“One Book, One Vancouver” has picked Karen X. Tulchinsky’s 2003 novel The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky (Raincoast Books) as this year’s selection in the city-wide book club.

More info here, at the One Book, One Vancouver website.

Click here to read Q&Q’s review of The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky.

According to Ben Kaplan of the National Post, the Canadian publishing industry is crazed with envy, obsessively checking up on their rivals’ deals and sales numbers:

Resentment among authors has been around since the first cocktail party lauded the first published word. But in the age of the internet and publicized book deals on Booknet Canada, Publishers Marketplace and the deals section of the Quill & Quire website, first-time novelists now have more tools at their disposal to keep track of opponents - and there’s a certain amount of bloodletting in the Canadian authorship game.
…

Publishers, agents and authors all want to keep tabs on their industry. And certain watershed deals - such as the twin fortunes earned by first-time novelists Anne Michaels and Ann-Marie MacDonald in the mid-’90s, Michael Turner’s deal with Doubleday for The Pornographer’s Poem in 1999 or the bidding war that broke out over Tish Cohen’s debut novel last year - attract the industry’s attention and scorn.

“We don’t only go online to check our sales, but also to check everyone else’s sales,” says Kim McArthur, president of McArthur & Co., a publisher and distributor that has seen 63 of its releases become Canadian best-sellers and 21 of them reach No. 1 in Canadian sales. McArthur believes envy is good for publishing, and that deal trackers and sales figures bring moxie to the biz. “Now you can be envious of someone and then go check their figures,” she says. “Really make yourself sick.”

It seems that we here at Q & Q are enablers. We’re sorry, everybody. We had no idea.

Slate has a fascinating, alluring, absorbing, beguiling, engrossing, enthralling, transfixing, and riveting essay about Peter Mark Roget and the thesaurus that bears his name:

Originally published in 1852, having been compiled over the course of more than four decades by the eponymous but strangely anonymous Peter Mark Roget, the thesaurus we know and love was not the first of its kind. Roget’s was the sixth or seventh in a line of, well, synonymous – but not identical – compendiums. Now, after a century-and-a-half career as a publishing juggernaut, the bound and beloved version is becoming a historical relic in the computer era.

Over the last few months, Q&Q has been collecting data for our upcoming industry salary survey, which will appear in our June issue. We’ve got a lot of facts and figures, but we’d also like to hear some more personal stories, which is where you, dear reader, come in.

If you work for a publisher, distributor, or wholesaler, and you’re willing to discuss the pros and cons of your job (relating to the work, the pay, the hours, the office conditions, or anything at all, really), please give our staff writer, Scott MacDonald, a call at 416-364-3333, ex. 3111.

Please note that we won’t print any names or identifying details without specific permission.

We’re not sure if this is 100% accurate, but the Fox Business website is claiming that a new book – The Book of ‘Bert’: High-Class Stars with Some High-Class ‘Stache – is the first book to boast its very own theme song.

The [book], published April 1 by Triad Publishing Group, has named Toronto-based rockers The Guys’ “Man with a Moustache” as its official theme song. The song was selected by author Jon Chattman, who heard the ditty and thought it meshed nicely with the book’s concept.

[…]

‘Bert’ is a romp through mustache history featuring 25 well-known personalities profiled and ranked on their mustache integrity. It includes lists in various categories boasting everything from best TV dads with mustaches to best mustachioed wrestlers, and a foreward by music legend John Oates.

“I’m pretty sure ‘Bert’ is the first book to come with a theme song, and that’s quite a groundbreaking achievement,” Chattman said. “I recall yearning for books I read in school to have a rocking theme song like ‘Eye of the Tiger’ or an obscurely enjoyable tune like Frasier’s ‘Tossed Salad and Scrambled Eggs’. The Guys’ tune is a song men can get behind, and women can dance to.”

If ‘Bert’ is indeed the first book to have its own theme song, it’s certainly not the first book to have musical accompaniment. Just last fall, Penguin Canada co-produced a full-length soundtrack to Will Ferguson’s Spanish Fly, composed by Calgary artist Tom Phillips and with lyrics by Ferguson himself. We’re guessing it wasn’t a chart topper…

Most people understand there is an occupational hazard implicit in knowing/meeting/befriending/being related to/marrying a fiction writer. There is always the risk of ending up a character in that writer’s work, and nine times out of ten, whatever the writer thinks of you personally, that fictional portrait will be distinctly unflattering.

In The Guardian, David Jenkins takes a look at literary self-recognition, having had it happen to him twice:

A friend has just published his first novel, The Paradise Trail. Like its author, it’s clever, charming and funny. It opens in a hippie hotel in Calcutta, in December 1971, where two freaks are writing a mock rock opera about the hippie trail, called Hepatitis! One, the protagonist, is handsome, witty, Scots, has recently resigned from an advertising agency and is soon to be entwined with a gorgeous photojournalist. The other is a balding, portly American called Larry.

