petrichor + books   122

Inside David Foster Wallace's Private Self-Help Library | The Awl
Even I am reaching critical mass on the DFW overload commiserate with Pale King being released.
davidfosterwallace  dfw  theawl  selfhelp  books  library  book 
april 2011 by petrichor
University of Arizona Poetry Center
But there is one particular not-so-dark story that I know to be true and that I want to tell now, because it’s been such a great happiness and privilege and endlessly interesting challenge to be Dave’s friend.
dfw  davidfosterwallace  depression  literature  books  control  life  writing  author  eulogy  essay  fiction  Franzen 
november 2010 by petrichor
We Cant Believe We Said That! CMOS 16 Outtakes - The Subversive Copy Editor
“I just finished chapter 10. For the next few days, I may be able to speak only in abbreviations, some of them Latin.”

“Needs rewrite. Though the gradation scale is infinite, I don’t believe any one image could contain an infinite gradation.”

“We’ve got one of four questions resolved; we’ll call that half done.”
CMOS  chicago  outtakes  comedy  language  books  publisher  copyeditor 
october 2010 by petrichor
Context first
I propose today that the current workflow hierarchy – container first, limiting content and context – is already outdated. To compete digitally, we must start with context and preserve its connection to content.

We need to think about containers as an option, not the starting point. Further, we must start to open up access, making it possible for readers to discover and consume our content within and across digital realms.

Without a shift in mindset, we are vulnerable to a range of current and future disruptive entrants. Containers limit how we think about our audiences. In stripping context, they also limit how audiences find our content.

Here, scale is not our friend. It may well be the enemy. As Clay Christensen first outlined in 1997, disruptive technologies don’t look or feel like what we typically value. Often enough, they are cheaper, simpler, smaller and more convenient than their traditional analogues.
publishing  books  future  toread  content  editing  web2.0  e-book  libraries  bookdesign  API 
october 2010 by petrichor
The Book Collection That Devoured My Life - WSJ.com
But I would very much miss books as material objects were they to disappear. The tactility of books assists my memory, for one thing. I can't remember the quote I'm searching for, or maybe even the title of the work that contains it, but I can remember that the book is green, that the margins are unusually wide, and that the quote lies two-thirds of the way down a right-hand page. If books all appear as nearly identical digital readouts, my memory will be impoverished. And packaging is of huge importance, too -- the books I read because I liked their covers usually did not disappoint.
memory  books  wsj  lucsante  sante  reading  library  literature  culture  book  author  essay 
october 2010 by petrichor
Technology Review: Blogs: Mims's Bits: The Death of the Book has Been Greatly Exaggerated
[...] it's just as likely that as the ranks of the early adopters get saturated, adoption of ebooks will slow. Unlike the move from CDs to MP3s, there is no easy way to convert our existing stock of books to e-readers. And unlike the move from records and tapes to CDs, it's not immediately clear that an ebook is in all respects better than what it succeeds.
So the world is left with an unconvertible stock of used books that is vast. If the bustling, recession-inspired trade in used books tells us anything, it's that old books hold value for readers in a way that not even movies and music do. That's value that no ebook reader can unlock. In fact, it remains to be seen whether legions of readers raised on 99c titles at their local used bookstore (or $4.00-$5.00 titles delivered via Amazon.com) will be so eager to start buying brand new books at $10. And then there's libraries--who gets left behind when owning an ebook reader, and not merely literacy, is a requirement to borrow a book.
book  future  concept  technology  amazon  kindle  e-book  reading  publishing  books  essay  recommended 
september 2010 by petrichor
What Are Books Good For? - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education
If we can get them right, books are luminous versions of our ideas, bound by narrative structure so that others can encounter those better, smarter versions of us on the page or screen. Books make the case for us, for the identity of the individual as an embodiment of thinking in the world. The heart of what even scholars do is the endless task of making that world visible again and again by telling stories, complicated, nuanced, subtle stories that reshape us daily so that new forms of knowledge can shine out.
joy  recommended  book  books  reading  culture  history  publishing  technology  future  bookdesign  bookcovers  essay  tehwin 
september 2010 by petrichor
Mischief & Mayhem Books › “Come on! Set Fire to the Library Shelves,” etc., etc.
Enjoy the process of book-making, which is a rather private and often unseen bit of machinery, from giddy conception to marketing meeting to pulping. It is the most important thing of all, and that is: hilarious.

