The Week In Books: Joyce Quoted Quoted By Goat Cell, Bookexpo America Concludes, Penguin & Amazon Makeup, Free Book Contest Still Running

“To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.”

Terribly sorry for failing to put up the Front List / Back List Post this week. I will do two next week: a double Front List on Monday and a double Back List on Tuesday.

That said, let's get to what happened in the book world this week.

Bookexpo America Has Come And Gone

90% of Bookexpo news coming over the wire concerns itself with the delightful appearance of Barbara Streisand.

For those of you that want something a little more, well, literary you can read this New York Times piece. It's somewhat better than discussion of just how classy Babs is.

Penguin and Amazon Sitting In A Tree

Amazon and Penguin had a bumpy April, with both sides failing to reach an e-book agreement and both sides claiming all they want to do is have readers and writers united, after a small transaction of course. Well, swords into plowshares and all that.

Scientists Attempt To Confound Evolution With Line From Joyce

I kid. Actually, one of the things I most disdain is the pomposity that people approach Joyce's most famous work, Ulysses. I find that if you don't pre-intimidate people concerning a work of fiction then they will not have as much difficulty reading it. Metap-theory placed aside, this story is awesome.

Scientists have inserted a line from Joyce's noble pen into a strand of...er...goat bacterium. They placed the line there (quoted at the top of this post) as a mutable watermark that will display changes as the cell mutates. This of course also gave the story legs as literary minded journalists grabbed it and ran.

Here are two fine articles on the project and Joyce's place within it. The first is from Discover Magazine and the second, and by far more engaging piece at Why Evolution Is True by Dr. Jerry Coyne.

He quotes Mencken, slams naive deism and explains the science so that even a passable education can grasp the concepts. Check it out and enjoy.

I hope you all have a good Memorial Day weekend, those of you celebrating and or not working (like me) that is.

Also, the Guess The Back List contest is still open.

Clues: Dystopic science fiction thriller that has been dubbed a "self-denying prophecy" for its astounding prescience concerning the environment. I will answer one question on facebook if you want additional clues. First come, first served.

The Week In Books: Apple Just Another Heartless Corporation, MobyLives Airs Bad Book Trailers, Stanford's Library Bookless and FREE BOOK CONTEST

At the bottom of the post is the Guess The Back List Book Contest. Before that though there is some stuff about books, sweatshops and other literary dealings.

Apple's Chinese Manufacturing Just Like Everyone Else's Chinese Manufacturing

This is not the first time that a story concerning suicide and despotic management practices at the factory where the Apple iPad is manufactured has come to light.

It is however the first undercover expose of the "hell factory."

Sad aside: Comedian Bill Maher did his jokey politics thing last week at the end of Real Time in which he stated that Apple and Steve Jobs would be a good choice to run the country.



I know it was in good humor but still, there is an undercurrent of seriousness that I find disconcerting.

What I wonder is how can anyone, at this late stage of the game, believe that a large corporation like Apple is any different than the other predatory giants of the world?

Two Tales From MobyLives

The first one is about Stanford preparing for the eventuality of their library being without...books. Luddites be damned.

The second is a rather humorous tour of the best and worst book trailers available on a youtube near you.

Yet Another Entry: The Alex

Noted and apparently ready to be ignored. Meet the Alex.

Really Not Sure What She's Saying But Jennifer Havenner Said This:

The Chicken Littles of the publishing world have clucked about lost points in retail sales of books and the increasing digital format trend. This is partly true. Book sales were actually up 3% last year and increased even more in online stores. eBooks exploded with sales over 175% compared to 2008.

And then this:

Bookstores are repositories of our most important examples of human wisdom, knowledge and art. The role of bookstores is to protect and promote that. Publishers can reserve eBooks for all those billions of dollars worth of fluff they put out every year, but should keep the important works in print and in bookstores.

This is the problem. Bookstores are increasingly being viewed as monastic institutions, which is ironic because it was the monks who lost out when Gutenberg made the press. Sure, the nobility supported their approach to bookmaking and copying but in the end it was the masses and back alley printers who took over the market.

