Library Blog Thoughts off the Top
via todayilearned.co.uk
Just a gentle reminder that the American Library is closed on December 24th and 25th as well as December 31 and January 1st.
Wishing everyone happy holidays! Hope that your new year will be filled with good cheer and great books!
via Real Simple
by Derwood Hunsdale-Talbot
I bring you the Wakefield Chandelier as inspiration. Perhaps you are a blacksmith on the side and need a new project. Or perhaps this will encourage you to go out and find a blacksmith and claim him (or her) as your own. Or perhaps you can reach into the depths of your DIY soul and create your own out of papier-maché and some clothes pins.
I fell in love with these bookshelf paintings (and their creator, Jane Mount, a little bit too) the second I saw them. Send her pictures of the spines of your favorite books, and she’ll create a one-of-a-kind painting featuring your ideal bookshelf. I can think of no better gift come Christmas (except for maybe the books themselves).
Like another person’s bookshelf more than your own? Ms. Mount sells prints of some of her finest works for a pretty penny less that the custom piece.
If you love the smell of 19th c. Dickens novels, but can’t afford a first-run copy, CB I Hate Perfum provides a solution. The purveyor of unique scents (including perfumes, room sprays, and pungent oils) has created In the Library, a “warm blend of English novel, Russian & Moroccan leather bindings, worn cloth, and a hint of wood polish.”
Postertext transforms the words on the page into the scenes in your head with their absolutely stunning black&white works. The team at Postertext transforms the entire body of work into a famous eye-catching and captivating scene.
It is hands down my favorite online campaign, even though it takes a good two minutes for the blasted site to load. Once it does, though, Save the Words has rounded up the endangered vocabulary that text messaging and emoticons have threatened with extinction. Browse the site for your favorite obscure utterance and adopt it, therefore promising “to use this word, in conversation and correspondence, as frequently as possible to the very best of [your] ability.”
It’s brilliant. It’s the perfect gift. And it’s free.
The downside to this great gift idea is that you need to make absolutely sure that the recipient really wants to have new wallpaper. And that his/her landlord is okay with it too. Note: pointing to a picture in a magazine and saying “that’s pretty neat” is not a green light for this project.
However, if the green lights are a go, a wall covered in beautiful book pages (old time-y dictionaries are the recommended vessel) is really, really pretty. Apartment Therapy makes the whole process sound easy. I’m not entirely sold, but those who wield their decoupage with dexterity: have at it.
It’s a game for those who enjoy the concept of olde fashioned family fun but clam up any time a Humdinger comes around their way. All you do in It Was a Dark and Stormy Night is identify the book or author based on a series of opening lines and trot your way around the board. A bunch of book categories (ranging from non-fiction to short stories to children’s books to contemporary fiction) makes it equally interesting and challenging.
Fun, simple, smart and just pretentious enough.
Sure they are a little bit cutesy, but what sort of reader isn’t also a tea drinker? I’m not 100% positive Novel Tea has the very finest English Breakfast tea on the market, but the packaging is nice and the concept, too, is nice: 25 teabags featuring classic quotes from the kind of books and authors you would expect to read while drinking tea. You’ve got your CS Lewis, your Louisa May Alcott, your Rita Mae Brown. Etc.
I feel like this would be the kind of thing you’d get your awkward book-wormish co-worker or your grandmother as a stocking stuffer.
I’m not sure how many men seek to own any scent inspired by Animal Farm‘s Napoleon, but in their defense Ah & Oh Studio did set out to exhibit “the dark sides of men’s nature with a line of scents named after famous writers” (sic).
I have a feeling I wouldn’t really like the man who loves loves loves this present, but I’m sure he is out there. So do it. Buy it. See what happens. The bottle is pretty swanky, after all.
Interested in writing a novel but aren’t sure where to start? November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and the writers at NaNoWriMo have some great ideas on how to get started on that book you’ve always dreamed of writing! Here is some information from the NaNoWriMo site:
National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.
Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.
Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.
Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.
