Forgotten Books Recalled

A while back now we read two novels by Robert Hugh Benson (Lord of the World and Dawn of All), originally published in 1908 and 1911. We’d become aware of these from a post on Siris (here). Both came from a publisher called Forgotten Books (link). I noted at the time that Forgotten Books might be a valuable source, but what with having bought two books of fiction, the impression was not as strong as it became when, very recently, I purchased a copy of Phantasms of the Living, by Edmund Gurney et al, and discovering, from its distinctive title page, that it also belongs under that publisher’s imprint. Well. Phantasms is a non-fiction classic in the parapsychology field; it appeared in 1886. Now I have a paperback of it which is actually a photocopy of the original. This made me go to the publisher’s web site to find out a little more.

Forgotten Books offers around 487,000 old books accessible in various form, online and also on paper (from Amazon.com). As best as I can tell, none of these is still covered by a copyright although Forgotten Books puts its own copyright on them (of dubious enforceability, I think). I made a test. For years now I’ve been trying to get access to the German historian, Theodor Mommsen—a process that has required long waits as volumes of his History of Rome reach me from distant university libraries. These books are rather handily available, at surprisingly low prices (Vol. 1, for instance is $10.03) from Forgotten Books. Books in English, Latin, French, German, Italian, and Spanish are also available. A perusal of a few of these have shown that the photocopying approach is not always entirely flawless. Sometimes small errors appear in typography. But access is what matters when it comes to getting at nineteenth century books of the sort really inaccessible in an orderly manner unless you live right next to a very major university library. Thus far, in neither of the two novels nor in Phantasms have I met any typographical anomalies.

Publishers Will Understand

The German newsmagazine, Spiegel, first published the story. The official coin commemorating Pope Francis’ pontificate went on the market with the name of Jesus misspelled as Lesus. The coins were immediately withdrawn, but four had already been sold.

I first heard about this story from Brigitte. She’d seen it as a snippet without an illustration. When I asked her if the L in question had been lower- or upper-case, she did not know. I asked that question because the Roman alphabet did not (indeed still doesn’t) have a J. Rome’s first would-be-emperor was Iulius Caesar; he came from the Iulia family.  If the name of Jesus were rendered in the Latin alphabet, we would have Iesus, and the accidental substitution of an l for a I might be understandable. Alas. Herewith the picture:

As the picture shows, the L used was a capital. Ordinary people laugh at this sort of thing, but if you lived in the tribe of publishers long enough, stories like this make your hair stand on end, sweat breaks from your brow, and color drains from your face. My own horrific memory of a failure of effective proofing came when a massive reference book I was responsible for, of a geographical type, omitted the entire segment on the state of Texas. Word came well after the book had reached its public when a Texas librarian notified us—indeed in very kind words. And she ended her letter by saying: “Don’t mess with Texas.”

Reprinting then, restamping in the Vatican now. But it would be very nice indeed to own one of the four coins with Lesus at two o’clock.

New Titles Over Time

I came across a tabulation not quite by chance today. It was in a book titled The Book Publishing Industry by Albert N. Greco, published in 2003 by Psychology press. The data came from R.R. Bowker, the gatekeeper on books. I was looking at total new title output from 1880 through 1989 by decades. The listing is visible here and excludes backlist books, thus reprints of older titles. I thought I’d chart these data against population growth. Here is the result:

What struck me here is the meandering pattern from 1880 through about 1959—and then the sudden upward explosion in titles. As always when the subject is books, we have multiple measures, of which “title” is one, “number of copies sold” is another—and “content” is the most mysterious third. If we look back to the very beginnings of book publishing using machines, the “content” was Bibles. Back in the hand-made book ages, the most common content was “prayer book.” Now looking at this image, we’ve no precise idea of the content heading for the skies there.