If I were still a bookseller and I had five-year lease and was struggling to make ends meet I would take little consolation in the sentiments of Havenner. They are not uncommon notions, but at the end of the day the stone set jaw and romanticism of monkish dedication is not the same thing as bread and beans.

Bookstores are being cut out by electronic books. They won't survive if ebooks become a dominant format.

Contest Time - Guess The Back List

Okay people, it's time to guess the back list title for next week.

This upcoming week the back list title will not relate to the front list selection. Instead it is apropos of the current environmental tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico.

It is a work of fiction set in a dystopic future where the environment has reached a critically toxic state. A weak, corporate controlled government is unable to do anything about the increasingly dangerous levels of toxicity. Their feebleness is, to borrow a cliche, bought and paid for.

The America of the novel has been compared to that of our last President, where regulation and safeguarding were sacrificed on the altar of business profits.

That is all I will say for now. On Sunday or Monday I will offer an additional clue.

Remember, one guess per person and all entries must be made on Facebook in the comment section of this post's link.

Good luck.

Front List / Back List: The Singer's Gun by Emily St. John Mandel and The Confidential Agent by Graham Greene

Two thrilling tales that speak as much to our need for entertainment as to our need to be aware of the darker happenings in our world.


From The Front List



The Singer's Gun by Emily St. John Mandel. Fiction. Unbridled Books. Hardcover. 287 pps. ISBN: 9781936071647. $24.95.

We stand in need of something stronger now: the travel book you can read while making your way through this new, alarming world.

-Michael Pye, The New York Times, June 1, 2003. Used by Mandel to open her book.

Anton wants a normal life. He wants to have a family and a desk job. He doesn't want to run an illegal business like his parents and cousin Aria do. The latter of which he helped start. He doesn't want to be a part of bringing potential terrorists into the country. He's tired of doing things that he thinks are immoral. He is tired of being a coward.

Anton Waker gets what he wants, more or less, with a bit of subterfuge involving a diploma and his conman's nerves.

In no time he is ensconced in middle management at a water logistics company.

You can't just walk out on the family business though. Sometimes you know too much. Sometimes you're too useful. Sometimes the lies get piled so high that the only way to truly get out from underneath them is to let them come crashing down around you.

Let me start by saying this: You will have no trouble finishing this book. Emily St. John Mandel's book is exactly what her first was, which is to say a carefully wrought and thoroughly thoughtful page-turner.

Now let me split some hairs.

Mandel has set for herself a large task of blending genres and the difficulty of this is evident in The Singer's Gun. There is no truly riveting moment of action. There is no point where the protagonist's horrific revelation is shared by the reader. Lastly there is no "ah ha" moment where several clever threads come together in a spectacular bow.

In her attempt to walk her story far enough away from genre cliche she may have lost something of the spark of those modes of storytelling. On the flip side, by keeping away from it she walks closer to more conventional fiction which somewhat doesn't mix with the implication of the cloak and dagger plot.

Hairs split, let's talk about why you're going to want to inhale this book.

In her debut novel (published last year) Last Night In Montreal she introduced us to her remarkable command of the language, plotting, and in particular to her ability to draw incredibly lifelike character portraits. Readers also were introduced to her wonderfully refreshing approach to story, which lives in a half-world composed of literary fiction and crime/thriller genre plotting techniques.

Think fast plot, withheld information and the foreshadowing of potentially violent conflict combined with extended passages where the characters engage in critical and existential analysis of desire, longing and other more unique insecurities. Like I was saying, Mandel's first novel lives in a half-world and does so quite successfully.

In The Singer's Gun she takes it one step further and this is why I say she has set for herself an immense undertaking. Not only does it take one step further into the realm of genre fiction it does so toward the cold-sweat misdirection of the realm of cloak and dagger. That's right, I'm saying that essentially Mandel has taken her second book into the half-light realm of international crime, espionage and political intrigue thrillers.

Like her first book it does not go openly into this realm. Instead it grasps firmly to more conventional literary fiction in order to become grounded in a reality that most readers will find something in common with. At the beginning of the novel Mandel uses the above Pye quote (there is more of it) to declare her intentions and she uses its theme admirably. The Singer's Gun is about the vast personal and social effects of the immigrant desire to fit in and become American. It is also about the hazard of doing so illegally and the lucrative businesses surrounding immigration.

