In the Company of Writers by Charles Scribner Jr.

In the Company of Writers is, more or less, a publishing memoir.  The author, one in a long line of Charles Scribners, helmed Scribners during a pretty fascinating, transitional period in the industry - and in his own company.  He took over at the tail end of the Max Perkins era, when Scribners was a powerhouse of major voices in literature (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, etc.), and stayed on through the company's merger with Macmillan, when Scribners became an imprint of a major conglomerate instead of an independent company.

He's so matter-of-fact about the position of privilege he was born into that it's impossible to resent him for it, and he didn't squander his advantages - he had an excellent education, for example, and so he became a student of Latin and Greek, was passionate about the history of science, and had an active life of the mind well into his twilight years.  He seems - and, really, it's impossible to know the truth through the text - but he seems like a true gentleman, in the best sense of the word.  And he describes his years at Scribners, working with authors like Hemingway, coping with the paperback revolution, and just generally staying afloat, with appealing candor.  There are some great little anecdotes, too.

Either because the author himself was influenced stylistically by his authors, or because much of the book was crafted out of an oral history (Scribner was too old to undertake a memoir on his own, so he told his story and let someone else do the writing), or thanks to the intermediary who translated Scribner's speech into text, the book is gorgeously written and gives a stylistic nod to Hemingway.  Before I read Hemingway, I really resented the overwhelming influence he has exerted on American writers.  Now that I've read Hemingway, I wish more people would write like him.  I guess that's how it goes sometimes.  So the prose here is gorgeous, and it's a pretty quick, easy read.

I really liked this book.  It captures a time and a place, and it seems really wise to me.

5 Ways The Google Book Settlement Will Change The Future of Reading

5 Ways The Google Book Settlement Will Change The Future Of Reading 

If you care about the future of books, you need to understand the Google Book Settlement. It's a complicated legal document, but we've talked to some of its architects, detractors, and defenders - and break it all down for you...[link]

Really interesting article.  Follow the link for the full text.

Makes me sad to think these rebellious game-changers I've admired might be mutating into tyrants...Apple's tyrannical control over the App Store and increasing animosity towards Google (rumors even have Apple jumping into bed with Microsoft in order to deal with the threat posed by Google...), and now the sinister side of Google's attempt to bring books to the many.

Yikes.

According to an article in The Business Insider...

it costs the [New York] Times about twice as much money to print and deliver the newspaper over a year as it would cost to send each of its subscribers a brand new Amazon Kindle instead.

Here's how we did the math:

According to the Times's Q308 10-Q, the company spends $63 million per quarter on raw materials and $148 million on wages and benefits. We've heard the wages and benefits for just the newsroom are about $200 million per year.

After multiplying the quarterly costs by four and subtracting that $200 million out, a rough estimate for the Times's delivery costs would be $644 million per year.

The Kindle retails for $359.  In a recent open letter, Times spokesperson Catherine Mathis wrote: "We have 830,000 loyal readers who have subscribed to The New York Times for more than two years."  Multiply those numbers together and you get $297 million -- a little less than half as much as $644 million.

And here's the thing: a source with knowledge of the real numbers tells us we're so low in our estimate of the Times's printing costrs that we're not even in the ballpark.

Read the full article here. Although, as I'm looking at it...the Kindle retails for $259 not $359. I know because I just bought a new one. I wonder if any of the other figures are off. Hmmmmm.

Anyhow, a quick note about the slew of book reviews that I posted a week or so ago. I've been taking notes about books I read for a really long time, more systematically as time goes by, but these proto-reviews are scattered all over the place.

A lot of them are really old, and some are probably incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't just finished reading the book in question. Not really written for an audience, which means, ultimately, that they're less useful to me - the person they were written for - years down the road. Live and learn I guess.

Anyhow, my memories of these books aren't fresh so I'm not mucking up the old reviews, just copying them out.

There are so many more to hunt down...but I think a catalogue will be kind of interesting. I'm surprised, for example, that the first reviews I wrote of Sebald's books weren't glowing - he's become one of my favorite authors. In general, the proportion of negative reviews is surprising to me.

Make a list.

How many bad things can you say about our country based only on the title of a book I passed in B&N today: Cancer on $5 a Day.

(Note: I just looked the book up on Amazon and it appears that it falls into the category of humor rather than self help. Does that make it better or worse?)

Dear All You Novel Writers Out There,

Do not begin your novel by describing the weather. I don't know why so many of you seem to think that grandiose descriptions of seasonal environmental effects (new grass, falling leaves, snow, rain, etc.) make a compelling first line.

In case you haven't heard, the weather is boring. Although you may later have the opportunity to share your uniquely special wonderment at the beauty of nature, please save it for your saggy middle - I'm sure it needs some shoring up anyhow.

The first line of your novel should draw us into the story. It should set the tone, give us an idea of what's to come. Is your book about the weather? I didn't think so. When you start with something bland and irrelevant, the reader draws certain conclusions.

Thank you,
A Sad, Sad Reader of Unpublished Fiction.

I just met the most controversial woman in publishing

Ms. J. R.

She's very good-looking.

Woo-hoo!

We're going to try to sign the authors of two books I pulled out of the slush pile! I have found a wee diamond in the rough, a thumbtack in a haystack! Twice! In one week!

Now, this is a victory for me but we have yet to discover if:

(1) the author in question will want to sign with us
(2) we can sell the book
(3) if the book will sell

But yay! Baby agent on the loose!

all agog

I just got back from a party at which Stephen Colbert was a guest. I sidled up next to him to say something inane about how great his show is (I think that the Colbert Report heralds the end of the age of irony, and I could not be happier about it...see, the prepared sentence I never got to use? So sad), but he was busy and I have been brought up to believe that pestering celebrities is very bad behavior so after noting that his beard grows in gray, I left him alone.

Another Life, by Michael Korda

Another Life is pretty much the perfect roman à clef - although that's not necessarily a compliment, since good romans à clef are by definition dishy and a bit nasty. Korda has the kind of sly, subtly cruel wit that makes for really juicy reading - and, as editor-in-chief at Simon & Schuster for many years, his targets are the movers and shakers of publishing, be they authors, agents, or corporate executives.

The book is a great history of publishing in the latter half of the twentieth century - the fall of the family run houses, the rise of the conglomerates, the changing roles of editors, the birth of the celebrity memoir, the synergy between television and books. He skims across the more glamorous highlights of his career - flying to Italy to discuss a movie deal in a lavishly appointed villa, putting on a bolo tie on his way to woo Larry McMurtry, endless lunches in New York's finest restaurants, driving his little Porsche out to Jersey to visit Richard Nixon. This is when he's not talking about a childhood spent (at times) on a yacht in the Riviera, getting to know Orson Welles and Graham Greene.

At times I found myself really enjoying the book - it's hard not to enjoy, since it manages to be both informative and a guilty pleasure all at once - and really liking the author. He's obviously energetic, curious, and adventurous - not to mention smart, funny, and very well-read. But at times I found myself loathing him, for the savage, needling way he described so many of the individuals in his novel, for his false modesty, and especially for his unbelievable attempts to whitewash his own personality - his protests that he was the least ambitious of men and happened to simply fall into the various social maneuvers and key friendships that made his career ring very, very false. That and the only-too-familiar pseudo-apology with which he dismisses his own philandering.

I'd recommend it to anyone, if only because it's so FUN, but it's not the kind of book I could ever love.