Once I had these data, I could also do a kind of approximation of new titles per capita, which I show next—albeit the measure I’m using is new titles per 1 million population:

The first bar pretty much encompasses the period known as The Gilded Age. A surge in reading was evidently not a feature of it. The early peak corresponds to World War I—but if war causes reading, what happened in 1940-1949? What this chart tells me, however, is that the first eight decades in this period may be more representative of “normalcy” and the last three signal some sort of “anomaly.” All population data in the two graphics are population at the midpoint of each decade.

Tantalizing. But today is a busy day, so enough.

Watching from a Distance

Sometimes when I watch you, you seem like the same person that I once knew.
And watch from a distance, but never able to do more than I ever would.
Looking at you, I find again I am starving in your mystery.
So far away and some kind of helplessness.
          [Metal Storm]

Yesterday I read an article titled “Publish or Perish” by Ken Auletta in the April 26 issue of The New Yorker. Hat tip here goes to Joyce Simkin who alerted our circle to this fascinating eruption (I’m inclined to call it that, but don’t ask me why) about the iPad and the Kindle, the larger-than-life figures of Steve Jobs (Apple), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), and assorted dukes of actual publishing, I mean of actual books. An odd feeling stole over me as I read, the sort of feeling no doubt common to people in their seventies, a sensation of distance, of watching something from far away while yet moving still farther from it.

My sensation of floating, of rising up into the air, of a stratospheric view of something down below, at the same time suggests the exact contrary—namely that of an industry that has begun to levitate and, in so doing, is creating a distance between a man sitting on a white plastic chair next to the green grass in the back while it, the business, the distribution system, is gradually thinning on me as it rises up, up, up into a cloudless sky.

In this story the book business is all too real but books, alas, have disappeared. The title of a P.D. James novel comes to mind, Devices and Desires. The devices are electronic and have nicknames characteristic of the times (“the Jesus tablet” for the iPad). It might also be called Prices and Devices; numbers with dollar signs, each indicating a book price, appear fifteen times in the article, eight times citing the figure of $9.99, the dreaded (or desired) standard price for a book delivered to your device wirelessly, and now in color, in sixty seconds or less.

Inversions are on my mind of late, that transvaluation of values some have labeled Nietzsche’s “moral breakthrough.” The article of my focus today presents an instance of such a transvaluation (but I’m not knocking Ken Auletta, far from it—his choice of subject is straight-forward; he is, after all, talking about the book business, not about books, and he isn’t kowtowing or pulling punches). The transvaluation lies in the fact that we now spend so much time and effort talking about the trade in books. Our heroes are the giants of trade. The transvaluation actually takes place when the trade transforms the object (and its buyers) to serve its own desires—rather than performing its humbler role of simply delivering goods. Auletta illustrates this well in presenting two cases in which the retailer aspires to become the publisher. And, down the line, perhaps, shall aim to build that tower of Babel in which AI computers shall also write the books for an adequately pounded, marinated, and conditioned so-called readership.

Yes. I’m watching from a distance. Reflexes of a lifetime—in business, in publishing, in writing—cause twitches in my body as I watch, as if I ought to do something, as if I ought to do what it takes to adapt to this new and glittering environment. But I sink back and watch as an early wasp heads out over our stoutly leafing hostas. And I feel a kind of certainty. What is its essence? It essence is that that the Kindle and the iPad shall both pass away—and it won’t even take too long a time. But the book shall remain. And, somehow, it will reach the new readers who’ll still be there after the Age of Oil has seeped into the past.

Dwarf Planet

Herewith a brief announcement of a new venture by Editorial Code and Data, Inc., an outfit close to my heart. ECDI is launching a new fiction imprint. I am announcing that on LaMarotte where commercial matters are a little more at home. I’ve also provided a link to Dwarf Planet Press on the blogroll of this site.