Spool back 36 years, and there were Duncan Campbell (the author of the book, as well as a distinguished journalist on this paper) and I, lolling below the monkey temple in Kathmandu, writing a mock rock opera about the hippie trail called Hepatitis! (Then, any musical worth its salt had an exclamation mark in its title). Duncan was handsome, witty, Scots and had recently resigned from an advertising agency; I was less handsome, less witty and Welsh.

Balding! Portly! American! How could Duncan do it to me? The “American” I can just about take (it’s important for the plot), but the “balding”? Why, Duncan once told me I’d first attracted his attention in the Delhi dosshouse where we met because he thought I was a girl, so luxuriant was my hennaed hair.

I haven’t been so upset since another friend, Sam Llewellyn, gave my name to the lead character in his seafaring thriller, The Iron Hotel. According to the blurb, the book was “a powerful examination of one man’s attempt to impose some rightness on a world that’s wrong from bottom to top”. I rang him to comment on the nobility he’d conferred on my good name. “Yes,” he said, “I was taking the piss.”

Experimental French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet has been dead for only a few weeks, but it looks as if the touching eulogy phase is already over. Salon has just posted an essay by Canadian author Stephen Marche (Shining at the Bottom of the Sea) on Robbe-Grillet’s influence on the modern novel, and it’s clear that Marche wasn’t too sorry to see him go.

I should have felt grief at the news of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s death last week. Instead I recognized in myself only confusing relief. He was a great champion for the innovative novel, so in a way I owe him: I’m a novelist, and while I would be loath to call myself avant-garde, my first book did have marginalia all the way through and my second was a literary anthology of an invented country. But the truth is, Robbe-Grillet was a disaster for innovative novels. After him, literary innovation, experiment with form or anything mildly unconventional came to be seen as pretentious and dry, the proper domain of the cheese-eating surrender monkeys and nobody else.

[…]

English fiction in the wake of Robbe-Grillet has become a deliberately old-fashioned activity, like archery or churning your own butter. He represented, through his status as cultural icon of the avant-garde, an entire generation that turned literary experimentation into self-involved blandness. In the ’50s, writers like Nabokov could produce Pale Fire or Lolita and feel themselves part of the mainstream of literary culture. After the ’60s, after Robbe-Grillet, anyone who experimented in fiction was being consciously marginal, or at least countercultural.

This Quillblogger, for one, tends to agree with Marche’s overall sentiments, but he seems a little misguided in pinning everything on poor Robbe-Grillet, especially when he makes groaner statements like this:

The relief I felt when I heard about Robbe-Grillet’s death was also partly hope. Now we can go on, I was thinking.

The comments section following the piece is worth a read, too, if only for a number of strong counter-arguments.

New books are not particularly fragile. Everyone knows that. In fact, that’s one of the big reasons why paper-and-ink texts are still preferred by such a wide margin over breakable, expensive-to-replace e-books and e-readers.

So it’s a bit of a mystery why the vast majority of publishers choose to send out review copies and sample copies of books in bubble envelopes.

Here at Q&Q, we try, as much as we can, to re-use these envelopes, but there’s only so much we can do. Here’s a shot of just some of the envelopes that infest our offices:

We re-use them and give them away, but they just keep piling up. They’re like Tribbles. We’re certain the situation is the same, if not much worse, at other media outlets. The most likely result is that the majority of these envelopes – which are NOT recyclable – just end up in landfill.

And so we’re asking – pleading, really – that publishers switch to using strong paper or cardboard envelopes for review and sample copies. Most warehouses do this already. It’s the most sensible, economic, and eco-friendly thing to do.

David Leonard, the book campaigner for Markets Initiative, agrees. “Obviously, the biggest environmental footprint from the publishing industry comes from the paper that the books are printed on,” Leonard told Q&Q in an an e-mail, “but environmental action with integrity should incorporate all aspects of a company’s practices. A simple shift from non-recyclable bubble wrap envelopes to recycled and recyclable cardboard packaging is a fast and easy way for a publisher to reduce their footprint, and help reduce pressure on our forests.”

So please, if you won’t do it for your bottom line, or for the environment, do it for us. Trust us: the books won’t break.

From The Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Seattle police are looking for a man who attempted to mail to Paris a box full of books packed with handgun parts and ammunition.

An alert clerk at a Wallingford UPS Store was preparing to ship the plastic-wrapped books on Jan. 31 when she noticed that one of the hardbacks rattled, according to police reports. The woman shook the book and spotted a gun part slipping through the pages.

The clerk phoned police Monday, after attempting to contact the sender. Searching the books, officers found a disassembled Beretta handgun, three loaded magazines and two boxes of 9mm ammunition hidden in hollowed copies of Richard Tarnas’ Cosmos and Psyche, Isaac Asimov’s Chronology of the World, and a communications text.