The excitement, the genre aspect if you will, is housed within the illegal activities of the protagonist, his parents and his cousin. Anton Waker's folks deal in high-end antiquities and works of art procured by dubious means and Waker's cousin Aria (practically sister) deals in near-perfect forged documents, namely Social Security cards and American passports. Anton is her business partner, in the sense that he gets a fare shake of the proceeds and is the face of the operation, doing the exchanges himself.

He is also her dupe, in the sense that he is never fully allowed to know how she gets such perfect fakes, who she has as contacts or even how she lines up clients. Kind of precarious for young Anton.

The Singer's Gun unwinds wonderfully as the bubble-world Anton has built for himself bursts both from within and out. Further revelation would certainly be impolite to potential readers.

While I don't think it is a "new" form like the Pye quote somewhat naively calls for, it is a wonderful and important update that has been sorely lacking in the fiction genre.

It is a daunting task but Mandel seems to be working towards something very special. In The Singer's Gun she has produced a page-turner that succeeds in demonstrating the exigency of the topics addressed within. It is a novel of our times and one that will find a willing audience nearly anywhere.

As with her first novel, The Singer's Gun will leave you waiting for the next.

From The Back List


The Confidential Agent by Graham Greene. Fiction. Penguin Books. 208 pps. ISBN: 0140185380. Out-Of-Print.

If we lived in a world, he thought, which guaranteed a happy ending, should we be as long discovering it? Perhaps that's what the saints were at with their incomprehensible happiness - they had seen the end of the story when they came in and couldn't take the agonies seriously.

-from The Confidential Agent

How is this book out-of-print? I truly hope it is merely between printings because for a novel like this to go without a place on retail bookstore shelves is truly wrong.

Since Emily St. John Mandel made exigence her goal with The Singer's Gun I decided to align such a noble goal with a classic thriller with not only relevance but near prescience.

Written in 1939, Graham Greene's The Confidential Agent is a brilliant spy novel of plotting, realism and real-world foreshadowing. Incidentally it was written while Greene was working on The Power And The Glory and in time Greene began to obsess over it more than his eventual masterpiece (with a capital M). Later Greene admitted, somewhat puzzled, that it was among the few novels he wrote that he personally enjoyed rereading.

The novel is set in the 1930's during the build-up to World War II. The protagonist has journeyed from his civil war torn country to England to procure a contract for coal that will help his faction's cause greatly. His name is D., and he is a somewhat unlikely agent in the deadly games played by spies during wartime.

D. is an expert on Romance epics and in particular The Song Of Roland. He is a bookish man who has lost much due to the horrors of the war, including his beloved wife. He has seen much death and dealt it himself. Greene uses a unsettling metaphor for D. as a man carrying an infectious disease (the war) with him to this peaceable kingdom.

While never explicitly stated in the novel, Greene later admitted that the agent's war torn country was Spain. The Spanish Civil War turned Spain into a proving ground for Nazi military equipment and while sleepy England looked the other way the storm that would eventually come crashing upon them gathered strength.

When Greene wrote The Confidential Agent the blitz had not happened yet. The cities of England were not yet in ruins. Greene darkly augurs this though in the flashbacks of D., who is haunted by the realities of his poor homeland. Whether the nightmare of being burried beneath a house worth's of rubble or the vision of the countless dead, D. brings these things with him wherever he goes.

D. however is not alone in England. The opposition has sent an agent, well connected and quite talented, to thwart D. in his efforts. First he is bribed, then he is beaten up and still D. plugs along his way to meet with the coal magnate. Of course stronger measures are then called for.

The Confidential Agent is amazing for the nature of its protagonist. He is noble, forthright, and yet clever enough to succeed in a deadly trade. Greene creates a sort of metaphor for civility through comparing D. to the knight Oliver from The Song Of Roland and in turn barbarity and the war itself to the blind pride and powerful anger of Roland himself.

Like all of Greene's spy books, it contains a series of political realities and commentaries that apply uncomfortably with modern times. Like his other thrilling classic The Quiet American, you can't help but be disconcerted in your entertainment while you read The Confidential Agent.