Adequacy

Two people in my family, Monique and I, are quite fond of a slender volume by E.F. Schumacher titled A Guide for the Perplexed. I’ve had occasion to refer to Schumacher a while back here, in the context of health care. Schumacher is best known in economic development circles, for his book Small is Beautiful, which appeared in 1973, and for concepts like appropriate technology. A Guide for the Perplexed is, in a sense, the documentation of his conversion to Catholicism. In the process of working his way to a religious understanding, he produced this little book in which certain medieval ideas are explained in modern terms. One of the concepts Monique and I like is Schumacher’s rendition of adequacy. The concept simply means that your understanding must measure up to that which you are trying to understand, expressed in Schmacher’s quote of Aquinas (without citing work or place): “Knowledge comes about insofar as the object known is within the knower.” He traces the origin of this insight—although, no doubt, it goes back into the mists—to Plotinus: “Knowing demands the organ fitted to the object.”

In a way this concept, adequacy, is self-evident. It belongs among those things that, once you hear about them, you immediately accept if you’ve observed the truth they represent. And then, ultimately, turning one of these concepts this way and that, you realize its profundity.

This floated back into my mind the other day again—my mind being on publishing books and how that process works. Then it struck me that a work—a novel say—must encounter someone in the publisher’s organization “adequate” to grasp what has been submitted, adequate to see its value. If an author matures while editors get younger and younger—if the big houses become ever more corporate, if fashions start to dominate, if werewolf stories compete directly with more serious works—it is possible to lose your market. The world of publishing has changed in significant ways since I began to write. The process has been bureaucratized. It wouldn’t surprise me if now “reading” is being outsourced to free-lance readers so that the publisher no longer has to pay health benefits to a sizeable editorial staff, never mind one senior enough to travel on the same trajectories some of their authors have described.

And It’s Not Just Eliot and James

I can’t resist adding the following, taken from the Detroit News, also datelined October 1. This quote comes from the paper’s Auto section.

Now the owner’s manual—the often forgotten paperbound bible stowed in your globe box—is on the way out. Once an elaborate art form in print—described by some as the least-read annual best-seller—it is the latest to go digital in the electronic age.

David Phillips, “Owner’s manuals on verge of extinction”

This article caught Brigitte’s eye after reading my first post for this day, and she flagged it for me to digest. Digest it I did. What it says to me is roughly the following:

It costs much, much less to inventory symbolic creations on an electronic surface than it costs to put it on paper, to bind the pages firmly together, and then to get the object to its intended user on wheels. Much developmental and marketing effort is now flowing into persuading the public to “consume” such things in electronic format. To create a portable equivalent to the book, we have Kindle, Bebook, Plastic Logic, and others. And to entice an i-podded new audience to use such devices, the industry is trying to add sweeteners (image, motion, and music)—which are also much cheaper to deliver as electromagnetic vibrations through the air or over wire.

What’s really going on here is not due to a loss of time because, somehow, we’re that much more busy. I would bet that today exactly the same proportion of humanity reads the likes of Eliot and James as did in Eliot’s and James’ time in the nineteenth century. Back in the 1950s, when I was first reading such people, I was part of a tiny minority. Back in the nineteenth century? When these two authors labored, ditto. The masses have never read Eliot and James, nor shall the masses of the future read the likes of Eliot and James.

People in the past lived in physically less developed environments and had to devote extra time to chores of ordinary living. We live in crowded times (the population has soared everywhere), and we therefore waste time commuting and struggling with communications overload. Same old, same old—time’s always precious, then as now. What is really underway at present is a transition between modes of delivering symbolic products to ultimate consumers. I am myself directly engaged in trying to adapt to this—as I’ll detail in future postings. And so are the auto makers, alas.

All of us, trying to reach our audience, have the same problem.

Crossing the Rubicon

I discovered early in my career that images complement numbers and numbers strengthen images. I used to assemble data in tables and stare at them with a sense of vague dissatisfaction—then I’d reach for graph paper and start charting the numbers “to see what they looked like.” In like manner often I’d encounter a curve or bar-graph in some source, and if the image conveyed knowledge I needed, the same unease would also rise sooner or later; in those cases the search was on to find the numbers behind the graphic. In my later work—if free to do as I wished, anyway—I’ve always tried to give people like me both aspects of phenomena. Graphics draw the reader, but “people like us” would want the numbers too. I knew that then and know it still, hence I try to give at least a link to the data.