In response to all the recent talk about the 21st-century being the Chinese century, The Guardian has put together a fascinating two-part piece about the Chinese publishing industry.

The Chinese literary world is like a parallel universe, almost invisible to many in the west, complete with big hitters (Su Tong and Jia Pingwa), innovators (Xi Chuan and Che Qianzi), and bestselling superstars (Han Han and Annie Baobei), some of whom are earning more than £1m a year.

The first piece looks at the parallel worlds of state- and private-owned publishing houses; the phenomenon of the shu cheng – massive bookstores that are like small book cities; the explosion of reading among young people; cell-phone lit; and a somewhat disturbing trend away from what we would call “literary fiction.”

This rush to the market has led to a “huge explosion” in genre fiction, according to [Beijing-based translator and journalist Eric ] Abrahamsen, with martial arts, sword and sorcery, romance and crime fiction very popular. “It’s sort of a release,” he says, “as if people are saying ‘finally we can sit down and read a romantic novel in the afternoon, rather than worrying’.” He is less optimistic about the prospects for literary fiction, suggesting that authors are “writing for a population that doesn’t want to think about their lives” and would rather just get on with making money. There is a small group of “very smart, very brave” writers trying to understand what’s happening to China in a period of change so rapid that “people are living differently now to how they were even six months ago”, but it is increasingly hard for them to find an audience for their work. “Almost nobody else is interested. The government’s implicit deal is ‘Don’t ask too many questions, just do your thing’,” he explains. “There are a lot of really disheartened writers who would like to put their heart and soul into writing, but who aren’t doing it because most people aren’t reading it.”

The second part of the series can be found here.

A couple of literary-themed birthdays are being reported in the media this week.

Reuters has picked up on Wonder Woman’s 66th birthday – not much of a milestone, admittedly, but 2007 is, incredibly, the first year that the comic is being penned by a woman, one Gail Simone.

In an interview, Simone explains how Wonder Woman weathered the shifting mores of the 20th century.

A: When she was originally created by William Moulton Marston, he definitely was for strong female characters. But he did have some what we would consider bizarre ideas.

Q: For example?

A: He really thought that the magic lasso was to beguile men and women into doing what she wanted them to do with her beauty. And that’s not a feminist ideal that we really adopt so much today. We like to talk more about character and intelligence and personality and things like that, rather than just beauty.

Simone has plans for the magic lasso, as well:

[What] I’m going to show is that the magic lasso is the most dangerous weapon in the DC universe. It’s more dangerous than any of the major weapons, it makes Wolverine’s claws look like popsicle sticks.

In other news related to iconic expressions of the American spirit, Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities turns 20 this year. In a New York Times piece, Anne Barnard explains what 1987 New York had over 1977 New York.

For much of this year, the lens of New Yorkers’ nostalgia has been trained on 1977, looking back 30 years to the blackout and looting, to the Son of Sam killings, to disco. But 1987, too, was a seminal moment for New York, then torn between new heights of wealth and decadence on Wall Street and the draining of jobs and taxpayers from the rest of the city.

Barnard paints contemporary New York in rose-coloured tones, though –

New York is on track to have fewer than 500 homicides this year, down from 2,245 in 1990. The white population is no longer shrinking, and diverse immigration has made the city less black-and-white.

The crime drops that marked the Giuliani era — along with some divisive police confrontations with minorities — have continued under a Bloomberg administration that civil rights leaders credit with bringing more interracial respect.

– and updates readers on some of the characters depicted in Bonfire:

“Twenty years later, the cynicism of ‘The Bonfire of the Vanities’ is as out of style as Tom Wolfe’s wardrobe,” proclaimed the Rev. Al Sharpton, whose counterpart in the book — Reverend Bacon — warns that he controls the burgeoning “steam” of black anger.

Another lawyer whose doppelgänger appears in the book is Edward W. Hayes. “Today, there’s not enough crime to become a criminal lawyer,” lamented Mr. Hayes, a longtime friend of Mr. Wolfe’s who was the model for the dapper, street-smart defense lawyer who takes up Sherman’s case. “Nobody goes around and sticks up supermarkets anymore, or armored cars.”

Reportedly, Wolfe’s new novel will be about immigration, but no pub date has been set.

The folks at Véhicule Press have posted a story from Wednesday’s Montreal Gazette on their web page, about a high-speed car chase that took place on the highway between Longueuil and Montreal and involved police and an Oldsmobile Cutlass. Though it’s not apparent from the story why Véhicule would want to post it, their reasons become clearer in the follow-up commentary:

While poet Asa Boxer was in Toronto on a Signal reading tour, his 1994 Oldsmobile Cutlass was being pursued by police across the Champlain Bridge. It did not end well, and our hearts go out to Asa, who as of today will be using public transportation.