And I will not dare to make claims about what we are going to do, lest I jinx us to explode under our own typical collective endless email chains and wacky ideas and two-hour-long meetings and occasional fits of kumbayah singing and general good spirits.
Choire  manifesto  mischiefandmayhem  essay  publishing  future  2012  howto  joy  recommended  book  author  writing  editor  books 
september 2010 by petrichor
Mischief & Mayhem Books › Lay of the Land, Revised
We know that only three percent of the books published in the US are translated. We’d like to help inch this number up, figure it might be a good idea to hear what the rest of the world is saying.

We don’t need genres to define our work. That’s what aesthetics are for. We don’t have to worship the same canon. (I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.)

We recognized that roles like ‘reader’, ‘writer’, ‘editor’, and ‘publisher’ are no longer discrete. We are all tangled up.

And by ‘we’ I mean you and me and anyone who cares to join us.
manifesto  publishing  future  book  books  mischiefandmayhem  essay  concept  translation 
september 2010 by petrichor
n+1: This Will Kill That
We don’t know what it felt like to read before newspapers, before mass media, before printing. We don’t even know what “attention” is; one person’s rapt, deep attention is another person’s dangerous trance, while what looks like constant distraction might also be an ability to synthesize. Pragmatically, for intellectuals to stake a claim on such things as “attention” or “concentration” is an abdication of our best ground: content. There is no valid reason to think that War and Peace teaches deep attention any better than a first-person shooter game. There are plenty of reasons, enduring ones, to think that War and Peace aerates and nourishes our daily lives more fruitfully, and productively, than Call of Duty. Which is to say that staking our claims on a format (the printed book), rather than on specific, lasting artifacts of a bookish culture is a losing proposition.
books  reading  writing  attention  n+1  publishing  future  content  concept  recommended  history  book 
august 2010 by petrichor
John Waters | The Paris Review
You have to give the totally straight face with [Colbert] because he is such a good straight man. It was so funny, right before we went on, backstage, it was me and the kid who wrote the article about General McChrystal that toppled the government [Michael Hastings], and I loved the journalist, and we were talking because I used to write for Rolling Stone. So I was showing him my Rolling Stone press card, and right before we go on, Colbert looks at us, because he’s always in character, right, even before, and he says, “I like one of you.”
johnwaters  literature  film  writing  interview  fiction  colbert  stephencolbert  tcr  colbertreport  books  bookstore  author 
august 2010 by petrichor
The Levels of Greatness a Fiction Writer Can Achieve in America by Tao Lin - Books - The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper
Secretly considered "unseemly in a wholesome way somehow" by serious literary critics; "I don't know, is it okay to read these people?" by MFA students at Iowa Writers' Workshop; and "I really, really want to stay away from those people and their books" by people who like Thomas Pynchon a lot.
taolin  publishing  literature  essay  books  writing  stranger 
august 2010 by petrichor
Dr. Syntax: How to Do a Hook Slide, and Other Improbable Things I've Learned from Books
Probably the coolest instructional book I've ever read was The Great International Paper Airplane book. Not only did it show you how to make scores of different paper airplanes, but it showed how to make an awesome rocket from a paper match, tinfoil and a paper clip. You haven't lived until you've launched one of these.
books  shiny  howto  paperairplane  rocket 
november 2009 by petrichor
Jason Pinter: Why the Digital Revolution is Missing the Big Picture
iPods sell the experience. E-readers are selling the gadget. And that's bass-ackwards. [...] I don't want to feel like e-readers are targeting me. I'm not the one who needs to be sold on the joys of reading. So here's the challenge: with this new technology, publishing has a small, slowly closing window to do what they've struggled to for so long: show people in doubt just how cool reading is. More readers -- that's how we save publishing.
reading  ebook  e-reader  kindle  books  book  future  publishing  marketing  essay  recommended  tehwin  music  apple  amazon 
november 2009 by petrichor
Why the International Kindle Will Change the Book As We Know It - WSJ.com
The development of the codex was a shift from thinking of literature as a unique object, like a painting, to seeing it as an institutional object. Conversely, as the codex came to dominate as a means of intellectual transmission, the scroll began to take on the status of a holy object, which is why synagogues keep the Torah in scrolls.