Guess The Back List Free Book Contest

Really struggling to name this installment. It's back though, whatever it's called.

Once again we have a relationship existing between the front list title and the back list title only this time it is somewhat less direct. There is nothing so obvious as the tarot card driven formatting of last week's books. It is perhaps more tenuous but I believe the books hold some form of commonality that is worth noting.

The Front List title for next week is The Singer's Gun by Emily St. John Mandel. It is her second book and a worthy follow up to her exciting debut novel, Last Night In Montreal. Like the latter title it lives somewhere between contemporary literary fiction and thriller genres. In the case of The Singer's Gun it slides further toward the thriller side and in particular spy fiction.

To begin her novel Mandel quotes from a 2003 New York Times article by the writer Michael Pye. In it Pye cites the milieu of post 9/11 world as reason for an effort to form a new sort of travel writing, in particular one that would convey the sense of danger and severity in which our new world lives in.

It is this notion of thrilling exigence that I focused on for this Monday's Back List title. It is adventurous spy fiction crafted by a master of the genre. The lead character is even of literary inclinations, just like the protagonist of Mandel's novel. In both cases there is much shadowing of the character's past endeavors, which over time are revealed.

Remember, the winner is the first to guess correctly the title of the Back List title on the post announcing the contest on Facebook. You will receive the Back List title, free of charge or shipping (anywhere in the world, people). Good luck.

Oh, and two guesses per person. I want brilliance, not work ethic.

Front List / Back List: Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham and The Castle Of Crossed Destinies by Italo Calvino

The tarot card... I look at them with a mixture of scorn, doubt and wonderment. In my personal experiences with the tarot, whether in the hands of a drunken school teacher, a legitimate carny or a real life high priestess, I have universally had dire fortunes foretold.

Upside down major arcana. Death. Impossibly powerful adversaries like the King of Clubs or someone like that. Lots of dreams deferred and strength meeting with failure.

Cue bluesy saxophone.

Every time except once. I was drunk and happy, something that does not necessarily always happen together, and I watched while a woman I loved lay down an Elysian Field of peace and prosperity. Every card sat right-side up and spoke of a welcome future. I was truly amazed, and in the stew of drink I allowed my agnosticism to slip away for a moment and believed that finally the cards had fallen as they should.

I left her apartment sometime later in the night heart-broke, crestfallen and in the rain.

Cut saxophone.

The tarot card is not an augur of the future. It is a vehicle for storytelling and quite possibly the most interesting device of its kind because it makes both players a storyteller and reader all at once.

The person reading the cards must "read" not only the cards laid before them but also the person before them as well. A good tarot reader will know a lot about people and if they know a lot about the particular person then all the better for the story they will render.

In turn the person having their cards "read" has already influenced the story with tell-tale aspects of their personality discerned by the reader but also will "read" the story themselves, translating the reading into a personal rendering that coincides with what the story provokes.

It is more alchemical than magical and in the case of both books offered today the tarot is literally the framework for the story.

From The Front List


Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham. Introduction by Nick Tosches. Fiction. New York Review Of Books. Trade Paperback. 275 pps. ISBN: 9781590173480. $14.95.

Dust when it was dry. Mud whet it was rainy. Swearing, steaming, sweating, scheming, bribing, bellowing, cheating, the carny went its way. It came like a pillar of fire by night, bringing excitement and new things into the drowsy towns - lights and nouse and the chance to win an Indian blanket, to ride on the Ferris wheel, to see the wild man who fondles those rep-tiles as a mother would fondle her babes. Then it vanished in the night, leaving the trodden grass of the field and the debris of popcorn boxes and rusting tin ice-cream spoons to show where it had been.

-from Nightmare Alley

Terribly wonderful. That's the adjective for this book and whatever it lacks in profundity it more than makes up with style and an eyebrow-raising plot that turns a complex sequence of events into page turning bliss. If Chandler and Hammett are considered masters then so must Gresham be.

