Books reborn!

Nicholas Jones is an artist and “book sculptor” working in Melbourne, Australia. According to the personal testimonial on his website, Jones claims his art is an extension of the book’s life cycle, from wood pulp to paper to books, then elevated to some sort of higher plane and then to dust.

From the website:

Books are capsules; vessels designed to hold information, borne of investigation or of personal expression. These objects are often venerated, held aloft as are amulets, as the source of reasoned knowledge, the fecund field awaiting the harvest. Sequestered away in dusty libraries, spines anticipating the eye of the beholder, these books’ tactility remain at arms length. The physical act of folding, tearing and sewing book leaves, may be considered iconoclastic (extinguishing the fire of reason, perhaps). Although sometimes iconised for their content or historical importance, more often than not, books are discarded as cultural detritus. These transformed books aim to highlight the poetic nature of the book as form. As historical phenomena, books have reflected the evolution of mankind, and although beseiged by new technologies, the book remains steadfastly both the solver of the riddle and the creator of the labyrinth.

Earnest artistic credo aside, Jones’s books are quite beautiful. See MacBeth folded, Intermediate English dissected, and works in progress. See his new boots as well…

A new home for short stories

Toronto-based authors Emily Schultz and Brian Joseph Davis have come together and launched a new website for short fiction, called Joyland. In a mass e-mail sent to Q&Q, they explain the impetus for the site:

Current literary publishing wisdom has it that the short story is dead. We think otherwise. We think the form is at its stylistic peak. It’s just that the traditional venues for short stories – commercial print magazines – have changed dramatically and jettisoned the once prominent short story.

Joyland is dedicated to finding a new way to publish short fiction, and rather than just start a web magazine we’ve wedded a strict mandate (only short fiction) to some principles of social networking sites.

The message goes on to list the initial contributors, and it looks like a pretty respectable line-up: Canadian authors Lynn Coady and Nathan Sellyn, and U.S. authors Ed Park and Harold Abramowitz. (Another aim of the site, apparently, is to get readers from both sides of the border reading authors they may never have encountered before.) They’ve also got an international assortment of contributing editors, including Schultz herself, Vancouver author Kevin Chong, and U.S. authors Janine Armin (New York) and Matthew Timmons (Los Angeles).

You can check it out for yourself here.

Finders keepers

Leave it to Abebooks.com to hit on a particular quirk of the used-book market: finding old items hidden within the pages of secondhand books. In an amusing feature on their site, Abebooks asked their booksellers to tell them about their most interesting finds, which include, among others:

• a baby’s tooth
• a diamond ring
• a Mickey Mantle rookie baseball card
• a Christmas card signed by L. Frank Baum
• forty $1,000 bills hidden inside an old cookbook

And that’s not all:

Aside from all the letters, torn out newspaper articles, shopping lists, business cards, and postcards (sent and unsent), other objects discovered by AbeBooks.com booksellers include a World War II U.S. ration book (with stamps remaining), World War II discharge papers, a pair of scissors, a valid driver’s license, a marriage certificate from 1879, a holographic image of a lady who sheds her clothing, theater playbills, a condom (unused), a cockroach (dead), and a strip of bacon.

One Book, One Vancouver picks Tulchinsky novel

“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.

Coveting thy neighbour’s sales

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.

The life and death of the thesaurus

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.

Q&Q wants to hear from you

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.

Books in stereo

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…

Is that me in your book?

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.”

Stephen Marche on Robbe-Grillet

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.