The introduction of the printing press brought a similarly enormous change to the nature of reading. One of the most interesting figures in that transformation is the great Benedictine scholar Trithemius. He lived in Sponheim in the 15th century and managed to amass a library fully half the size of the Vatican library, an incredible achievement. He was also the author of "In Praise of Scribes," the foremost defense of scribal practice, in favor of writing things out and against printing them.
kindle  book  religion  history  scroll  technology  books  ebook  reading  culture  wsj  digital 
october 2009 by petrichor
Redactor Agonistes - The Barnes & Noble Review
Barnes & Noble doesn't like the title. Borders doesn't like the jacket. The author's uncle Joe doesn't like the jacket. The writer doesn't like the page layout and design. Your boss tells you the flap copy for a book about a serial killer is too "down." The hardcover didn't sell well enough for the company to put out a paperback. The book has to wait a list or two to be published. Kirkus hates the book. Another writer gets angry at you for even asking for a quote. The Times isn't going to review the book. And so on.
publishing  books  editing  book  editors  randomhouse  future  business 
september 2009 by petrichor
Three definitions of “reader” / from a working library
Instead of asking, how much can I handle? ask what am I learning? Instead of what do I have time for? ask what is the meaning of it all?

Because the meaning isn’t going to emerge on it’s own—you have to create it. The algorithms and tag searches and bookmarklets will only get you so far; afterwards, it’s work only you can do, work the machine has no need for. The reader is your own personal anthology, but you are the editor: you are the sum of its parts.
reading  essay  book  books  aworkinglibrary  recommended  rss 
september 2009 by petrichor
Nilanjana S Roy: The care and feeding of book bans
In 2004, the scholar James Laine discussed Shivaji’s parentage in his book; in an act of carefully planned spontaneous outrage, defenders of Shivaji’s reputation sacked the Bhandarkar library in Pune. Laine’s book was banned in Maharashtra. In 2008, Uttar Pradesh CM Mayawati banned Jaishree Mishra’s Rani, because the book—clearly identified as historical fiction—suggested a romantic friendship between Rani Lakshmibai and a British officer. [...] Over the decades, it became apparent that freedom of speech was offered, but not guaranteed, in India. If your opinions offended religious sensibilities, or offended our urgent and unexamined need to sanitise national icons, they would be censored. The banning of a book works wonderfully well in practice. It allows politicians to express their willingness to defend a national figure or a religious belief—ignoring the fact that in most cases, that figure or belief is being questioned by the author, not attacked.
india  censorship  book  books  history  future  literature  fiction  foreign  politics  government 
august 2009 by petrichor
FT.com / Books / Essays - What a carve up
Widely expressed among financial market participants is the view that we would never have trashed the house if our parents had supervised us properly. But it won’t do. If self-interested behaviour, inadequately restrained by state actions, leads to social and economic disaster it does not follow that the individuals and businesses which engage in the self-interested behaviour escape culpability. We don’t apply that standard to lorry drivers. We expect them to drive safely and professionally and hold them responsible when their failure to do so causes accidents. “I would have had to slow down” is not an excuse. It is not apparent that we should lower our expectations when it comes to the senior executives of banks.
finance  books  essays  FT  criticism  economy  government 
august 2009 by petrichor
Rose and Laura Wilder and the Little House stories : The New Yorker
In 1936, the Saturday Evening Post published Lane’s own “Credo,” an impassioned essay that was widely admired by conservatives. Her vision was of a quasi-anarchic democracy, with minimal taxes, limited government, and no entitlements, regulated only by the principle of personal responsibility. Its citizens would be equal in their absolute freedom to flourish or to fail.
