Harvard University Press Blog

The Essence of the Literary Experience?

Earlier this month, The New York Review of Books Blog featured a piece from Tim Parks called “E-books Can’t Burn,” which has since been much tweeted, facebooked, and otherwise shared. It’s a solid, considered defense of the e-book, one that rehearses all of the practical advantages of digital reading (portability, one-handed reading, resizable type, etc), and kindly but firmly dismisses the materiality that people are reluctant to leave behind (the feel of paper, the scribbling of marginalia, the books on our shelves). In his repudiation of the notion that there’s much lost with the transition to e-books, Parks writes directly against those “literary men and women” who are most loathe to see such change.

He notes that e-books are one more stage in the evolution of the material experience of reading:

Weren’t there perhaps specific pleasures when reading on parchment scroll that we know nothing of and have lived happily without? Certainly there were those who lamented the loss of calligraphy when the printing press made type impersonal. There were some who believed that serious readers would always prefer serious books to be copied by hand.

More than just a defense, though, Parks actually argues for the superiority of the experience of literary reading done digitally:

The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience. Certainly it offers a more austere, direct engagement with the words appearing before us and disappearing behind us than the traditional paper book offers, giving no fetishistic gratification as we cover our walls with famous names. It is as if one had been freed from everything extraneous and distracting surrounding the text to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves. In this sense the passage from paper to e-book is not unlike the moment when we passed from illustrated children’s books to the adult version of the page that is only text. This is a medium for grown-ups.

Fetish-free direct engagement with the essence of the literary experience certainly sounds like a great thing. But this nearly-utopian vision overlooks quite a bit of the actual experience of e-reading. The very advantages provided by the e-book surely undercut its ability to fuse us directly with the text: We can read e-books with one hand while the other clutches a strap on a crowded, racing train; We can read e-books on our phones, with calls and text messages breaking in at their whimsy; We can read them on our tablets, where the internet just dares us to call it extraneous; We can read them on our Kindles, with advertisements and crowd-sourced annotations.

We’ll leave aside all the very real concerns about what happens to the quality of the literary experience when we’re all trained to expect books for $9.99 or less, and won’t do much beyond chuckle at the suggestion that our engagement with gadgets (gadgets!) could ever not carry fetishistic gratification. Because we’re not e-book haters, honestly. Some of our best friends are e-books.

But, despite his nods to reading as an evolving experience, what Parks has written feels a bit too much like a declaration of the end of (book) history. It’s a celebration of an apparently friction-free medium whose mediation we can’t yet actually claim to understand. The study of the history of the physical book should make this clear. It’s a discipline that didn’t even exist until recently (the scholar Peter D. McDonald suggests that 1982 perhaps marks its birth, noting the publication that year of Robert Darnton’s classic “What Is the History of Books?”). This field, which has seen so much incredible work in these three decades, surely teaches us that there is much to learn from studying the experience of reading, even if it took us centuries to take note. And the work of scholars such as Matthew Kirschenbaum, who’s studying software’s impact on writing, should suggest that its impact on reading is similarly ripe for examination.

To be sure, this isn’t meant as another attack on e-books, nor a defense of print. But to suggest that we’ve come closer to “the essence of the literary experience” seems to take for granted that such a thing exists, when scholarship suggests that it doesn’t. Mediation is a wonderfully messy thing, even when it comes on sleek screens.

(Word) Clouds Before the Fall

A few of our Fall books have already been making their way out into the world, but it’s hard not to think of Labor Day as the point when autumn’s really here. So, before we get there, let’s take a moment to look back at some highlights from our Spring list, via their word clouds. Each book’s cloud shows the group of words that appear most often in the text; the larger the word’s font size, the more frequently it appears. They’re a nice way in.

Here’s the cloud for Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts, by Daniel Richter 

 

Peter Fritzsche’s The Turbulent World of Franz Göll: An Ordinary Berliner Writes the Twentieth Century

Toronto, Week One

This year, after the retirement of David Stimpson, longtime HUP/MIT/Yale sales rep John Eklund has gamely gone international, taking on much of Canada. Eklund, who was named Publisher’s Weekly’s 2011 Rep of the Year, blogs his travels and book industry insights at Paper Over Board. Below is a report on his first week of meetings with buyers at some of Toronto’s many terrific bookstores, and some reflections on the state of bookselling up north.

-----

I began my first week of appointments in Toronto with more than a bit of trepidation. Though everyone has been extremely cooperative in accommodating my proposed dates, I haven’t met and worked with this many new customers since the day I started this job in 1998.

There were some logistical challenges. Canada Post has gone on strike, but it means my obsession with sending catalogs early paid off. Then Air Canada agents called a strike, but neither of my flights was inconvenienced. Anyway, a country that has a labor movement with gumption, what a great concept!