Though it must be noted that Gresham's twisted majesty has more in common with that of Jim Thompson or James Cain. It has to do with the psychological differences between hard-boiled and noir crime fiction. There is one. It is an important distinction too. The hard-boiled writer deals in the wares of pyrotechnic jargon, cant and masculine violence, while the noir writer plumbs the psyche to go deep into the cause rather than the effect. Gresham, like the aforementioned Thompson, was something of a lay student of Freudian psychology and this is evident in the depth of his characters.

Also like Thompson, Gresham was a tragically doomed drunk. Gresham's biography reads like a list of the symptoms of alcoholism. He wrestled mightily with the disease, seeking out assistance from Freudian psychology, Christianity, Alcoholics Anonymous and Rinzai Buddhism. All were employed and none laid to rest his sodden demons. His supposedly abusive marriage to poet Joy Davidman ended when she left him for C.S. Lewis. It was not long after this occurrence that Gresham committed suicide.

When he was found in his empty apartment he had a suit on and in his pocket he carried business cards that at the four corners read: NO ADDRESS, NO PHONE, NO BUSINESS, NO MONEY and in the center: RETIRED. It was September of 1962. Nightmare Alley, Gresham's biggest critical and monetary success, was utterly out-of-print.

Nightmare Alley is about crime and dilemma, guilt and madness, and pulls you in like the mark that you are. It is a novel about the fast-talking, quick misdirection of carnivals. It is about sexual obsession, murder and above all else, alcoholism.

It has also lived a largely underground existence. When Gresham died, no paper carried the story except the New York Post. The bridge columnist mentioned his passing. It seems the cards at least honored the man they apparently condemned.

The label of cult classic was seemingly the novel's fate. That is until 2010 when New York Review Of Books did what they do and brought it back to life, replete with insightful Foreword by Nick Tosches. This is not a book that should be underground. This is one for the 20th century's "best" lists.

The novel is organized into chapters that are themed and named for what is known as the major arcana of the tarot card deck. These are the most important cards with the weightiest meanings. They are often unchangeable fates and when aligned in a negative manner have dreadful implications. In Gresham's novel the cards are always leading one further down that bad road the title refers to.

Stan Carlisle is our hero, if you will, and we are privileged to watch him grow up "in the carny," that is as a worker in a traveling carnival. Published in 1946 and set around that time, the novel is rich with "old-timey" dialog and the particularly colorful language of the carnival worker. You learn about marks, palming, dabbing cards and above all about the frailties of human perception. Carnies are realists and skeptics, having dissected every magic trick and hustled poor men out of their last few red cents.

Being a work of crime fiction it is always polite to avoid revealing too much of the book. It has its twists and turns and they are very much worth experiencing first hand. This is a tale of fate and the constraints the author placed upon it using the tarot card as a framework lend it a somewhat occult feeling. Also know that there is an almost Chekhovian implication involved in the plot's twists and turns.

Chekhov observed that a gun mentioned in the first chapter must be used at some point in the story. It must fire.

In the case of Gresham's Nightmare Alley the gun is replaced with a bottle of booze.


From The Back List


The Castle Of Crossed Destinies by Italo Calvino. Translated from the Italian by William Weaver. Fiction. Harcourt Brace & Company. Trade Paperback. 129 pps. ISBN: 0156154552. $14.


Personally I find it somewhat humorous that it has been over a year that I've been running this blog and only now have I posted a book by Italo Calvino. Calvino is one of my favorite writers and for me to take this long to post about one of his books is comical.

Calvino was in the cards this week. In the tarot cards to be exact (and slightly cheesy).

Italo Calvino has been called a postmodern, fabulist and probably a combination of the two is not inaccurate. Postmodern is a term that has always bothered me though, because it contains within it a sense of art for art's sake and a form over function approach. Calvino was a brilliant innovator and wrote some of the most unique books of the last century (ever might be more accurate) but he was also a devoted practitioner of storytelling in its oldest, most simple forms. So the nervous and self-conscious tendencies of the postmodern writer don't exactly align with this greatest of Italian raconteurs.

He was however a member of a very elite and rigid group of conceptual writers, at least for a time. The Oulipo (literally meaning "workshop of potential literature") group that I refer to here was mainly populated by French writers, poets and mathematicians. Calvino, Jacques Roubaud and Georges Perec were among the most famous of this group. Of the group it has been the Italian, Calvino, that has had the most lasting effect on literature. I believe this has to do with his story-oriented approach. It's a lot easier to deal with than a novel without the letter "e."