As you spend November writing, you can draw comfort from the fact that, all around the world, other National Novel Writing Month participants are going through the same joys and sorrows of producing the Great Frantic Novel. Wrimos meet throughout the month to offer encouragement, commiseration, and—when the thing is done—the kind of raucous celebrations that tend to frighten animals and small children.
While you’re working on your novel, read NaNoWriMo pep talks from authors such as Tom Robbins, Sara Gruen, Peter Carey, Katherine Paterson, Piers Anthony, and Janet Fitch.
So, to recap:
What: Writing one 50,000-word novel from scratch in a month’s time.
Who: You! We can’t do this unless we have some other people trying it as well. Let’s write laughably awful yet lengthy prose together.
Why: The reasons are endless! To actively participate in one of our era’s most enchanting art forms! To write without having to obsess over quality. To be able to make obscure references to passages from our novels at parties. To be able to mock real novelists who dawdle on and on, taking far longer than 30 days to produce their work.
When: You can sign up anytime to add your name to the roster and browse the forums. Writing begins November 1. To be added to the official list of winners, you must reach the 50,000-word mark by November 30 at midnight. Once your novel has been verified by our web-based team of robotic word counters, the partying begins.
We hope to see a few Library members working on their novels in November! Let us know if you would like us to reserve a table for NaNoWriMo gatherings.
Have a listen to the American Jazz Trio playing at the Library Open House Sunday evening. Phil Crawford, Adrien Dearnell, and Oliver Griffith played a sublime set of standards in the refurbished reading room to wind up a great day of visits by new friends and old.
We’re thinking of making music a regular thing on Sunday evenings. Any enthusiasm out there? Let us know.
Sep 10th 2011 | from the print edition
TO SEE how profoundly the book business is changing, watch the shelves. Next month IKEA will introduce a new, deeper version of its ubiquitous “BILLY” bookcase. The flat-pack furniture giant is already promoting glass doors for its bookshelves. The firm reckons customers will increasingly use them for ornaments, tchotchkes and the odd coffee-table tome—anything, that is, except books that are actually read.
In the first five months of this year sales of consumer e-books in America overtook those from adult hardback books. Just a year earlier hardbacks had been worth more than three times as much as e-books, according to the Association of American Publishers. Amazon now sells more copies of e-books than paper books. The drift to digits will speed up as bookshops close. Borders, once a retail behemoth, is liquidating all of its American stores.
Electronic books
Having started rather late, books are swiftly following music and newspapers into the digital world. Publishers believe their journey will be different, and that they will not suffer the fate of those industries by going into slow decline. Publishers’ experience will, indeed, be different—but not necessarily better.
In some ways the transition from paper to digital distribution is a boon. E-books currently have high profit margins, and are free from many of the drawbacks of print. Peter Osnos, the founder of PublicAffairs Books, says the biggest challenge small publishers face is managing their inventories. Print too many books, and lots of them will be returned by stores. Print too few and publishers will forgo sales while they order reprints (at higher prices). None of these problems exists when distributing books digitally.
Bodice ripping
Romance novels and crime blockbusters have proved particularly popular on e-readers, perhaps because it is difficult to tell from across the aisle of a bus whether someone is reading a bodice-ripper or Dostoevsky on their Kindle. Donna Hayes, chief executive of Harlequin (which owns Mills & Boon), says digitisation has given new life to old books. Serialised romance novels generally have a shelf life of just four weeks. Now many are easily available: Harlequin has digitised more than 13,000 of its books. The firm has begun to publish some romances as e-books only, gauging customers’ appetite for them before taking some into print.
Yet these advantages are outweighed by several looming hazards. The first is piracy. Digital-book files are tiny—much smaller than a film, and not even as big as a music album. Book readers may be an unusually honest lot, but they are not above getting stuff for nothing. E-books routinely pop up on file-sharing websites like the Pirate Bay, both in their own right and as part of vast anthologies with names like “2,500 Retail Quality E-books”. The example of countries such as Spain suggests that media piracy can become entrenched even among the middle-aged. In Russia, e-book piracy is already rampant.