I’m not entirely sure that everyone has the same two-pronged approach to reality. If all shared my way of being, history books would feature lots of maps. They don’t. The authors are presumably masters of the maps and assume that what they know is widely shared. But I rather suspect that with exceptions (as always) most people are pretty ignorant about geography; I certainly am, flunking simple tests all the time. A good case perhaps is that famous river, Rubicon. Caesar wasn’t supposed to cross it, not in the company of troops, on his return from Gaul. But he did. In doing so he broke the Roman Republic for ever. But the question then arises, where is the Rubicon? I confess that, until this morning, I had only a vague notion (shame on me!). I put it in Northern Italy, somewhere south of Milan, intersecting some highway leading straight to Rome down the western edge of the country. Wrong!

The Rubicon turns out to be on the East coast of Italy. It’s a relatively small river; it originates in the Apennine Mountains and runs into the Adriatic. It is only 29 km in length. The Apennines run the whole length of the country (a map is here), forming Italy’s spine. The easy way of getting to Northern Italy from Rome, then as now, is to travel along the east coast of Italy, the Adriatic to your right. On the way towards Bologna, between today’s Rimini to the south and Cesena to the north flows the Rubicon still. In Caesar’s time it was the boundary between Cisalpine Gaul and Rome. What we call France was then Gaul; and Cisalpine Gaul was the “France on this side of the Alps,” thus on the Roman side. The map shown here, rudely annotated using Paint, gives the situation roughly. One can see the topography plainly by using Google maps, particularly its wonderful “Terrain” feature, which shows you the mountains as they are. The road system—and surely it still tracks the viae the Romans used—provides an easy crossing of the Apennines, going east to west, beginning in today’s Pescara on the Adriatic.

Some years back when circumstances (read Brigitte’s nudgings) pointed me at Thucydides, I began reading that great historian using our stand-by resource, the Great Books of the Western World. I rapidly threw in the towel, lost in a chaos of geographical references I couldn’t trace. But the text was compelling. As a consequence I discovered the best edition, and perhaps the ultimate model of how to publish history, in The Landmark Thucydides, subtitled A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War, edited by Robert B. Strassler and published by The Free Press, 1996. Little maps illustrate the entire book so that, reading it, one is never lost, always oriented, and therefore the meaning is greatly enhanced.

Some people say, “I’m a visual sort of person.” I belong to that tribe. And not. Or both. As Goethe had it, “Two souls, alas! reside within my breast.” Or, perhaps, two brains mediate my understanding of the world—and one is based on pattern, picture, image, the other on the sublimely abstract and universal concept. The two, together, form one reality. It’s easy to find one or the other, difficult to find both together. Bless those who make the effort to accommodate the challenged.

Layers

For a while of late I’ve been thinking about layers in culture. Such thoughts occur when I’m away from the artificial stimulations of the media, engaged in the relatively boring chores of just plain living. Writing about the noosphere is in part responsible for such reflections. Well, today, I felt that sense sharply intensified. An old friend of ours is retiring from Gale Research, the publisher, after thirty-some-odd years of service as a reference book editor. Brigitte and I were invited to make contributions to a book. Our friend will get that object as a parting gift at the ceremonies of departure.

The past, and that layer beneath the hype, thickened and densified as I wrote my contribution—and read the words that flowed from my fingers spontaneously. And with it came the realization that life sucked clear of the fogs and dusts of the swirling noosphere hasn’t changed very much at all since—to pick a year at random—1955. That’s the layer where people get married and grow old, where children take piano lessons and adults participate in choirs, where rugby is played and dogs are walked, where jobs are sought, gotten, and grow into careers.