I took the bus down to O’Hare on Sunday morning. The driver was a trainee - tentative, learning the ropes, a little awkward. But he had an experienced handler hovering over his shoulder, explaining the shortcuts and schedule tricks. “Never skip a stop no matter how far behind you get! You never know when somebody might be waiting.” I thought of this man as his David Stimpson, and took it as a good omen.

Continuing the theme of repping by public transportation, I took the Rocket from Pearson to the Kipling subway station. It was a smooth ride but “the rocket”- really? Still, I was downtown in an hour for $3.00. The train passed through far-flung stations on the Bloor line I’d never been in, and I saw beautiful institutional pastels on the walls - mauve, sea green, and a kind of pale butterscotch - that I hadn’t seen since elementary school.

I daydreamed about my first visit to Toronto in the early eighties. I spent a weekend at the decrepit Selby Hotel on Sherburne, in the room in which (supposedly) Ernest Hemingway lived when he wrote for the Toronto Star. Feeling the literary vibe made it a little easier to ignore the roaches and the thumping cheesy disco in the basement.

There are precious few North American cities anymore where one might take a “book vacation,” but Toronto remains one of them. True, when bookselling and publishing elders gather, as they did at David’s happy, bittersweet retirement party at his beloved Pilot Monday night, the inescapable theme is “the good old days.” Stipulating that there were once many more bookstores selling many more interesting books, I’m still skeptical. Moms Mabley used to make fun of people who dwell on the good old days. “What good old days? When? I was there, where were they at?”

Be that as it may, I just spent a wonderful week visiting diverse and wonderful bookstores in a truly wonderful city. It’s the kind of trip I’d gladly make for fun, and I’m being paid for it! I’d been to many of these shops before as a customer, but it’s an entirely different thing to sit down with buyers to sell them the lists.

What were some of these places and personalities?

York University Bookstore, which features the kind of deeply scholarly trade inventory that was once routine in college stores before the sweatshirts took over;

The University of Toronto Bookstore, which is housed in one of the most beautiful rooms in book retailing;

Books for Business, a tidy, bright, smartly selective business specialty store in the financial district;

Marc Glassman, owner of the widely mourned Page’s Bookstore, is now juggling about a dozen book balls, including the Toronto International Film Festival shop and a clever reading series called This is Not a Reading Series. (Toronto is book event crazy. Like film festivals, there seem to be reading festivals of one kind or another every week.)

The wonderfully quirky and old-school charming Book City stores, a collection of local neighborhood shops which reminded me of Milwaukee’s legendary Harry W Schwartz chain, where I learned bookselling;

In Praise of Design, Regional Edition

As publishers, we keep company in various overlapping circles of the book business. One community with which we’ve had a long relationship is the Bookbuilders of Boston organization, which brings together people involved in book publishing and manufacturing throughout New England. Last night the group held its 54th annual New England Book Show, at which we were thrilled to see a number of our books recognized for their excellence in design and production.

In the category of illustrated general trade books, our annotated edition of Pride and Prejudice, and the relaunched Image of the Black in Western Art series were both highlighted for their overall design and production, from jacket to layout:

In the reference category, The Classical Tradition got a nod for its overall design:

 

The following were all recognized as outstanding jackets in the general trade category, including a “best in category” award to our old sheepish pal:

 

Due Date: Fall 2011

Today let’s see how far we can take a publishing/parenthood analogy before it forces us into indelicacy or just plain falls apart.

Well, let’s see, there’s conception. And then… are there such things as pregnancy announcements? Do parents do that? Tortured from the start, this analogy. Well, publishers do it. We like to be all formal about it, so when we’ve got books in the oven we figure out their names and we predict their birthdays and we guess how tall they’ll be and only then do we send out our pregnancy announcements. We just call them catalogs, though. And it just so happens that our Fall 2011 catalog is here, with everything you could want to know about our whole new brood. You can take a look through the catalog over at Scribd, or if your browser is friendly enough you can flip through it right here (use the + and - buttons to zoom in and out):

Harvard University Press Fall 2011 Catalog

 

But where else can we take this analogy? Jacket design, we could say that’s like buying baby clothes. Our Sales Conference, taking place today and tomorrow, we could call that a super early baby shower with no presents. Then all these books will have birthdays, one after the other, from August through February. And as soon as they’re born we’ll pack them up lovingly in cardboard boxes and send them off to be sold. Yikes, okay, let’s stop there. Publishing—not so much like parenthood.

