Harvard University Press Blog

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;

Venice by way of HUP

Whenever isobars descend from Greenland (damn you, high pressure!), we indulge in two forms of escapist Internet window shopping: first for summer clothing, and second for airline tickets to someplace far away, and warmer. Thanks to a stripy-gondolier-shirt revival*, a Venn diagram charting both of our guilty habits would show a single point of convergence: Venice.

It turns out that the Queen of the Adriatic is an incomparable destination for armchair travel, regardless of which Internet vices brought you there. Perhaps in recognition of this quality, we at HUP have published a number of books on Venice, most recently Iain Fenlon’s Piazza San Marco and the third and final volume of Bembo’s iconic History of Venice in its first English translation.

  In his study of St. Mark’s Square, Fenlon shows that the evolution of the space Napoleon is supposed to have called “the finest drawing-room in Europe” from marketplace to parade ground to tourist haven has been a barometer for Venice’s fortunes. Like the other books in the Wonders of the World series, Piazza San Marco peels back the varnish conferred by landmark status to reveal the complex, colorful, and noisy evolution of an iconic place.

 Venice from the Ground Up (no, you’re not the first to think it
should be  …from the Water Up) offers another close-up view of the city. An installment in our  From the Ground Up series, it guides readers through the history of the city by way of its canals and landmarks.

In a literary vein, Tony Tanner’s gorgeous Venice Desired  charts the encounters of writers including Ruskin, Byron, Henry James, Proust, and Pound with what Ruskin called “this amphibious city—this Phocaea, or sea-dog of towns,—looking with soft human eyes at you from the sand, Proteus himself latent in the salt-smelling skin of her.” If the striped shirts didn’t seduce you, surely Ruskin will. (Note that Tanner’s similarly warm, elegant, and fascinating Prefaces to Shakespeare —including of course, reflections on The Merchant of Venice—will be out this spring.) 

“Whatever roughness rage, some exquisite sea-thing/ Will surely rise to save.” That’s Byron, in Don Juan. And Tanner says: “The lines suit equally well whether you believe in Venus, or Venice. Or, of course, both.”

There are worse places to daydream about on a winter’s day.  

* Here at HUP, we get all our fashion news from the Wall Street Journal.

Photos from Venice from the Ground Up

                                                                                                   

Reading on the high seas

Well those Somali pirates are at it again! Just when you thought they were out of ammunition and chutzpah, they are back at it on the high seas and wreaking havoc. 

Maybe the Somali pirates want to join the ranks of noteworthy seafarers of the past. Harvard University Press has two rollicking books forthcoming about life, death, and adventure on the open ocean. In The Death of Captain Cook, forthcoming this January 2009, Glyn Williams recasts the history of Captain Cook, this time exploring the multiple narratives of his death.  Since first reported to the world in 1780, the death of Captain Cook on a Hawaiian beach the previous year has been revered, celebrated, and shrouded in mystery. Simultaneously called a hero and an antihero, a ruthless invader, and a torchbearer of the Enlightenment, Cook’s reputation grew as much out of the moving story of his death as out of his adventures while he lived. Looking further ahead to March of 2009, Harvard is coming out with Buccaneers of the Caribbean: How Piracy Forged an Empire by Jon Latimer. The term "buccaneer" is often used synonymously with "pirate," and has become associated with the trappings of pirate living - skull and crossbones, pieces of eight, yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum. But "pirate" literature concentrates almost exclusively on the so-called "Golden Age" of the eighteenth century that postdates the buccaneers, and which formed the principal inspiration for writers of fiction from Robert Louis Stevenson to the recent film series Pirates of the Caribbean. But the truth about the buccaneers is considerably removed from the stereotype and much more complex, and the aim of this book is to outline the truth.

So curl up with a hot toddy--in the safety of your own home--and get ready for these two swashbuckling books to hit bookshelves near you!

Now actually Beijing Time

As the Olympics kick off (at 8:08 Beijing time on 8/8/08, no less), The Independent delivers a nice endorsement of Beijing Time, the book that takes us all there even if we couldn't get off work for two weeks and afford the monumental airfare to China. "This engrossing book merges travel writing, sociology and streetwise reportage," says the paper. "From Mao's tomb to designer malls, karaoke bars to 'Pandaman', who parodies Olympic hype, these intellectual sleuths search for clues to the hidden city beneath the headline stories. Their Beijing hums with ghosts of the past, as well as with every kind of futuristic dream."

Precisely!

||| Read an excerpt from Beijing Time.

Hong Kong--City Between Worlds

A superbly thorough review of Leo Ou-fan Lee's City Between Worlds: My Hong Kong in PopMatters today. Michael Buening hits all the right notes in his characterization of Lee's approach to his adopted hometown, a city whose myriad identities require an equal variety of analytic techniques if one is to even come close to capturing what it's like to be in Hong Kong, or to be a Hong Konger:

Uncertainty and transience is part of [Hong Kong's] character and in City Between Worlds Leo Ou-fan Lee uses a variety of techniques—travelogue, revisionist history, cultural deconstruction, and personal essay – to pin down what he calls this “confusion and contradiction” while uncovering the deep communal roots that often go unnoticed by outside commentators.