Piracy is a particular threat because of a second, bigger problem: the apparently arbitrary nature of e-book pricing. When Amazon began selling e-books, it charged $9.99 for many of them, often selling at a loss to fire Kindle sales. Gradually it became clear that Amazon was undermining the perceived value of all books, digital and paper alike. So, last year, the biggest publishers used the release of Apple’s iPad to push Amazon into “agency” pricing. Publishers now set their own prices and give about 30% of the sale to Amazon.
That has meant higher prices for many new e-books. As some prices rise, though, a tide of free and cheap product is flooding the market. Self-published novelists, keen for attention and without agents or publishers to share the proceeds with, often sell their works extremely cheaply. Meanwhile publishers have moved to offer introductory discounts on some books. As a result, Amazon’s list of 100 best-selling books has become a pricing free-for-all. This week 21 books were selling for just 99 cents. Others were priced at $4.98, $7.59 and $8.82. The most expensive single book, at $16.99, was Dick Cheney’s memoir. There is none of the clarity of iTunes in its early years, when the price of music tracks was fixed at 99 cents.
Publishers point out that books have always sold for a wide variety of different prices. Hardback books cost more than high-quality paperbacks, which cost more than small, mass-market paperbacks—and everything is more expensive than a dog-eared library book. But those books are physically different from each other. E-books all look the same. And the popularity of those 99-cent thrillers suggests readers are more price-sensitive, and less quality-sensitive, than publishers care to admit.
Another problem is Amazon’s market dominance. The firm accounts for less than a quarter of physical book sales (see box). But Amazon sells 60-70% of e-books in America and perhaps 90% in Britain, according to estimates by Enders Analysis, a British outfit. In America, Barnes & Noble’s Nook is the main competitor. Surprisingly, given the success of the iPad, Apple’s iBookstore has lagged. James McQuivey of Forrester Research found in a survey that only half of iPad owners read e-books—and two-thirds of them own or plan to buy an e-reader especially for the purpose. Amazon appears set to launch a tablet computer to take on the iPad. And Amazon is becoming a publisher in its own right. It has a romance imprint, and has signed big writers like Timothy Ferriss, author of “The 4-Hour Workweek”. This tightens its grip over the e-book market.
A book in the window
Perhaps the biggest problem, though, is the gradual disappearance of the shop window. Brian Murray, chief executive of HarperCollins, points out that a film may be released with more than $100m of marketing behind it. Music singles often receive radio promotion. Publishers, on the other hand, rely heavily on bookstores to bring new releases to customers’ attention and to steer them to books that they might not have considered buying. As stores close, the industry loses much more than a retail outlet. Publishers are increasingly trying to push books through online social networks. But Mr Murray says he hasn’t seen anything that replicates the experience of browsing a bookstore.
Efforts are under way. This week a British outfit called aNobii released a trial version of a website that it hopes will become a Wikipedia-style community of book lovers, with an option to buy. The idea has potential. Amazon’s recommendation engine, although helpful, is rather impersonal—perhaps the retailer’s second-biggest weakness, after the resentment publishers feel for it.
The book business has long been suffused with gloom; Mr Osnos says that booksellers have faced five or six supposedly fatal challenges during his career. But this time the challenges are really daunting. Publishers have to confront many of the problems that have afflicted other media industries that have gone digital, as well as a few entirely new ones. The next few years will be a thriller.
Il faut en profiter.
Looking back on my ten months in Paris and my two months working at the American Library, I have come to realize that this simple phrase, one of my favorite in French, has become a devise for my experiences abroad. A reason to explore one more world-renowned museum. An excuse to try one more beautifully crafted patisserie. Or a mantra for a certain way of life: a cultured, reflective, and appreciative understanding of all that Paris has to offer.
My year abroad has been one of the most challenging and stimulating of my life. Through classes at the Sorbonne, travels around Europe, and even the most mundane of days, I have learned more about French culture, and myself, than I had ever expected. When my academic year ended, I was able to stay and work at the American Library with the help of Smith College’s internship program. This opportunity has allowed me to experience a French work environment—an uncharacteristic and very dusty one at that, thanks to the current renovation works—and to single-handedly tackle a large Reference project for the CAPES/Agrégation exams. I have taken advantage of the vast collection, the first reading material in English I have had all year, and of the days spent with the supportive staff members, who have helped me with everything from finding the best places for lunch to brainstorming job opportunities for the future.
