address. Or that phone number. NEVER. OK?" I nodded and gave her my most professional smile. "Because it's happened before," she told me. "I've had assistants who just don't understand."

Charles Dickens left behind one, and only one, manuscript for “A Christmas Carol,” the tale he wrote in 1843 of an unfeeling rich man and the boy who pricked his conscience. Kept under lock-and-key for much of the year at the Morgan Library and Museum, the manuscript is not widely available, one reason, perhaps, why it has been all but impossible to track the many revisions Dickens made to the manuscript as he struggled to get his story right. A high-resolution copy of the manuscript's 66 pages, which you can examine below, may finally change that.

from September 8, 1947

These three volumes about children's books would fit nicely on a shelf already holding Jim Trelease's "The Read-Aloud Handbook," first published in 1979; Mem Fox's "Reading Magic," from 2001; and Pam Allyn's "What to Read When," which came out in April.

Some offerings in this mini-genre are more stylish than others, but all represent a cri de coeur on behalf not just of children's literature but of children's hearts and imaginations. Surely that is territory worth defending from the armies of electronic usurpers.

The jacket of Crumb’s Genesis also announces, with the Crumbian emphasis of two exclamation points: "The first book of the Bible graphically depicted! Nothing left out!" It is unclear whether "the first book of the Bible" means Genesis or is a claim that this is the first time a book of the Bible has been graphically depicted in its entirety. If the latter is the case, it is, as far as I know, an accurate claim; and it is certainly worth pondering what is gained or lost by representing biblical narrative in graphic frames verse by verse, with images for virtually everything, including the begats.

Celebrating the nature of Iowa and the Midwest with words and images

But it is in the nature of world-builders to be philosophers as well. That is, the best of what Tolkien called “secondary worlds” are extended commentaries on and critiques of this world: they are mirrors cunningly placed so we can see the back of our universe—aspects of our being that are normally hidden from us. Every major secondary world is to some degree polemical, ideological.

So it turns out that, “for almost everybody occasionally and for some people pretty well perpetually,” the perfect simulation of reality does not erase the boundary between the real and the virtual but rather intensifies it, and makes the real ever more desirable. And such desire in turn re-creates scarcity in this allegedly post-scarcity society: the stadium where Ziller’s composition will be premiered contains only so many seats, which means that it’s quite possible to want and not get one. (The Mind rather mournfully explains to people that there will be no room to dance.) A very un-Culture experience.

A twenty-something book nerd, I have an undergraduate degree in the History of Technology from Georgia Tech and am currently pursuing an MA in Book History at the University of London. This blog focuses on book history, rare books, literature, grad school, and related subjects, but will occasionally diverge to topics like travel and life in London.

Typographica is a review of typefaces and type books, with occasional commentary on fonts and typographic design. Edited by Stephen Coles, also of The FontFeed and The Mid-Century Modernist.

My name is Wesley Hill.

This is my commonplace book and sometime-journal.

This venue has been created to appreciate the practice of book cover design. This is not a blog to rip apart what we dislike—everyone has a different aesthetic. This is a blog about the challenges and outcomes of a project. We are here to teach and be taught by one another.

If we must claim that The Wind in the Willows is about something, I would say that it’s mostly about the inter-animating powers of friendship and place. Ratty loves the river, but he loves it more when he can show it to Mole. Ratty has known all along that “there is nothing—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats,” but he chants this well-worn fact over and over, dreamily, because in sharing the experience with the novice Mole he finds it coming fully alive to himself once more. Badger’s home is all the more delightful as a refuge from the cold because it is Badger’s home, not just some generic warm spot. Badger’s gruff hospitality allows all sorts of creatures to come and go as they will. And Toad Hall becomes more wonderful than ever when it has been saved from the stoats and weasels, and saved by Toad’s faithful friends. Friends give meaning to a place, and the traits of certain places encourage and strengthen the blessings of friendship.

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The principles are tiresomely belabored, but the specific policy recommendations don't follow straightforwardly from the principles. How do we get from "We must be good stewards of creation" to "Our church needs to invest in the Eden Conservancy Project"?

It seems to me that one way we get there is through deep and serious empirical study, so that we can determine with some reasonable degree of confidence whether the Eden Conservancy Project—and the general conservation strategy it represents—really is a good way for those of us who want to care for God's creation to invest our resources.

But, of course, any answer to such empirical questions will depend on how well we have formulated the questions—how well we understand our goals and desires, how well we understand our concepts of care and conservation. This is another way of saying that we also must get from general biblical principles or commandments to specific practices through theology.

Written by someone my cousin knows from high school. I don't normally read this sort of thing....