Apparently, some dude stole Boxer’s car, and the chase ended after the thief collided with an SQ Cruiser. The perp was arrested and charged for fleeing police and car theft.

All we could think after hearing this was: poets can afford cars?

Bethany Keeley, a doctoral student at the University of Georgia, has spent the last few years becoming a bit of an expert on wayward quotation marks. Her excellent website, The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks, features snapshots – taken by her or by one of her many correspondents – of the most flagrant public misuses. Today’s posting, for instance, features a notice from an office worker asking coworkers to put “dirty” dishes in the dishwasher, and telling them that the dishwasher will be “turned on” at 5 p.m.

Other highlights: a restaurant advertising a “hot ham” sandwich; a country fair promoting “fresh” cashews; and a sign welcoming “President” Bush to town.

The U.S. publisher Thomas Nelson will be publishing the world’s first eco-friendly Bible later this month, according to The Book Standard.

The Charles F. Stanley Life Principles Daily Bible will be certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and production will flow from a FSC-certified forest through a paper manufacturer and printer that have FSC chain-of-custody certification. “Our team is excited to be taking some important steps forward in protecting the resources God has given us,” said Michael S. Hyatt, president and CEO of Thomas Nelson.

The story goes on to point out that the Bible is the most widely circulated book on the planet, which is true, of course, but it’s not like this is the only version of it floating around. We’re not sure who this Charles F. Stanley dude is, but he probably doesn’t have as deep market penetration as, say, King James. Still, it’s a good start.

The Guardian’s weekend edition features an opinion piece by writer and filmmaker Martin Wagner, who is obviously still stinging from the rejection letters he received from agents as a young novelist. The crux of the piece is his argument that in the relationship between writers, agents, and publishers, it is the writer – the “lifeblood”of the industry – who most consistently gets screwed.

The piece also serves as a platform for Wagner to promote his play The Agent, which satirizes the industry and is currently being adapted into a feature film. However, given his evident distaste for agents – whom he describes as “vultures” – his suggestion for improving the situation is a little surprising.

Maybe one of the problems is that agents simply don’t get paid enough? While a 15 per cent commission is plenty if you’re representing a J.K. Rowling, what about 15 per cent of an author who could reasonably call himself a success if he got an advance of £2,000 for his first novel – a mere £300 for his agent?

Which raises the question of what a “reasonably” successful author is supposed to do with a (less than) £1,700 advance per novel – but we’ll put that aside for now. In the meantime, Quillblog welcomes any other suggestions to improve author-agent relations.

Remember Glenn Danzig, the perpetually shirtless goth rocker from the Misfits? Remember how your semi-goth girlfriends in high school had pictures of him in their lockers and insisted that he was not only hunky, but deep, too? Well, it seems they were right and you were wrong.

Just take a look at this old video that has popped up on YouTube, in which Danzig sits down in front of his bookshelf and talks up some of his favorite titles, most of which involve werewolves, nazis, or other apparitions of evil. And though the guy’s enthusiasms are morbid, it’s clear he’s just a big ol’ softy at heart. Look at the smile that lights up his face at the end. So cute!

Thanks to The New York Times‘ Papercuts blog for drawing the video to our attention.

We all know that fashion is both cyclical and cannibalistic, so it’s only a matter of time before the nineties became the hot “retro” decade. While hipsters are still semi-ironically digging the clothes and music of the eighties, at least one grunge-era fad has resurfaced: Austenmania.

Remember when Pride and Prejudice was a book club champion? Remember when every other hit movie was a tart-yet-frothy romantic comedy? It’s all back.

Witness:

National Post:

Jane Austen lived and wrote 200 years ago, but readers continue to delight in her six novels — and creative types keep basing movies, TV productions and spinoff novels on her books to feed an audience hungry for more.

The Sydney Morning Herald:

Girls, lace up your bodices and brush up on your swooning techniques because a glut of Jane Austen movies and TV productions is coming as Regency mania sweeps the state.

Austen fans are flocking to Pride And Prejudice-themed balls and 18th-century dance classes as interest in the author and her era soars.

Eight versions of Austen’s life and works have been released or are hitting big and small screens in Australia, including Becoming Jane, starring Anne Hathaway as the young writer. There is also a version of Mansfield Park, starring former Dr Who sidekick Billie Piper.

BBC News:

The number of people visiting a stately home in Berkshire has increased since the property was used for the filming of Pride and Prejudice, figures show.

A report by film and tourism bodies found coach tours at Basildon Park went up by 76% after it featured in the 2005 adaptation of the Jane Austen novel.