After I graduate from Smith, I plan on pursuing degrees in French Literature and Library Science and hope to relocate permanently to Paris, a wonderful city which I will miss dearly. I have ten bittersweet days left before I leave for Maine and plan to make the most of them sous le ciel de Paris, with a good book and a glass of wine. Après tout, il faut en profiter.
I DON’T READ FICTION BUT MY WIFE DOES. WOULD YOU SIGN THE BOOK TO HER? Siri Hustvedt and Celine Curiol discuss the strange cultural biases against fiction in general, and fiction written by women in particular. What do sex and gender mean in a literary form? It is true that all over the world women consume far more fiction than men. Why? What is at work here? More questions, some possible answers, several jokes, and a lively dialogue are guaranteed.
Siri Hustvedt is the author of Reading To You, a poetry collection, three collections of essays, Yonder, Mysteries Of The Rectangle: Essays On Painting and A Plea For Eros, and a non-fiction work, The Shaking Woman: A History of My Nerves. She has also written five highly acclaimed novels.
Céline Curiol has lived in New York, London and Buenos Aires. She is the author of three novels published in France by Actes Sud. Her first novel was translated into 15 languages, and in English was published by Faber & Faber as Voice Over.
On Tuesday 3 May at 7:30 pm at The American Library in Paris
Chris Boicos presents the two empresses of Paris with a lecture and slideshow.
The two Bonaparte emperors of France Napoleon I and his nephew Napoleon III had the fortune of marrying women whose intelligence, taste, charm and involvement in the culture and the arts would leave a deep mark on their respective historical periods.
Joséphine de Beauharnais, was born Marie-Josèphe-Rose de Tascher de La Pagerie, in 1763 in a plantation family in Martinique. She is one of the great survivors of a tumultuous age. In 1796 she married a rising general, 6 years her junior, Napoleon Bonaparte who in 1800 became the ruler of France. In 1804 she was crowned Empress in Notre Dame cathedral despite the resentment of the Bonaparte family and Napoleon’s mother Laetitia. In 1809 her inability to bare children for the new dynasty will lead to a humiliating divorce. She, however, will keep her famous country residence, Malmaison and an extravagant income. In our lecture we will focus on her story, that of her collections and her distinctive contribution to the style of the Napoleonic period.
Eugénie was considered one of the great beauties of her age. Her sentimental role model was the beautiful and tragic Marie Antoinette. The hooped skirts of the period with their wide crinolines made by her favorite couturier, Worth, as well as the interior decoration of the imperial palaces, the Tuileries or Compiegne, reflected the styles of the reign of Louis XVI.
She patronized artistic and literary luminaries like Merimée, Georges Sand or Flaubert, the architect Viollet-le-Duc and the painters Winterhalter, Rosa Bonheur, Dubuffe and Riesener.
Chris Boïcos, founder of Paris Art Studies, is a former art history professor at the University of Delaware and the University of Southern California in Paris.
On Wednesday 4 May at 7:30 pm at The American Library in Paris
We will hear “The Strange Case of the Two Mr. Porters.” Fiction writer Joe Ashby Porter’s books are the novels Eelgrass, Resident Aliens, and The Near Future, and the collections The Kentucky Stories, Lithuania: Short Stories, Touch Wood: Short Stories, and All Aboard: Stories. His Le future proche (transl. Bernard Hoepffner) was published in April by Joëlle Losfeld/Gallimard. His awards include two NEA Creative Writing Fellowships, and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters with the commendation, “No writer of his gifted generation has shown greater daring, or has earned higher praise.”