As print takes its place alongside smoke signals, cuneiform, and hollering, there has emerged a new literary age, one in which writers no longer need to feel encumbered by the paper cuts, reading, and excessive use of words traditionally associated with the writing trade. Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era focuses on the creation of short-form prose that is not intended to be reproduced on pulp fibers.

...

ENG: 232WR—Advanced Tweeting: The Elements of Droll
LIT: 223—Early-21st-Century Literature: 140 Characters or Less
ENG: 102—Staring Blankly at Handheld Devices While Others Are Talking
ENG: 301—Advanced Blog and Book Skimming
ENG: 231WR—Facebook Wall Alliteration and Assonance
LIT: 202—The Literary Merits of Lolcats
LIT: 209—Internet-Age Surrealistic Narcissism and Self-Absorption

Like many Victorian atheists, A.N. Wilson has found God.

Young readers now see the protagonist of J. D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye” as a whining preppy, not as a virtuous outcast.

However, as a writer, I'm not convinced that we are the best equipped to understand how we go about the business of literary production. If, as Flannery O'Connor asserted, to be a writer of fiction requires a certain "calculated stupidity", then part of that, surely, is a willed ignorance of the mechanical side of production: the symbolic cogs of the imagination and traumatic winding gear of the unconscious. The novelist, quite rightly, fears the psychoanalyst as both an enemy and a usurper.

In truth, even if they have an imperfect insight into their own methods, I still slightly mistrust writers of fiction who are assured literary critics; it makes me suspect that they favour the word over the world it should describe. Such scribes fall victim too easily to the solecism of equating style with morality.

“The assumptions of realism as it has been practised are simply wrong. People bring a great deal of memory and also a sense of present experience to everything that they do. If you see someone doing a simple action like hanging sheets on a line, there is absolutely no reason in that person’s perception that there is anything simple about it at all. I have all the respect in the world for reality, but I think the general assumptions about it are wrong.”

But here is a second novel, and it is no surprise to find that it is religious, somewhat essayistic and fiercely calm. ''Gilead'' is a beautiful work -- demanding, grave and lucid -- and is, if anything, more out of time than Robinson's book of essays, suffused as it is with a Protestant bareness that sometimes recalls George Herbert (who is alluded to several times, along with John Donne) and sometimes the American religious spirit that produced Congregationalism and 19th-century Transcendentalism and those bareback religious riders Emerson, Thoreau and Melville.

So while the Web age has definitely made the self-assembly easier, it has had almost no impact on the evaluation process; there is, actually, an argument to be made that the Web has even decoupled information from evaluation, for the former is increasingly available for free on sites like Wikipedia while there is a growing desperate demand for the latter, as making sense of the growing body of information out there is becoming impossible. Under this set-up, it's easy to imagine why we might actually want to turn back to the good old books as our only reliable guide to guide us through the information age.

I didn't meet Roose until two years after his semester here, when he sat in my office for a friendly, hour-long chat on one of those "good days" of February in Lynchburg, just a few weeks before his book's release. He still comes back to visit the friends he made here—and, on this trip, to talk about the book. Of all the unexpected events at Liberty, the one that most moves him, one included in the book but conveyed even more poignantly face-to-face, is the love his Liberty friends showed him when he finally revealed the truth about who he is and why he enrolled here. One of his roommates, he says, expressed their reaction best: "How could I not forgive you when I've been forgiven so much?" Roose shakes his head in disbelief, sitting in the chair next to mine. "I never expected the people here to apply the principles of their belief to their lives in such a real way."

Breakaway Books published OAR’s sequel, Again to Carthage, in 2007; a 6,000-copy first printing sold out in three weeks. Runner’s World excerpted the new novel, and the article caught the eye of agent Byrd Leavell, of the Waxman Literary Agency. He read it, and was inspired to contact Parker and try to get a publisher to reissue the book. Six houses bid, and the winner was Brant Rumble at Scribner. Parker is working on a prequel to OAR, titled Cold Island Blues. Leavell said he will bring it to Scribner in April.

Commentary on technologies of reading, writing, research, and, well, knowledge. As these technologies change and develop, what do we lose, what do we gain, what is (fundamentally or trivially) altered? And, not least, what's fun?

Debatable:
The only place where Once A Runner falls short of perfection is, inevitably, in the novel's climax, Parker's depiction of The Race. In a valiant attempt to convey Cassidy's internal thoughts and emotions, Parker's language loses the freshness and originality of previous chapters, instead reverting to the hackneyed clichés and tired aphorisms so common in sports-writing today. He still succeeds in creating a gripping scene of drama, but fails to capture the true essence of Cassidy's spiritual, personal effort.