Everything that Lane wrote after “Credo”—fiction or polemics—was an expression of that vision. She may have been the first to invoke the term “libertarian” (it dates to the eighteenth century) to describe the agenda of a nascent anti-statist movement of which she has been called, with Isabel Paterson and Ayn Rand, “a founding mother.” To the degree that she is still remembered for her own achievements, it is mainly by a few libertarian ultras for whom her tract of 1943, “The Discovery of Freedom: Man’s Struggle Against Authority,” is a foundational work of political theory. (It was written “in a white heat,” she said.)
reading  author  newyorker  family  politics  Wilder  essay  history  america  llibertarianism  republican  Reagan  book  books  publishing  children 
august 2009 by petrichor
André Kertész: The power of reading | Art and design | The Guardian
What the camera captures is their thirst for knowledge or hunger to escape their circumstances. One memorable image features a boy sitting in a New York doorway in 1944, amid a heap of newspapers left there to alleviate the wartime shortage ("Paper is needed now! Bring it at any time," reads the poster behind him). Times are hard yet the boy looks perfectly happy: amid the detritus, he has found a page of comic strips.
guardian  photography  reading  books  photo  photographer  artist  nyc  newyorker  history  war  currentsituation  comics  image  art  foreign  newspaper  uk 
july 2009 by petrichor
Daniel Handler | And Here's The Kicker
Dahl’s stories also never seemed to have a real tight arc, which I always appreciated. In James and the Giant Peach [Knopf, 1961], a huge peach grows in James’s yard. Inside the peach, he finds giant insects. His parents have died, and off he goes with these bugs on adventures. But there’s never a sense that James is learning something about himself. It’s just a pure, crazy journey.

The older I get, and the fewer tight arcs I’ve experienced in which I learned something about my life that enabled me to go forward, the more I appreciate these books.
[...]
There’s something about Dahl’s books that incorporates the fear and the sadness and the chaos that exists in life while also managing to be funny. He doesn’t make the world a funny place where only funny things happen. His tragedy is honest, and it doesn’t always have redeeming qualities about it.
book  interview  author  children  gorey  Mr.Show  books  literature  fiction  humor  comedy  brooklyn  joy  yawp  fantasy  genre  dahl  oz 
july 2009 by petrichor
Bookworm 4/11/96
And I don't think I really understood what loneliness was when I was a young man. And now I've got a much less clear idea of what the point of art is, but I think it's got something to do with loneliness and something to do with setting up a conversation between human beings.[...] I wanted to do something really sad. I'd done comedy before, I wanted to do just something really sad and I wanted to do something about what was sad about America. [...] I'm sort of proud of it in a way that I haven't been about earlier stuff is that I feel like whatever's hard in the book is in service of something that at least for me is good and important. [...] I think when you're very young and until you've sort of [clears throat] faced various darknesses, it's very difficult to understand how precious and rare the sort of thing that art can do is.

DFW: You're welcome to cut all this out if this just sounds like, you know, a Kraft product or something.
books  interview  literature  dfw  fiction  davidfosterwallace  ij  infinitejest  infinitesummer  infinite  jest  book  author 
july 2009 by petrichor
Largehearted Boy: Note Books - Mark Olson
There is a lonely train called “reading” in your youth. My mother had warned me against it; her brother had done it. While others ran wild in the woods, my Uncle sat there and read. Other horror stories followed about the effects of reading on him—Korea, detention, Iowa, to name a few—and I saw him a few more times before he died, and loved him, but was scared with him and for him ‘cause he was lonely. I punched my ticket for that train the day I read Desert Gem Trails by Mary Francis Strong. I wasn’t in my youth and Christmas will never be in June—I was near forty and about ready to lose everything I ever worked for.