• You know that mysterious figure who visited Edgar Allan Poe’s grave every year? Nevermore. And it turns out it was all a publicity stunt cooked up by the guy “who led the fight to preserve the historic site.” Yup, we feel dirty too. (Associated Press via The Globe and Mail)
• ECW’s 800-page book about relatively obscure folk singer Steve Goodman is profiled. (The Seattle Times)
• Now that the O.J. Simpson book is going ahead, the victims’ families are fighting it out. (Forbes)
• Stephen King walks into an Australian bookstore …. (Yeah, it does sound like a joke. Punchline at the link.) (BBC News)

Poor Samuel Johnson. He’s been dead for centuries, but it seems that someone’s still got a grudge against him. According to the CBC Arts website, a male suspect was detained yesterday by police in London’s National Portrait Gallery for attacking a painting of Johnson with a hammer.

Its glass was smashed and the hammer became embedded in the canvas. […] The oil painting by Joshua Reynolds of the famous 18th-century literary figure, author of an early definitive dictionary of the English language, is valued at £1.7 million ($3.6 million Cdn).

According to a gallery rep, the portrait can and will be repaired. Unfortunately, the rep could not shed light on why Johnson was singled out. Maybe the guy just didn’t like Johnson’s wig?

A murder trial currently under way in Poland suggests that there is definitely such a thing as too much author research. The defendant, according to an article in The Guardian, is 33-year-old writer Krystian Bala, and police say his popular novel Amok mirrors the facts of a real-life killing much too closely to be coincidence.

In Amok, Bala describes how the man was tied up in a similar fashion to [the victim] Dariusz J, with his hands bound behind his back and round his wrists and neck. The murdered man, the owner of a small advertising agency, had also been tortured.

Bala has vigorously denied having inside knowledge of the killing. He says he was simply an avid reader of the press reports and that he has been framed to cover up for what he described as a “bungled” police investigation.

It sounded like a tenuous accusation to us at first, but then the Guardian piece goes on to mention that the victim was a close friend of Bala’s ex-wife, and that, four days after the murder, Bala sold the victim’s mobile phone over the internet. Creepy.

Some book-related links:

• Norma Gabler, the Texas textbook nitpicker who spent most of her life seeking out factual errors and “left-wing bias” in schoolbooks, is dead at 84. (Los Angeles Times)
• Kerouac’s On the Road – uncut and republished. (The Independent)
• Russia goes big on book advertising. (Moscow Times)
• Norman Mailer: Mr. Television. (Slate)
• The book every soldier in Iraq should read. (Harper’s)

Residents of Seattle’s Mercer Island will be the first targets for a new pilot project by Amazon.com called Amazon Fresh. According to an article on seattlepi.com, Amazon Fresh is a new home grocery delivery service, similar to that offered by companies like Grocery Gateway.

“It’s just starting out, and it’s very small. We are in the early-stage beta test, and it’s a better way to serve our grocery customers,” said Craig Berman, an Amazon.com spokesman. “We are offering a great selection and great prices at a really convenient experience.”

Berman said Amazon Fresh would offer items found in a local grocery store, including organic and non-organic fruits and vegetables, dairy products, ice cream, meat, fish, health and personal care items, cereal, chips and soda.

The program lets customers order online and then have the products delivered the next day during a one-hour time slot of their choosing.

We know that Amazon has been dealing in non-book goods for a long time now, but there’s something about this new venture – and the way  Amazon seems to see books and heads of lettuce as basically interchangeable – that makes us want to crawl back into bed.

(Incidentally, the seattlepi piece goes on to note that, for the moment, books will not be included among grocery items. But if there has to be an Amazon home grocery service, wouldn’t it be better if books were included?)

In the latest issue of the London Review of Books, editor Daniel Soar introduces the world to an excellent judo manual. It has descriptions of all of the basic judo moves, clear drawings, and explanations of various strategies. And, oh yeah, it’s co-written by Vladimir Putin.

Putin provides a striking metaphor to demonstrate the judo master’s technique. He calls it ‘give way in order to conquer’. Imagine you are a locked door. Your opponent wants to break you open with his shoulder. If he is ‘big and strong enough and rams through the door (that is, you) from a running start, he will achieve his aim’. But here’s the neat bit. If instead of ‘digging in your heels and resisting your opponent’s onslaught’, you unlock it at the last minute, then, ‘not meeting any resistance and unable to stop, your opponent bursts through the wide-open door, losing balance and falling.’ If you’re even more cunning, you can stop being a door and stick out a leg, causing him to trip as he sails through. ‘Minimum effort, maximum effect’, as Russia’s effortlessly effective president says.

The article goes on to apply Putin’s judo strategies to his actions at the recent G8 summit, and finds striking similarities. Soar is also disturbed by Putin’s intimate knowledge of how to inflict pain, including detailed instructions for executing a manoeuvre called the “hand squeeze”: “seize your opponent’s hand and press between the central finger-bones with the pad of your thumb. If you press hard enough, you will cause him to ‘fall on his back from the severe pain in his wrist.’ Gentle pressure applied along these lines by Putin might explain the pained grimace Blair wears whenever the two shake hands.”