There is the pride, though.  Because—seriously, now—we’re tremendously proud to be bringing out this new list, and it’s a particularly strong collection for us. We have books coming this fall that help to remind each of us at HUP why we’re here. Books like No Enemies, No Hatred, a collection of essays and poems from the Nobel Prize-winning jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo. And Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution, a work of critical history that refutes popular attempts to pit religion and evolution at odds. And American Oracle, a new book examining how four American writers addressed the Civil War at the time of its centennial, by Bancroft Prize-winning historian David W. Blight. And On Rereading, in which Patricia Meyer Spacks meditates on the comforts to be had and knowledge to be gained from reading the same books over and over.

That takes us just to page eight of the catalog. We’ll have plenty more to say about all of these new books throughout the coming year. In the mean time, please do take a look through the catalog.  

On Publishing Thomas Eisner's "For Love of Insects"

Renowned biologist and pioneering chemical ecologist Thomas Eisner died from complications of Parkinson's disease on March 25th at age 81. The Washington Post, New York Times, and Cornell Chronicle all have featured warm accounts of his life and work. Below, HUP Editorial Director Michael Fisher recalls the excitement of publishing Eisner’s now-classic book, For Love of Insects.

-----

Tom Eisner was one of the first authors I visited after I arrived at the Press in 1992. I had heard (I think from Ed Wilson) that Tom was planning to write a book. I travelled to Cornell to introduce myself and tell him how eager I was to work with him. I repeated that message in emails over the years that followed. But I had to wait until 2001 for a manuscript from Tom. (I would have waited longer.) That manuscript became his masterwork, For Love of Insects.

His next book, Secret Weapons, followed shortly thereafter, but then he became “backlist,” and our contact became less frequent, as tends to happen.  When I learned of Tom’s death I felt compelled to revisit that exciting time when we worked so closely together on For Love of Insects. I looked back at our emails to one another, and at other messages related to the book, and have collected below a few that capture the excitement and momentum of publishing a wonderful and important book. It was a privilege to know and to work with Tom. And of course HUP will keep his great books in print for as long as there is an HUP.

---

From: Thomas Eisner

Sent: January 19, 2001

Dear Michael,

I have indeed resumed work on the book, although it will never go fast... I am having real second thoughts though about the way in which I am "mixing" the science with personal recollections.

Happy New Year.

Tom Eisner

---

Sent: Friday, January 19, 2001

To: Thomas Eisner

Dear Tom,

Hmm... this sounds ominous. Does that mean second thoughts about the whole enterprise? I hope not. Actually, what I really hope is that you won't allow your second thoughts to block you from completing a draft. Let an editor (me) at least see a complete draft.

Best,

Michael

Design Across The Pond

Recently the folks at Flavorwire laid out a side-by-side comparison of US and UK book jackets, prompting our friends down the road at the Harvard Book Store to ask “Why are British book covers always so much cooler?”

To that we say “Ouch.” And respectfully offer some side-by-sides of our own, just off the tops of our heads.  HUP on the left, UK editions on the right.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So, US versus UK book design...

We like our side of the pond just fine on that front.  

In fact, we liked that sheep design up there enough to make a little slideshow about it last year:

 

John Eklund, Rep of the Year!

We were two hours into a seven-hour list meeting this morning when we got the brilliant news that John Eklund has been named Publishers Weekly’s Rep of the Year. To the best of our knowledge it’s the first such recognition for a University Press rep, and it couldn’t have gone to a better book person.

We sang John’s praises a few weeks back when he was nominated, so we’ll spare him a second telling. Here, though, is a bookseller’s take on John, from Jonathon Welch, owner of Talking Leaves Books in Buffalo:

“When I think of how I would define all of the characteristics that make up a great sales rep, John Eklund springs right to mind. Among other things he is passionate without being overbearing, perpetually informed and informative, informal and professional, attentive to the store, the buyers, and the staff, a great listener to bookseller complaints but a strong advocate for his books and presses, well-prepared and insightful. . . . I want to be like him when I grow up.”

Don't we all!

Congratulations, John!

Electronic Publishing, Then and Now

Ebooks aren’t just from the future anymore. Though ereaders and formats will continue to evolve, they’re clearly here to stay. That much we can say for sure, and have clearly known for some time. As we rapidly catch up with our future, though, it’s interesting to think about who knew what, when.

For example, here’s pioneering American composer and polymath John Cage on electronic publishing in 1965:

We can't be satisfied with distribution now because it won't be very good. For instance, my book (Silence), published in the United States, is very difficult to get outside the United States, and that won't be solved, because all of the publishing problems of books, and objects, and things in quantity are still those of the previous culture. Yet with the number of people who work now -- the number of composers, the number of authors, and so on -- has vastly increased over the 19th century; but the number of publishers has not increased. The result is that you have traffic problems, so you have the kind of problems that all large cities encounter with automobile traffic. And I hear, where I go now, that in the future we may expect that private traffic in large cities will be forbidden. It may then equally be forbidden to produce a book that would require people to distribute it, but it will not be forbidden, certainly, to send information by electronic media throughout the world. (Via the blog of the John Cage Trust.)