The differences we observe down at this level are really trivial. We remember the changes that came and seemed transforming—because the human mind is always alert and eager to adapt. But on reflection the qualities that mattered then still matter, and the blunt fact is that you rapidly get used to things like Xerography, electric typewriters and calculators, to computers, internets, and digital TV—but something must me produced to be copied, the words have to be good before you type them, the numbers can be scary whether you tote them up by pen or keystrokes, the news reached us then as now, and our minds have become steeled against them and grow ever more resistant the faster the hail rattles down on the tin roof. And the news are much the same—as we can prove by demanding of the genii that it summon up old archives. Amazing how intensely people once felt about matters long since forgotten…

Boredom is good. It reminds you of values. You realize that beneath the raging storms of change, culture endures. It isn’t left untouched by all that stuff rushing about in the invisible electromagnetic flux, but that too we get used to. Gale Research. It was a wholly owned, relatively small, but very prestigious reference book company still headed, when we encountered it, by its founder. Our friend already worked there then. The company was twice sold since, first to the Canadian publishing giant Thomson, then spun off to Cengage Learning. Managements came and went. Slogans flourished like mushrooms and wilted almost instantly. One new enthusiasm after the other was organized in, organized out, in-sourced, out-sourced—and endured. All this hoopla caused a lot of laughter, down there, in ordinary life. And things went on, adapting, struggling, battling—as they had long before we became members of the publishing tribe. At the working level things endure. Some things must. And will. As Martha Stewart would say, It’s a good thing.

Titles. Publishers, Please Listen!

Back When I wrote a novella entitled The Chained Karma of the Plutonium Priest—and if that doesn’t draw you, you’re not a science fiction fan. The story was published in Galaxy magazine, but the editor there titled it Plutonium. Yes. Unfortunately Galaxy had serialized one of my novels under the title of Helium, so this was, as it were, in the ballpark. Sort of. Helium, by the way, first saw the light as A Hostage for the Hinterland, my own title for it. No room for a long title? Column-inch-challenged? I shake my head. Plutonium did its magic anyway despite being a nickname. I was nominated science fiction writer of the year; I didn’t get the coveted prize, but I was up there on the stage with two other contenders. Later yet this same novella, genuinely expanded into a novel, not merely bulked up—in effect I wrote a brand new novel with the same plot—saw hardback publication by St. Martin’s Press. But they called it The Karma Affair, hoping to position it as a “cross-over” novel; they put a so-so but mysterious-looking dust jacket on the thing. Now, to be sure, I never wrote anything in science fiction which wasn’t a cross-over book. I’m just not the kind who cleanly fits a genre! Anyway, that book did rather well despite its undistinguished title, enough so that it got translated into a number of languages, including Italian. The Italians, finally, gave it a good title: La Fisica del Karma. This was close to being descriptive of one aspect of the book, as neither Plutonium nor Karma Affair really were. My own title, the best of them all, went to waste. But publishers have this right, you see. They buy the property but reserve the right to butcher the title.

Several incarnations later, now working in reference publishing, I originated a title called Manufacturing U.S.A. Here I got lucky. The deciding personality was Deidra Bryfonski at Gale Research. She over-ruled more junior editors who wished to change the name. No. She went with mine, and MUSA, as it came to be known, went out into the world with the handle that I gave it. MUSA promptly won Best Reference Book of the Year in its category and became the foundation of our company, Editorial Code and Data, Inc. The book is still appearing at two-year intervals, albeit its title now is Manufacturing and Distribution U.S.A., the scope having expanded and also its size; three volumes now. It’s current editor is Joyce P. Simpkin, a young woman but a veteran editor of ECDI. That company name, incidentally, I formed in respectful imitation of what I’d always thought was a great name; I was respectfully using only its rhythm and its honest and direct statement of what the company did: Industrial Light and Magic. ECDI subsequently won several other Best Reference awards as well, and, generally, under Gale, we were and are edited by pros.

Title-inflation is very often a problem nowadays as Chiefs of This and That (Toxic Asset Disposal perhaps) proliferate—but occasionally, if the creator has a knack, title-deflation is something to be avoided. Are you listening out there?