In yesterday’s Montreal Gazette, columnist Monique Polak discussed the dilemmas faced by self-help writers with beautifully appropriate given or married names. What do you do when your real name is so good, it sounds fake? What if your advice isn’t as good as your handle? And how many times can people make the same jokes about your name?

Polak talked to authors Pat Love, Susan Wisdom, Brad Smart, Lisa Collier Cool, and Rhonda Findling, who all swear those are their real names. Their books, respectively, tell people how to reach “love beyond words,” have successful stepfamilies, be smart parents, love and leave “bad boys,” and find the right man.

Unfortunately for Cool, she flubs a key question (in Quillblog’s opinion) and undercuts the power of her name.

But is [Cool] cool – as in someone who knows what’s in? Cool pauses to consider this question. “Well,” she said, “I never miss American Idol.”

Quillblog is mildly disappointed that Polak didn’t talk to our favourite self-help author, Shmuley Boteach. The rabbi is the author of several advisory books – including Shalom in the Home, which (according to BookNet Canada data) was one of the bestselling family and relationships titles in Canada in mid-May – and the host of a show of the same name on TLC. Look, his name has “teach” in it! And Shmuley! You can’t beat Shmuley.

The Grolier Club in New York is currently hosting an exhibition of miniature books. The collection of teeny tiny tomes numbers in the hundreds, with three inches being the top trim size. Included in the collection are, according to the Grolier’s website:

• A 40-volume set of Shakespeare’s works, two inches high and easily readable.
• John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address in miniature.
• The first book on contraception, originally published as a miniature, and responsible for a 19th century decline in the British birthrate.
• The Emancipation Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln, first printed in book form as a miniature.
• A minature book that flew to the moon and returned.
• A book from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s substantial miniature book collection.
• The world’s two smallest books, each less than one millimeter tall.

Wow, a miniature book that flew to the moon and returned – that is impressive. And why would they print the first book on contraception in miniature form? To fit in a wallet?

A Guardian commentary column reports that McDonald’s is picking a fight with the dictionary. The fast-food chain doesn’t like the Oxford English Dictionary definition of “McJob,” which, in the Canadian version, is: “a low paying, low status, and usually unstimulating job with few benefits and little possibility of advancement.” The BBC credits Douglas Coupland with coining the term in 1991’s Generation X.

According to McDonald’s, however, its jobs are only awesome, so the chain wants the word eliminated. Last year, the Golden Arches launched a publicity campaign in the U.K. to redefine McJob and “set the record straight,” said an April 21, 2006, press release. Posters were splashed around that declared, “McProspects – over half our Executive Team started in our restaurants. Not bad for a McJob,” and “McOpportunity – two pay reviews in your first year. Not bad for a McJob.”

But, strangely enough, those clever taglines don’t seem to have been persuasive. And so the chain has locked its sights on the OED. You can sign a petition here to “change the current definition of McJob to better reflect the reality of service sector jobs.” Go now, to beat the rush!

Bill Watterson, the creator of the beloved comic strip Calvin & Hobbes, has become a cultural hero to a lot of us over the years, not just for his great work, but for his steadfast refusal to sell out by licensing his characters to merchandisers. In the years since the strip ended, there have been no stuffed animals, no greeting cards, no McDonald’s tie-ins, no nothing. (Except for a few bootleg t-shirts and decals.)

There also has not been an animated cartoon version, although rumours persist that Watterson has been working on one all by his lonesome in his Ohio home. In the meantime, however, a young Italian animator has risked litigation by creating his own Calvin & Hobbes short, which has now been posted on YouTube.

Though it’s in Italian (with English subtitles), it’s completely faithful to the style and tone of the strip, and it’s pretty darn cute, actually. (Though Calvin’s voice is too high, if you ask us.) Here’s hoping that Watterson will see it as a nice homage and let it remain in cyberspace. But just in case he gets cranky, you’d better take a look at it now while it’s still there…

(Thanks to the Cartoon Brew website for the link.)

Our undying thanks to the Friends of Q&Q who managed to smuggle a small carton of the new Stephen Colbert ice cream all the way from Rochester, New York, to our downtown Toronto HQ. Ice cream + fudge-covered waffles + caramel = the sweet taste of liberty. Seriously, people, it’s insanely good – and you can’t get it here in Canada, because (according to an apparent Ben & Jerry’s statement posted on this website):

Sadly at this time we do not have plans to introduce Stephen Colbert’s AmeriCone Dream outside of the United States. The Canadian market gets far fewer Ben & Jerry’s options based upon production capabilities for Ben & Jerry’s in Canada (most of the Canadian product is made in Ontario) including issues like packaging redesign, labeling laws etc., and importation quotas on ice cream. All these complex pieces are part of our international marketing strategy.