One of the chief techniques implimented by the Oulipo group to further innovate was to set proscribed limitations at the outset of the writing process. Perec's A Void is a classic example of this technique at it's most extreme. By choosing to write an entire novel without the use of the letter "e" is certainly a limitation and by doing so Perec forced himself to spend more time on word choice and planning of the plot.

Calvino took the idea in a different, more accessible direction. Instead of forcing the story in a certain direction due to limitation of assets (terribly economic word) he would frame it within a framework. Whether the starting and stopping of several different books forming a larger work in his most famous novel, If On A Winter's Night A Traveler or via structured digressions within his masterpiece, Invisible Cities, Calvino told plain tales in an extremely regimented manner.

The novel I mention today is The Castle Of Crossed Destinies and it is one of Calvino's most clever offerings. This is saying something as I believe every book the man wrote was extremely clever.

In The Castle Of Crossed Destinies a collection of medieval travelers find themselves in a strange but hospitable castle after journeying through a dense wood. They also find themselves unable to speak. After a sumptuous meal and many a half-pint of wine the diverse company grow frustrated at the inexplicable loss of voice. They each want to tell the tale of how they arrived in this place.

Enter the tarot. The King of the castle produces a large deck of tarot cards and after some explanatory gesticulating the company realizes that with the cards they will have to converse with each other and render their often tragic stories.

Borrowing heavily from his rich repoitoire of folk tales as well as from the Italian epic, Orlando Furioso, Calvino weaves a series of exotic and often magical tales of tragic adventure. There is obviously something of the Canterbury Tales here as well in the structure of the story.

Like Gresham's Nightmare Alley, the use of the tarot cards adds a visual element to the story. Through interpretation of the images on the tarot cards the reader is clued in on what twists and turns the story will take. In Gresham's case it is a clue in the classic whodunnit sort of way.

In the case of Calvino it is a statement on possible ambiguities that exist between storyteller and listener.

Give them both a read if you haven't already. If nothing else it is not a bad thing to aware of the subtleties of that most ancient of weather predictions. Let alone the mischief you can wreak with a working knowledge of people's hopes and dreams.

Next time you get a scary tarot reading you can take the deck and deal one back for the reader, ready to weave for them a tale of their most feared eventualities.

About The Players

Nightmare Alley

Nick Tosches (Introduction) should be read by everyone and his biography can be read about here.

William Lindsay Gresham's tragic life can be read about here.

The Castle Of Crossed Destinies

The Oulipo group can be read about here.

Italo Calvino should be read by everyone alive at least once and his biographical material can be found here.

The Week In Books: Google's E-Bookstore Is Your New Bicycle, Sony E-Reader Proves Schlock Sells Electronically, Mash-Ups - I Hate'Em,

After producing a vat of this stuff, guilty publishers use the remainders to manufacture zombie mash-up novels.

There will be no need to add a hint as to the free book contest at the end of this post, as Christopher Schaeffer knocked my poorly disguised tendencies out of the park. Next week's Back List title is The Castle Of Crossed Destinies by Italo Calvino.

I am that obvious.

In any case, you can check out Mr. Schaeffer on Tumblr. There's a reason he got that so quick. Well, actually it's because I'm that obvious.

Let's have some Week In Books fun now.

Google E-Bookstore Could Be What Is Right

Fair and equitable. This PC World article is by far the best one on Google's plans to launch a e-bookstore this summer. The thing that jumps off the page, er, screen is the fact that Google is going to be very aggressive in its affiliate program in order to coax booksellers, that's right book-jockeys, to participate and sell from their catalog.

If Google can get in the 20% share for booksellers then I for one would fully back their launch and or open an online bookstore. The percentages Amazon offers, or even the program I use with Powell's, is comical at best.

I truly hope Google looks at becoming an online book clearing house. That would be visionary and full of hope.


Sony E-Reader Proving That E-Book Readers Are Run-Of-The-Mill

Per a GalleyCat post, it seems people have actually been buying and using Sony's e-reader...to buy Dan Brown. The 10,000,000th customer purchased Digital Fortress, which if you don't know is one of Brown's...uh...formative works.

