QUILLBLOG

New York Times launches book blog

Paper Cuts, Dwight Garner’s new blog about books for The New York Times website, is off to a good start. In addition to commenting on current happenings and issues in the publishing world, Garner is planning some interesting features such as a weekly playlist of songs from a writer or someone bookish. “Why? Because books and music, on good days, just seem to go together. And because the ‘celebrity playlists’ on iTunes never get around to asking writers to pitch in.”

And with access to the Times’ archives, Garner promises to “occasionally rummage around in the history of book advertisements in this newspaper, tracing them from the middle of the 19th century through today.” If that seems very retro and printy for a blog, Quillblog recommends the first slide show for an interesting view of how publishers were promoting writers such as Toni Morrison, Ken Kesey, Susan Sontag, Calvin Trillin, Joan Didion, and Cormac McCarthy in the 1960s and ’70s.

An ad for Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, with an extensive quote from Times critic John Leonard, stands up remarkably well 37 years later. But other ads are more tellingly of their time, such as this 1965 blurb from Bruce Jay Friedman for the novel August Is a Wicked Month by Irish author Edna O’Brien: “I don’t know when, in recent years, I’ve read a better book by a lady novelist.” The ad is complete with a sultry close-up of O’Brien smoking. We’ve come a long way, baby. Or have we?

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