And here’s 60 Minutes commentator Andy Rooney on electronic publishing in 2011 (CBS isn't too embed friendly, so take a look on YouTube):

 

A little funny, no? That bit of John Cage above probably seemed straight from The Jetsons back in 1965, and Andy Rooney last night had perhaps a touch of The Flintstones. On the one hand, there’s nothing too surprising here. John Cage was always way ahead of his time, and Andy Rooney is often an easy target.

On the other hand, though, these comments juxtaposed do tell us a bit about this transition to digital. You can look at the ereaders all around you and then read John Cage’s thoughts on electronic distribution and start to think that things were always going to happen exactly this way. But somewhere in those Andy Rooney minutes is the recognition that there’s a lot left to shake out about business models in electronic publishing, and about what ebook dominance could ultimately mean for authors, publishers, and readers. We’re past the point where it makes much sense to scoff at electronic publishing, but accepting that fact doesn’t mean we know where we’re headed. And, sadly, John Cage isn’t around to tell us.

John Eklund, Book Person

Could our arms reach Milwaukee, one John Eklund would likely be bruised by back-pats, because we were thrilled to learn last week that he’s been named one of Publisher’s Weekly’s four finalists for Rep of the Year! Such recognition is a fine honor for a tireless advocate of university press publishing. And, though John’s likely to find our dwelling on this news silly, a few words are in order.

In an industry currently dizzy with its focus on ebooks and data, data, data, John is a capital-B, capital-P Book Person. He’s as invested in the health of the book business as anyone, but because of books and people, not because of profits or shareholders. He still believes strongly in the ability of books to explain the world around us. When he found himself appalled by the self-centeredness of American news coverage of recent events in Egypt, he rattled off a list of a dozen books to do the explaining that the media couldn’t or wouldn’t. When the headlines about Borders filing for bankruptcy focused on investors and bottom lines, John made us remember the 20,000 booksellers in line to lose their jobs. Books and people.

John has been representing the Harvard, Yale, and MIT presses since 1998. He came to work with us after spending many years as a buyer and bookseller for the landmark independent Schwartz chain in Milwaukee, and he’s carried that commitment to independent bookselling into his life as a rep. John understands publishing, bookselling, and reading as the delicate ecosystem that they together comprise, and he’s forever ready to remind us when we let ourselves forget. He posts “road reports and musings” to his blog, Paper Over Board, where his sharp eye and open mind show themselves time and again, like in this post from November, when a bowl of grapes on a restaurant table got him thinking about how booksellers build loyalty. John’s great at seeing something that works and drilling right down to why, as in this love letter to The Elliott Bay Book Company last summer. If you’re in the book business and you don’t read John’s blog, start now.

The sales rep’s fundamental role is to serve as an essential conduit between publishers and booksellers, but it’s not just a one-way transfer. Sure, John has to present to his accounts the hundreds of new books that HUP, Yale, and MIT have to offer each season across history, science, art, sociology, popular culture, politics, and the rest. But reps also have to send information in the other direction, reporting back to publishers on how new titles are being received, and also on trends and developments on the front lines. As much as we try to keep up with what’s out there, people in a publishing house are often trapped in our own little bubble. Reps provide us with critical contact with the booksellers who still know more about what and how people read than any algorithm can tell us.

A great rep like John, though, is so much more than a cable between parties. Repping has always been about relationships, and maybe never more than today. In an industry facing as much monumental change as publishing, those relationships and commitments can still be what pull you through. Somehow recently in publishing “legacy” has become a pejorative, and “traditional” seems now to be code for “dying.” John’s quick to spot and embrace innovation, but his respect for tradition and for relationships are what most stand out about him. He’s learned this business from people he’d say he’s been lucky to know, like Mark Gates, and David Stimpson. While John’s always eager to credit those he’s learned from throughout his career, here’s hoping he knows that these days he also does an awful lot of teaching.

Finally, in this winter when John’s been joining workers in Wisconsin and elsewhere who are standing up for their right to band together, it has to be said that his relationship with his colleagues makes him uneasy with this personal recognition. For years John has been partnered with Adena Siegel and Patricia Nelson in representing Harvard, Yale, and MIT, and their arrangement is unique. Just last week, all three took time out of their selling season to engage in a round robin of thoughtful emails about ideas for improving our catalog. John’s the first to say that it’s a group effort, and that it should be recognized as such.

Even so, John, please accept our congratulations. And when next we see you, and those back-pats fly, don’t say you weren’t warned.

(UPDATE: He won!!)