There won't be a threepeat: This time next year, Once a Runner will no longer be eligible. The novel's place atop Bookfinder's list caught the eye of Brant Rumble, an editor at Scribner, which is printing new copies in April. A nonrunner, Rumble told me he nevertheless found himself "completely engrossed" in the detailed descriptions of Quenton's runs.

That puts Rumble in a small minority. The paradoxical nature of the novel's popularity—it was the most-wanted book that not enough people wanted anymore—suggests an intense but narrow appeal. There's a reason Once a Runner has never managed to find a mainstream audience. It aggrandizes the insular world of running in a way that, with due respect to its new publisher, no nonrunner could possibly relate to. It is written for runners—and to keep nonrunners out. But it also nails the running life like no other novel ever has.

Kevin Patrick talks with author John L. Parker about his books - the classic Once a Runner and the new Again to Carthage - why he wrote them in the first place, and why he came back to write the sequel decades later, his own health and life and reprinting Once a Runner.

Last month, I sat down with John L. Parker in the corporate offices of Fleet Feet Sports in Carrboro, NC to interview him about the much-anticipated sequel to Once a Runner, Again to Carthage.

"It just blows my mind," said Jerry Parker, John Parker's younger brother. "When it first came out, we couldn't give copies away. Now, we have people - multiple people - telling us they legally changed their name to Quenton Cassidy. After 30 years, it's an overnight success."

Having printed 5,000 copies, Parker then dispatched the novel to running-shoe stores. Sometimes the copies came back, and with notes that were not appreciative. So he went to races in a T-shirt with iron-on letters. "It was blue, I think," he said, "and the lettering on the back just said something like 'Free Book' and there was an arrow pointing sort of up over my shoulder, indicating that you needed to pass me to win a free book." He wanted to make sure that other runners knew he was a real runner. He wanted to make sure they knew he was fast.

"Man, talk about hubris," Parker said. "The back cover of that first edition actually listed my PRs."

I have chosen to do a term paper on Once a Runner for my AP English class. The assignment is to choose a book with personal significance, preferably a work ?outside the traditional literary cannon,? and write four to six interrelated but separate essays on reading the focal text. The first essay is an introduction of content, themes, contexts, and significance. The following essays must begin with an epigraph, examine a ?broad human truth,? and contain an encounter with another reader, such as a critic, a family member, or the author in another venue. I come here in search of encounters with fellow readers, as I doubt any literary criticism on Once a Runner even exists, and no one in my family has read the book. I will copy/paste a few of the quotations I?m looking at below. Feel free to comment on them in particular, on any other aspect of the book, or even on anything tangentially related to Once a Runner.

I hear they paid over $150,000 for the rights, which is kind of insane but also kind of not. I suppose they’ll publish in hardcover, I bet they’re hoping for media (timed to Fall marathon season?), a tie-in with the paperback edition of Again to Carthage (Parker’s sequel, which came out October 2007), big library sales, and a backlist title that will sell forever. At least, that’s the minimum I’d hope for, if I were in their (running) shoes.

They don't refuse to reprint Parker's running novel 'Once a Runner' but the 7 or 8 printings since it first appeared have not been enough for consumer demand. About 10 copies (it's a paperback) turn up every week on Ebay, only shagged out examples making less than $100, never less than $80 and decent ones can make over $150. The edition is almost immaterial. I suspect that people buy it there, read it, and then put it up again. I calculate that Ebay make about $3000 a year in fees from this one paperback alone.

Perhaps most perplexing, the fiction list is ruled by “Once a Runner,” John L. Parker’s 1978 novel about, um, running. My favorite line, courtesy of the book’s Wikipedia page: ” ‘A 3:58 or so, Cass.’ He looked up seriously from his chowder. Cassidy sipped his tea morosely. These things were not to be bantered about lightly. It was bad luck to put your mouth on times your feet couldn’t reach.”

Pastors and theologians today could still learn a great deal from Updike’s fiction. Just think of the Lutheran pastor Fritz Kruppenbach in Rabbit, Run (1960), a deeply Barthian minister who utters this thunderous denouncement of pastoral work – in conversation with another minister, he asks: “Do you think this is your job, to meddle in these people’s lives? I know what they teach you at seminary now: this psychology and that. But I don’t agree with it. You think now your job is to be an unpaid doctor, to run around and plug up holes and make everything smooth. I don’t think that. I don’t think that’s your job…. ”

Books & Culture's thoughtful editorial reaches readers who want to be challenged to think beyond today's headlines, to dig more deeply into issues and ideas, and to analyze culture from an informed Christian perspective.

(Somehow I didn't have this bookmarked until now though I've read it for years.)