Shakespearean Joseph A. Porter’s books are Shakespeare’s Mercutio: His History and Drama, The Drama of Speech Acts: Shakespeare’s Lancastrian Tetralogy, and (edited) Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, as well as eight annual volumes of Renaissance Papers. He is a contributor, with an entry “Mercury” about Shakespeare’s (and his) favorite deity, to the new five-volume Shakespeare Encyclopedia (ed. Patricia Parker, Greenwood), and he is Editor-in-Chief of the New Variorum Othello in progress.
Professor of English and Theater Studies at Duke University, where they have taught since 1980, the two Mr. Porters are spending the 2010-11 academic year on sabbatical in Paris.
On Thursday May 5th at 7:00 pm at the Village Voice
An American novelist, journalist and editor, Vendela Vida is the author of three previous books; Girls on the Verge , And Now You Can Go and Let The Northern Lights Erase Your Name. She is also co-founder and co-editor of the literary magazine, The Believer , and collaborated with Dave Eggers on the screenplay of the 2009 Sam Mendes film, Away We Go .
Shakespeare expert and prize-winnng author Professor James Shapiro, will speak about his latest book Contested Will – who did write Shakespeare’s plays? And why does it matter so much to us? James Shapiro’s fascinating search for the source of this controversy retraces a path strewn with fabricated documents, calls for trials, false claimants, concealed identity, bald-faced deception and a failure to grasp what could not be imagined.
For two hundred years after Shakespeare’s death, no one thought to argue that somebody else had written his plays. Since then dozens of rival candidates – including Sir Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford – have been proposed as their true author.
Professor James Shapiro, who teaches at Columbia University in New York, is the author of Rival Playwrights, Shakespeare and the Jews, and Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World’s Most Famous Passion Play. 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare won the BBC FOUR Samuel Johnson Prize in 2006.
Libraries are more than books! Check out this great new exhibition at the French National Library at their François-Mitterrand site, from 29 March to 26 June. Details below.
Après Jan Fabre au Louvre et Jeff Koons à Versailles, la Bibliothèque nationale de France joue à son tour la carte contemporaine en accueillant dans ses murs Richard Prince. Artiste américain de réputation internationale, particulièrement célèbre pour ses photographies de cow-boys des campagnes publicitaires Marlboro ou pour sa série de toiles de « nurses », il est l’artiste qui raconte le mieux l’Amérique fin de siècle.
La Bibliothèque nationale de France accueille sa première exposition monographique à Paris et pour cet événement l’invite à s’approprier les collections historiques de la Bibliothèque, en champion de l’ « appropriation art » qu’il est.
L’exposition Richard Prince. American Prayer (en référence à la poésie de Jim Morrison) montrera un aspect inédit de l’artiste : un fervent bibliophile et collectionneur de la culture pop et des contre-cultures américaines des années 1950 à 1980, qui sont autant d’inspiration pour son oeuvre de photographe et de peintre. Sur fond de musique de Jimi Hendrix, de Jim Morrison, de Bob Dylan et du Velvet Underground, et avec la complicité du scénographe David Adjaye, Richard Prince nous fait voyager dans une Amérique qui se joue de ses mythes dans une succession de mises en scène beat, hippie et punk.
Avec le soutien de Champagne Louis Roederer, Louis Vuitton, Banque Neuflize OBC, la galerie Gagosian et la participation de Dietl International et Domeau & Pérès.
En partenariat avec Le Monde, Les Inrockuptibles, Le Nouvel Observateur, Beaux Arts Magazine, France Inter et Paris Première.
Art Spiegelman, a Swedish-born American, won the Grand Prix at France’s Angouleme world comic strip festival.
Spiegelman is best known as the creator of Maus, an animal fable of his Jewish father’s experience in the Holocaust — the only graphic novel to have won a Pulitzer Prize, the top US book award.
photo credit: Pieter van Hattem
If you’re interested in what a great book editor sounds like and thinks about in 2010, you could not do better than reading this long interview with Jonathan Galassi, the president and publisher of Farrar Straus Giroux and the leading editor of his generation. For thoughtfulness, realism, experience, humor, love of craft, and enthusiasm – and publishing success– he has few equals, and his interviewer, Jofie-Ferrari Adler for Poets & Writers, brings it all out over five screens.