It's not that I don't like D. Brown. It's just that I long for a day when Harriet Beecher Stowe was a bestseller. We were there once. We can get there again.

Boy. That was as tender and spirited as I've been in years.

The top 5 list on the Sony E-Reader looks about par for the wasted course. Though it could be worse. It could be a harbinger's registry of publishing woes.

Mash-Ups Have To Go

Seriously. This stuff is inexcusable. Pastiche of a genre of pastiche is, no hyperbole here, awful.

But worthy of a movie option.

It does make sense from a publishing standpoint. There are tons of graduates of writing programs with slickly penned crappy novels (senior thesis) so thoroughly starved of ideas that even they know not to think of them as worthy beyond their own egoism. Yet they are so polished... Really, we need to harness these workshop craftsmen and women. Especially because they write so damn clean. No editing needed at all. A breeze to publish. I know! Let's have them write pastiche!

Please, everyone. No mash-ups at home. What will you tell your grandchildren?

Toronto District School Board Going Electronic With Texts

This is going to happen more and more. Text books are toxic to print, wasteful in consumption and quickly outmoded. This is a good article discussing the precedence of such a decision and what it's impact will be for the city of Toronto.

Free Book Of The Week

You read that correctly. Free book. Every week. But don't get your hopes up too much because this is a contest and to be completely honest, I do not believe it will be easy to win.

Every Wednesday, hopefully earlier than I am posting tonight, I will announce the theme for the forthcoming week's Back List title from Monday's "Front List / Back List" post. If the Back List title relates to the Front List then I will announce the title of the front list book and explain how the back list title relates.

First person to guess the title of the Back List book on the weekly contest post on facebook will receive a free copy of the Back List book.

Realizing that this may prove difficult, I will include a hint at the end of my Friday "Week In Books" post.

If you are unfamiliar with the "Front List/Back List" post here is a short explanation. First a bit of bookseller jargon.

A front list title is one that is current and typically on display. In the case of my posts these books are always new(ish) releases.

A back list title is a title that is no longer new or featured but yet important for filling out the back end of either the publisher's or bookseller's catalog.

In "Front List/Back List" I review a new release (front list) as well as an older (back list) title that pertains to a current event, cultural trend or to themes within the front list title itself. Thus the dusty old title gets to be featured as though new.

So...

Free Book Of The Week Contest

In the case of this week's contests here are the facts.

Next week's Back List title will relate to the Front List title.

The Front List title for next Monday is Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham. Republished for the first time in decades, Nightmare Alley is a brilliantly written novel that revolves around the grimy, violent life of carnies. That's right: carnival workers.

Set in the heyday of carnival shows, with a cast of sideshow freaks and cunning hustlers, Gresham's novel is both revelatory of a particularly rough trade as well as the often painful absurdity of the human condition. Organizing the novel by twenty-two tarot themed chapters, Gresham's book is both mysterious, brilliant and fascinating.

After reading it you'll want to write the good people at New York Review Of Books to thank them for their work in bringing it back to print.

So, tell me dear reader, what is the Back List title for next Monday?

You have until midnight on Sunday, May 9th to answer the question. Remember, you must post your response as a comment on the weekly contest post on the DA's facebook page.

Front List / Back List: The Art Of American Book Covers 1875-1930 and Six Of My Favorite Modern Era Covers

Sorry for the slight delay, folks. There was goat racing on Sunday and a tropical foliage shipment at work on Monday. O diversities of life!

We're having a slight change of pace today as well. Reviewing a new reference/art book that highlights book covers from the heyday of cloth binding: 1875-1930. To follow that I'm listing six modern book covers that rank among my favorites.

It's the old rare book dealer in me. It comes out from time to time.

From The Front List


The Art Of American Book Covers: 1875-1930 by Richard Minsky. Art / Graphic Design. Hardcover. George Braziller, Inc. ISBN: 9780807616024. 134 pps. $34.95.

"In the following pages you will see works by early precursors to Malevich, Marinetti, Kandinsky, Kline, Escher, and other artists. One wonders if the artists had these books in their childhood homes.