At first, I didn’t go out into the desert alone—too big, too hot, too scary. I tried to drag other people out there with me. I had a van and I would saddle up to anyone with this book in my hand.
reading  music  jayhawks  largeheartedboy  essay  book  books 
july 2009 by petrichor
Covering Photography
Web-based archive of relationship between history of photography and book design.
photography  books  design  book  photo  reference  images  bookdesign  bookcovers 
july 2009 by petrichor
P.G. Wodehouse | Books | A.V. Club
When the soul is bruised, relief can sometimes be found in annoying a swan.
book  author  books  Wodehouse  Jeeves  Wooster  history  list  howto  reading  avclub 
july 2009 by petrichor
David Foster Wallace: R.I.P. | newsobserver.com blogs
Within their genres, each of his picks is a stand out.
Perhaps he's suggesting that even though we tend to define fiction, especially great fiction, in a specific way, it works, in fact, on different levels. Harris' "Red Dragon"and Clancy's "The Sum of All Fears" aren't trying to be "Hamlet"; Jong's "Fear of Flying" has different aims than "The Sound and the Fury" (except for the chief aim of engaging its readers).
book  books  literature  fiction  wallace  author  list  dfw  davidfosterwallace 
july 2009 by petrichor
Collecting books is awesome, part two: a Q&A with Vanessa Brown - The Afterword
On a recent trip to New York, I wished I had a Kindle for convenience. I'm a luddite usually, and it's just the electronic toy for me. It would be handy, and I'm attracted to all the free classic titles. But the Kindle only substitutes for a paperback. If it trims away the fat from book publishing, that's fine with me. People will still always want beautiful hardcovers and rare editions. The Kindle makes room for fine presses and encourages publishers to make books beautiful as objects unto themselves. No more of these crappy glued bindings, please! If the Kindle helps things move that way, I'm all for it. I kind've want one, so I can have all of Montgomery with me all the time. A good analogy is the way that music collectors still buy vinyl, and bands that aspire to making lasting contributions to music still issue vinyl for those collectors. No one worries that iPods will kill the collectible vinyl industry. It's the same thing with books.
book  kindle  books  e-book  publishing  canada  LucyMaudMontgomery  Maud  history  future  interview  collector 
july 2009 by petrichor
Typotheque: Microtypography, Designing the new Collins dictionaries by Mark Thomson
One of the guiding principles of the new design is economic: the new dictionary must run to the same number of pages as the old, even though there’s more content. So for every square millimetre of white space I wanted to add, the text design had to be that much more efficient. In fact the white space was already there in the previous edition, but it was trapped in places like excessive word spaces in lines of justified text, or extra space between definitions to allow for enlarged headwords.

The new design is ranged left, and therefore has consistent word spacing. This makes sense in a dictionary: with a fairly narrow measure and most entries being just a few lines, justified setting is prone to very large and irregular word spaces. Ranged-left type is more even and controllable in colour; equal word spacing in itself makes texts easier to read, and the voicing is more consistent.
dictionary  design  books  typeface  font  publishing  typography  Collins  typotheque  essay  history 
june 2009 by petrichor
Sealed Abstract » The joy of electronic books
You start doing random searches, and the results are scary. How many books reference the wood chuck chuck question? Let’s graph my books by publishing date. Can we use a bayesian network to classify my books by genre? Can we write a script to rip cover art from Amazon.com? The possibilities are endless.
books  howto  digital  DIY  ebook  reading  computer  book  iphone  OCR  scan  nerdpower  e-book 
june 2009 by petrichor
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