Now, we at Q&Q don’t like to throw the word “boycott” around, but, well, we’ve heard that money talks.

(Or you could sign this petition.)

Oh, and, um, yes, there is a book connection. Stephen Colbert’s I Am America (And So Can You!) will be published this fall by Grand Central Publishing, distributed here in Canada by H.B. Fenn and Company.

The Writers’ Union of Canada is organizing a rally in Ottawa later this month to protest the lack of federal arts funding. From the TWUC press release:

In conjunction with other arts groups, The Writers’ Union of Canada is holding an Awakening in Ottawa, on April 16, to open the eyes of the Harper government to the cultural and economic contribution the arts make to Canada.

In other news, the Canada Council has just about figured out how it’s going to divide its recent $50-million funding infusion. From the Council’s update to grant applicants:

In order to provide sufficient time for all applicants to receive their letters, the Council will delay the public announcement of the results of the competition until Monday, April 16 and post a list of successful grant recipients, with the amount of each grant, on the Canada Council web site.

As frequent readers of Quillblog can attest, reading is sexy. Now we can share the message through clothing and accessories.

The website buyolympia is selling T-shirts, buttons, bags, and bumper stickers with the slogan “reading is sexy,” accompanied by a picture of a girl peering over the edge of her oval glasses. Available in styles for him or her, the shirts come in various colours.

In an article in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik reflects on his cooking experiences with recipes taken from the pages of novels. “Cooking is to our literature what sex was to the writing of the sixties and seventies, the thing worth stopping the story for to share, so to speak, with the reader,” he writes.

Gopnik connects the manner of cooking to the style and meaning of the writing. Quillblog especially enjoyed his thoughts on shell beans as cooked by Robert B. Parker’s main character, Spenser, in School Days:

The beans alone establish Spenser’s credibility as a cook. “I shelled the beans from their long, red-and-cream pods and dropped them in boiling water and turned down the heat and let them simmer,” he tells us. A devotion to shell beans, I have noticed, divides even amateur cooks from non-cooks more absolutely than any other food, and they are, into the bargain, a perfect model of writing. Like sentences, shell beans are a great deal more trouble to produce than anyone who isn’t producing them knows. You have to shell the beans, slipping open the pods with your thumbnail and then tugging the beautiful little prismatic buttons from their moorings—a process that, like writing, always takes much longer than you think it will. And then even the best shell beans, cleaned and simmered, are like sentences in that nobody actually appreciates them as much as they deserve to be appreciated.

Gopnik goes on to discuss cooking scenes as opportunities for reflection for the characters, and expresses his doubt that deep thought is possible, either for the characters or ourselves, while making some of the more complicated dishes such as bouillabaisse in Ian McEwan’s Saturday.

In one of the week’s stranger stories, a lost William Carlos Williams poem has been donated to Southwest Missouri State University. Entitled “About a Little Girl,” it was written for a teenager whom Williams – a doctor as well as a poet – had diagnosed as having leukemia and being close to death.

The twist? The girl in question, Marion Macy, lived until the ripe old age of 91 before dying in 2002. Says the story on the CBC Arts site: “Macy married a man called Lund and had two sons, who grew up with that poem, yellowing around the edges and signed with the initials WCW, on the wall of their home.” One of her sons has  donated the poem to the university.

The gossip website Gawker has called Dave Eggers to task for a notice that was recently sent to lifetime subscribers of his quarterly McSweeney’s magazine. It seems that, after only a few years of publication, Eggers is already trying to get those subscribers – who kindly paid a one-time-only $100 subscription fee to the magazine in its early days in order to help with start-up costs – to voluntarily transition to a normal yearly subscription. The notice reads, in part:

We know that many years ago, you lifetimers gave us $100 for an everlasting subscription and helped us through our infancy. We can’t tell you how much we appreciated that. Now that we’ve somehow kept this thing going for twenty-two issues, we thought that we’d check in with you and see if we could maybe, you know, move on.

Assuming that all those lifetime subscribers didn’t already, you know, move on from the ickily twee McSweeney’s long ago, this could become an interesting test of reader loyalty. To what extent are people willing to underwrite the publication of their favorite periodicals? And how many people would pay for something they love when they can get it for free?

In a post for Entertainment Weekly’s website, books editor Tina Jordan discusses the generally poor quality of unofficial literary sequels, a topic that Quillblog has discussed as well (click here for the link). But what caught our attention was Jordan’s mention of her copy of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. Jordan, who calls the book a staple of her “southern girlhood,” has a 1939 hardcover edition that was once owned by her grandmother.

Keeping a “battered” copy of a well-loved book for sentimental reasons helps to create a reading heritage. These books become stories within stories when the original owners pass down a love of books and their libraries. Quillblog has a copy of the novel Touch Not the Cat by Mary Stewart, where her name was taken from, and the copy of King Lear that her mother read in high school, complete with handwritten notes in the margins (very handy when writing an essay).