-from Richard Minsky's Introduction to The Art Of American Book Covers

I kind of had to stop what I was doing and rush over to Wolfgang Books to pick this one up when my former business partner posted something about this book on facebook. Everyone who follows book design through the years has varied preferences but nearly everyone will be able to name a favorite era.

For me it has always been the late Victorian Era and the Arts & Crafts movement as it changed in the early 20th century. This period, specified in Minsky's book as ranging from 1875 to 1930, is without a doubt the height of cloth-bound book production.

I have always been somewhat of a populist when it comes to books. I love series. Whether the Little Leather Library series of the early teens and twenties or the pillars of modern American publishing like J.M. Dent's Everyman's Library or Boni and Liveright's Modern Library, much of the publishing during the early 20th was concerned with producing nice-looking, high quality books of merit for a large audience.

Cloth, not leather or expensive specially produced paper products, was the vehicle for this change. Gilt stamped impressions, colorful designs and wrap-around illustrations were the hallmarks of the era that preceded these later mass-appeal publications. The effect, as evidenced in Minsky's quote above, is one of prescience concerning the future turns art would take.


One look at Dodd, Mead and Co.'s 1880 wraparound cover for Richard Markham's Aboard The Mavis will instantly explain why someone (you) will want to procure Minsky's book.

Book covers-art is often now designed as a signifier to key readers in on what kind of book they are looking at, and really, there is nothing wrong with that. It is however because of this modern marketing concern that the books chosen by Minsky for his book are much more artistic. In some cases the cover art does not lend itself as paratextual reference at all. Sometimes the gilt peacock feather design is there simply as embellishment and this is what makes the late Victorian-era so stunning.

The cover art was often autonomous to the book itself.



From The Back List

I'm offering up six of my all-time favorite dust jackets today. The jacket began its career in the humble light of utility. It literally was meant to protect the clothnound book beneath. Often these jacket's were plain or merely contained the title and the names of the author and publisher. In time they began to receive increased design and eventually replaced the book itself as the centerpiece of book art.

So here's my top six. I'm thinking that on Thursday I'll post my top six worst covers. You know, for levity.

The Magus by John Fowles. Cover design by Tom Adams. Originally published on the Jonathan Cape edition.


Comment: I have always considered this cover the ultimate in paratextual communication. One finds themselves closing the book at various parts to behold the cover. There is something of the tension and fantastical horror of the book that matches perfectly with Adams cover art.

Incidentally on his website(where you can purchase a poster of the original artwork), Adams remarks that it was on this project that he worked the closest with the author.

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. Cover design by Arnold Skolnick. Originally published by Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich.


Comment: Again, it has to do with paratext. The monochromatic cover design bears the image of a nautilus shell inhabited by people and before it is a sea of small spheres. The chambered nautilus, perfect in its natural design, seems to me the quintessential image for Calvino's masterpiece on the subject of man in society. Plus it's shiny.

The Old Man And The Sea by Ernest Hemingway. Jacket art by A. Originally published by Charles Scribner's Sons.


Comment: I know. It's an iconic cover and no revelation. It is however my favorite design from the greatest era in American fiction and a cover that somehow captures the mystique of the book within, which of course is impressive. One look at this jacket and you're instantly aware that death and triumph are out at sea.

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. Illustration by the author. Originally published by Houghton, Mifflin and Company.


Comment: Hearkening back to William Morris and the Arts & Crafts movement that deeply influenced the father of modern fantasy writing, the original cover art of The Hobbit is perhaps the most perfect union of the book's implication and eye-catching aesthetic ever. It is a masterpiece of book art.

The Trial by Franz Kafka. Jacket art by George Salter. Published by Alfred A. Knopf.


Comment: I have always admired George Salter's jacket art. From iconic books like Atlas Shrugged to lesser known productions like his Kafka illustrations, Salter was prolific and talented.

To me, there is a nearly perfect look of desperation on the simply drawn man on trial in salter's jacket art. The world around him is vague, with only enough detail to remind him and us that he is in fact on trial. Wonderful cover.


The Alcoholics by Jim Thompson. Lion Books. Unknown artist (to me).


Comment: Do I really need to explain this?