Bibliophiles and serious writers certainly will find these three new works on books and book publishing of great interest: John B. Thompson’s
Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-first Century (Polity, 440 pages), Irving Louis Horowitz’s
Publishing as a Vocation: Studies of an Old Occupation in a New Technological Era (Transaction Publishers, 167 pages), and Jacques Bonnet’s
The Phantoms on the Bookshelves (MacLehose Press, 133 pages).
Thompson’s
Merchants of Culture calmly explores Anglo-American “trade publishing,” providing deep insights and statistics on a business that thrives on million-dollar cash advances to authors, the occasional bestsellers, and the incessant marketing and publicity efforts to produce such bestsellers.
Horowitz's
Publishing as a Vocation focuses on scholarly publishing. In this book, Horowitz, the chairman of a small scholarly press and a copyright absolutist, denounces large publishers as monopolists and furiously condemns the idea of “open access” journals and the use by librarians of the “fair use” provision of the copyright law to circumvent statutes protecting intellectual property.
Bonnet’s
The Phantoms on the Bookshelves is a sharp-edged but roundly enjoyable confession of a “bibliomaniac,” one who not only reads them but also obsessively uses them to furnish his home—even its bathrooms. He blithely admits that this obsession is “monstrous” and indefensible, and that his interminable reading of books “may be no more than a means to keep tedium at bay.”
Read Paul Duguid’s “Do You Love Books,” a review of the three books, in The Times UK Literary Supplement now!RELATED READING:In “Living Singles,” an article that came out in the February 27, 2011 issue of
The New York Times Magazine, Virginia Heffernan writes about narrative nonfiction as the only homegrown American literary form. She says that narrative nonfiction now constitutes some of the most beautiful and illuminating writing in all of American English, and she finds it entirely fitting that Amazon.com now sells narrative nonfiction by its masters.
Read Virginia Heffernan’s “Living Singles” in The New York Times Magazine now!