Does anyone else have a book previously owned by a friend or family member that has a place of honour on your shelves? What books have you recently bought that you would pass down to others?

Want to have a little fun with theory? A website run by David Gauntlett, a professor at the University of Westminster, introduces theories and theorists in a more approachable manner via trading cards. Students and coffee shop debaters may gather round and exchange the ideas and cards of theorists such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Edward Said, and Deleuze & Guattari.

The cards include a photo, a brief description of the theorist’s work, and a list of strengths, weaknesses, and special skills. Gauntlett also developed a card game where players defend their theorist, collecting the weaker theorist cards to win. An official set of 21 cards is available for purchase while the unofficial collection may be printed from the website. Neither set includes gum.

Journalist and CityNews ombudsman Peter Silverman recently posted a comment on this Quillblog post from last year that we thought we should highlight:

I am a journalist in the process of doing a television story on the banning of Three Wishes by the Toronto School Board. I have read this book and would like to receive comments from children between the fourth and sixth grades concerning their opinions.With parental consent, I would like to interview these children for CITYTV as I am doing a documentary on this issue. I can be reached at peters@citytv.com
Thanks. Peter Silverman, OMBUDSMAN, CITYNEWS

(For those who don’t know, Silverman is a kind of consumer advocate who made headlines earlier this year when he was attacked by a shady Toronto optician who’d allegedly been threatening his customers and selling cheap knockoffs of name-brand frames. As you can see from the video here and here, Silverman more than holds his own.)

This week’s Friday photo is from Flickr photographer Nesha. To find out what it’s a picture of, you’re gonna have to click on the photo itself. (Or go here.)

Every Friday, Quillblog highlights a recent photo from our new Quill & Quire Flickr Pool. Have you recently attended a book reading, library event, or author appearance? If you’ve got photos of the Canadian book scene, we’d love to see them. Sign up through Flickr and submit your images.

In a column on Popmatters.com, Mikita Brottman takes a close look at The Garfunkel Library, “a chronological listing of every book [singer Art Garfunkel] has read over the last 38 years – almost a thousand of them – including the month and year of reading, the date of first publication, and the number of pages they contain.”

As if the very existence of such a listing weren’t odd enough, Brottman discovers some further oddities:

Most revealing, however, aren’t the books that are listed, but those that aren’t. According to the site’s author, “We are pleased to present a listing of every book Art has read over the last 30 years.” That’s right, every book, do you hear? This means that, although he’s a poet himself, Garfunkel has only ever read four or five volumes of poetry—one of which, read in October 1989, was his own (Still Water—Prose Poems by Art Garfunkel). It means that when his wife, Kim, was pregnant in 1990, he read nothing in preparation; no What to Expect when You’re Expecting, no Official Lamaze Guide.It means that, when he walked across America in 1984, and later on across Europe, he did so without the aid of travel books. It means he read nothing he could share with his son, born in 1991 (unless you count Louise Ames’s Your Five-Year Old in 1996.) It means he read no books about healing and forgiveness in the build-up to his much-vaunted re-union with Paul Simon (unless that explains Deborah Tannen’s You Just Don’t Understand, in August 1996). Most recently, in January 2006, Art and his wife had a second son, born to a surrogate mother. You’d think he could have found something more pertinent to read in preparation for this emotion-laden event than Henri Pirenne’s Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe.

Though the list appears to be legit – it appears on Garfunkel’s own website, for one thing – we still can’t seem to get the phrase “elaborate prank” out of our heads.

This week’s Friday photo comes courtesy of Flickr photographer Oliver, who took this shot of burnt books from Afghanistan while on a recent trip to Ottawa. The books are part of a new exhibit at the Canadian War Museum entitled Afghanistan: A Glimpse of War.

Every Friday, Quillblog highlights a recent photo from our new Quill & Quire Flickr Pool. Have you recently attended a book reading, library event, or author appearance? If you’ve got photos of the Canadian book scene, we’d love to see them. Sign up through Flickr and submit your images.

Author Kenneth J. Harvey is known for sending out regular e-mail updates about his career to an ever-growing list of people. (In fact, he’s written about it for Q&Q.) But after years of building up his address book, Harvey’s now realized that it has other uses besides alerting the world to, say, a new Swedish rights sale for The Town That Forgot How to Breathe. This morning in Quillblog’s inbox, there was a message from Harvey looking for leads on how to get tickets to an Arcade Fire concert. Seems the red-hot band’s May 16 show at Massey Hall in Toronto sold out in minutes, and Harvey wants to make his son’s 20th birthday – which falls on the same date – a memorable one. If you want to help him out, you can e-mail him here. Oh, and someone should show him this.