Project Gutenberg, the first producer of free electronic books (ebooks).

On a Japanese cell phone, you type the syllables of hiragana and katakana, and the phone suggests kanji from a list of words you use most frequently. Unlike working in longhand, which requires that an author know the complex strokes for several thousand kanji, and execute them well, writing on a cell phone lowers the barrier for a would-be novelist. The novels are correspondingly easy to read—most would pose no challenge to a ten-year-old—with short lines, simple words, and a repetitive vocabulary. Much of the writing is hiragana, and there is ample blank space to give the eyes a rest. “You’re not trying to pack the screen,” a cell-phone novelist named Rin told me. (Her name, as it happens, actually was borrowed from a dog: her best friend’s Chihuahua.) “You’re changing the line in the middle of sentences, so where you cut the sentence is an essential part. If you’ve got a very quiet scene, you use a lot more of those returns and spaces. ...”

Fortuity happens, but serendipity can be cultivated. You can grow in serendipity. You can even become a disciple of serendipity. The elevation of Fortuna to the status of goddess is a way of shrugging: an admission of helplessness, an acknowledgment of all that lies beyond our powers of control. But in the very idea of serendipity is a kind of hope, even an expectation, that we can turn the accidents of fortune to good account, and make of them some knowledge that would have been inaccessible to us if we had done no more than discover what we were looking for.

Chalk this up, if you will, to deficiencies in my Christian character. But even for those more saintly than myself— and there are a few—the blogosphere inevitably accelerates the pace of debate to the timetable of daily journalism. In terms of how they treat substantive ideas, blogs are not very different from newspapers: they present an idea and then move on, as quickly as possible, to the next idea. Perhaps there can be, later on, some brief acknowledgment that that idea wasn't treated fully and adequately—but, as the newsreel in Citizen Kane reminds us, Time is On The March, and bloggers are under enormous pressure to march along with it.

The New Criterion, now co-edited by the art critic Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball, was founded in 1982 by Mr. Kramer and the pianist and music critic Samuel Lipman. A monthly review of the arts and intellectual life, The New Criterion has emerged as America’s foremost voice of critical dissent.

In most of the great cities of the West, museums now dominate the lists of most popular tourist attractions. More people go to the Louvre each year than to the Eiffel Tower; in London, three museums--the Tate, the British Museum and the National Gallery--each attract more visitors than the London Eye.

"This boy is a wonderful comedy writer", H.L. Mencken once said of William Faulkner. Yet we seldom associate Faulkner with humour. The term "Faulknerian" tends to connote that blend of Southern gothic tragedy for which the author is most recognised. Many assume that Faulkner's work is little more than lurid tales of burning barns, kitchen castrations and moaning man-children, but this does a disservice to his novels and short stories. It ignores a fundamental aspect of Faulkner's work: the pairing of the comic with the tragic, the screwball with the sordid, the goofy with the grim. It is a rare mix of light and dark, and one that is most closely emulated today in the smart films of Joel and Ethan Coen.

The Book Design Review is a blog dedicated to the best, and sometimes the worst, of book design, book covers, and book jackets

Inspired by the Canadian blog Bookninja's cover competition, we asked you to redesign a famous novel for a dumbed-down era

Milton had carried his epic around inside him for many years, and any number of calamities—including the outbreak of bubonic plague from 1664 to 1665, which killed seventy-five thousand Londoners—might have prevented him from getting it all down on paper. Its very completion must have seemed like divine Providence to Milton. Even while writing it, he believed that he shared a muse with Moses and King David and that she visited him nightly in his dreams; he woke up and dictated his poem in seemingly preformed stanzas. The palpable exhilaration of the poem’s composition, and the heavy burden of its complex meanings, contributes to the thrilling tension of “Paradise Lost.”

It’s difficult to prove that oral and literate people think differently; orality, Havelock observed, doesn’t “fossilize” except through its nemesis, writing. But some supporting evidence came to hand in 1974, when Aleksandr R. Luria, a Soviet psychologist, published a study based on interviews conducted in the nineteen-thirties with illiterate and newly literate peasants in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Luria found that illiterates had a “graphic-functional” way of thinking that seemed to vanish as they were schooled. In naming colors, for example, literate people said “dark blue” or “light yellow,” but illiterates used metaphorical names like “liver,” “peach,” “decayed teeth,” and “cotton in bloom.” Literates saw optical illusions; illiterates sometimes didn’t. Experimenters showed peasants drawings of a hammer, a saw, an axe, and a log and then asked them to choose the three items that were similar. Illiterates resisted, saying that all the items were useful.

"A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep." — W. H. Auden

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