[...]

The very writing of this book is another way Lee gives voice and creation to “his” Hong Kong. City Between Worlds balances probing intellectual analysis, fierce criticism, and gentle warmth, all imbued with the frustrated love any city dweller will immediately recognize as the elusive grasp to define where one lives.

We couldn't have said it better ourselves. As an added bonus, don't miss Leo speaking about his book at the Harvard Coop this coming Monday (June 23) at 7pm. The Coop is located in the heart of Harvard Square--it's pretty hard to miss. Hope to see you there.

Grrlscientist on Kate Jackson

A nice review of Kate Jackson's Mean and Lowly Things: Snakes, Science, and Survival in the Congo by Grrlscientist at Living the Scientific Life:

During the years that I have written book reviews for my blog, I have had the great pleasure of reading some astonishingly good books, especially about science. Mean and Lowly Things is one of the best, and in fact, even though this book is newly published, I think it qualifies as the "classic field biology book" that helps to define and explain this sort of research to the public. In view of my own passion to continue researching the parrots of the remote islands in the south Pacific Ocean, I might be overly emotional regarding field work in distant lands, such as what is recounted in this book. However, by the time I finished reading this book, I experienced intense sadness because I felt as though I was closing the covers upon a beautiful world and a dear group of friends whom I had experienced so much with, and whom I wanted to continue working with.

More on Kate Jackson and more on the book.

Mary Beard interview--Part 2

BLDGBLOG has posted Part 2 of the interview with Mary Beard, editor of the Wonders of the World series and author of the forthcoming The Roman Triumph. Also, don't miss Mary's Times Online blog "A Don's Life."

BLDGBLOG interviews Mary Beard

A fantastic interview with Mary Beard, editor of the Wonders of the World series (published in the US by HUP) and author of the forthcoming The Roman Triumph, at BLDGBLOG, a site this blogger reads religiously. In another post, BLDGBLOG author Geoff Manaugh explains his enthusiasm for Cathy Gere's The Tomb of Agamemnon, one of the most stellar offerings in the Wonders of the World series.

The Wonders of the World series has a simple concept--pair a famous structure with someone who's qualified to write about it in an intriguing way that reveals not only the architectural, but also the cultural implications of the place. The books are aimed not at the specialist, but at the general inquisitive reader ("the intelligent ignorant," as Beard often refers to herself, although "ignorant" is not a word others would be likely to use in describing the Chair of Classics at Cambridge). We co-publish the series with Profile Books, a British imprint, and while the list of titles differs slightly between the two publishers, volumes that have been released in the US include:

* The Parthenon by Mary Beard

* The Alhambra by Robert Irwin

* Westminster Abbey by Richard Jenkyns

* The Temple of Jerusalem by Simon Goldhill

* The Colosseum by Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard

* The Tomb of Agamemnon by Cathy Gere

* The Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of Ancient Egypt by John Ray

* St. Peter's by Keith Miller

* The Forbidden City by Geremie R. Barmé (forthcoming)

* various top-secret forthcoming volumes that will undoubtedly knock your socks off, so stay tuned...

Venice--the city as theme park

A post over at BLDGBLOG (one of my favorite sites) surmises what Venice will be like once the city is completely depopulated of actual residents, a phenomenon that some observers predict will occur within the next 30 years. From The Guardian, last year:

Depopulation is getting to the point of no return, the Venice council housing chief, Mara Rumiz, said following the publication this week of the latest figures. "Beyond then, Venice will never again be a normal city, but will become a mere tourist destination and lose its charm - even for the tourists themselves," she was quoted as telling the daily La Repubblica yesterday.

If you want to know what the streets of Venice were like in the pre-ghost town days, pick up a copy of James H. S. McGregor's Venice from the Ground Up, a lively tour through the streets and canals of the once-powerful city.

Previously on the blog--maps of Venice, past and present.

Rome

Yesterday's New York Times contained one of their long-running "36 Hours In..." travel features, and yesterday it was Rome that got the NYT treatment. While the article is nice as a primer, we prefer our own guide to the Eternal City, James H. S. McGregor's Rome from the Ground Up.

The Times provided a nice little map to help you navigate the tourist-y center of Rome, but we can do them one better. The new paperback edition of Rome from the Ground Up contains eight maps, specially prepared for this volume, that show you more sites in greater detail than you'll get from just one newspaper article. Check out our last two posts on McGregor's Venice from the Ground Up for an example of the type of map you'll get from these books, or see our web feature on Rome from the Ground Up.

[photo credit: Clifford Boehmer / Harvard University Press]