Fine Books Blog

Liberal Bias

A couple of issues ago, Nick Basbanes wrote a laudatory column about Dana Gioia, the current chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Nick described how Gioia had taken over the NEA at its lowest point—when calls for its abolishment had reached a fever pitch. Under Gioia's leadership, political support for the agency has gradually grown, along with its funding. Gioia is a poet so it is perhaps not surprising that many of his efforts have been centered on reading and the performance of plays.

That column generated a letter accusing Fine Books of liberal bias. Here is the key part of the letter:

While I am all too aware that the book trade is predominately left leaning, I do not appreciate the assumption that all of us share that political persuasion. Basbanes refers to the Republican-led Congress "slashing" the NEA budget until chairman Gioia took over. However, he completely fails to mention the fact that our Republican president, George W. Bush, requested an $18 million dollar budget increase for the NEA in 2004, the largest increase since 1984.

Contrary to Mr. Basbanes implications, Republicans are not haters of the arts who would prefer to spend their time at NASCAR races than attend a Shakespearean play. It is also highly unlikely that only conservatives were outraged by the kinds of "art" that contributed to the controversy over the NEA, like Andre Serrano’s photographs of crucifixes floating in urine or of the spectacle of naked performance artists smeared with chocolate. Perhaps such works of art had some role in the low expectations of the public toward the NEA. Chairman Gioia certainly deserves high praise for his remarkable improvements in such a short period of time.

I responded, perhaps a bit curtly (for which I apologize):

Mr. Basbanes had no intention of bashing conservatives or Republicans in his story about the revitalization of the NEA. That is very hard to do because many conservatives count “slashing” the NEA’s budget as a proud accomplishment. Tom Coburn, for example, the incumbent representative from Oklahoma, still includes the abolition of the NEA as one of his legislative goals. While Mr. Basbanes did not mention the 2004 increase in the agency’s budget, in the second paragraph of his story he did refer to the even larger increase this year.

Today I received yet another letter, from a different reader, canceling his subscription: "Obviously in your mind one is permitted one attitude to this question and one only. Otherwise, the ridicule comes out."

I have to say, I really don't get it. It's not a secret that the Republican party views the NEA with suspicion and that many Republicans want to eliminate the agency. In fact, proposals to cut tens of millions of dollars from the NEA budget were introduced in Congress this spring by the White House.

Wanting to eliminate or reduce the size of the NEA does not imply that someone is anti-art, just anti government funding for the arts. Certainly many Democrats who support the NEA would much rather watch American Idol than attend an opera funded in part by the NEA, so support for the agency can hardly be construed as implying a passion for the arts.

I think Nick's article on the NEA could be fairly accused of bias, but by the left, not the right. There are many art supporters who feel that under Gioia's leadership (he is a Republican, after all) the NEA has survived by eliminating controversy and seeking the safe middle ground when art should be pushing the boundaries. For political reasons, for example, the NEA has completely stopped funding visual artists.

But Nick's Gently Mad column isn't supposed to give voice to all sides of the story. The column reflects his personality and makes no pretence to exhaustively cover a subject from all sides. In large part, the personality of the column is why so many people read it.

In closing, let me say for the record that Fine Books does not have an official or unofficial position on NEA programs or funding, except that we wish we were eligible for some of the latter.

How Cool Is Blogging

All the big ad agencies are developing blog strategies for their clients. Apparently, if your product hasn't been mentioned in a blog, you're on the road to bankruptcy.

Yesterday, my wife and I received FIVE - count 'em, 5 - green boxes with odd labels. Actually, two were addressed to Fine Books contributors, two to my wife, and one for me. In each box we found a small bottle of Hendrick's gin, a cucumber, and a card with a web address.

Originally, we only opened the ones addressed to us, but once we realized gin - our alcoholic beverage of choice (I've had two today - it was a rough day) - was enclosed, we purloined all five. I'm sure the other Fine Books folks probably didn't want theirs, but I'm not about to ask.

It turned out to be a promotion from Hendrick's, one of our top three gins. Amy and I prefer Beefeater, which I know is a cliche, but it's also the best gin for martinis. Hendrick's is probably our second favorite. (Is anyone from Beefeater reading this - we can be bribed. Really. We once knew an employee of the firm that represented Beefeater, and we really enjoyed the relationship.)

I'm not sure what we were supposed to do with the cucumber. The cocktail recipe Hendrick's provided called for gin (which they kindly sent), mint, soda, ice, and a bit of sugar - ingredients that cost me close to $5. It was a nice cocktail. The recipe didn't include a cucumber, so I sliced one thin and floated it in the drinks.

What does this have to do with book collecting? We're featuring early cocktail books in the next issue.

Bombs away.

Language Landmines

Every issue of Fine Books raises dozens of nitpicky grammar and language questions. Should it be "a half million" or "half a million." Or, for example, a writer recently submitted an essay with the following phrase, "a contemporary book and art collector." I knew that he didn't mean a collector of contemporary books and art. Rather, the reference was to a collector who is active now (contemporary) as opposed to another collector mentioned in the article, who is no longer buying. But the meaning was ambiguous, so I rewrote the sentence.

Many people have very firmly held ideas about language and get very worked up over grammar. A common point of dispute is till vs. until. Often people write 'til, which reflects the idea that till is a shortened, informal form of until. In fact, till is the original form of the word. Our ancestors added the un- prefix to gussy it up (To is another word that was made more impressive with the addition of a prefix. Think "Do unto others... We've largely dropped unto from the language, but until survives).

Another big point of contention is the use of he/she or the singular their to get around the sex bias in statements like "A writer is his own worst critic." Recently over at the Weekly Standard, a Yale professor ranted about how such concerns are destroying our noble language. "How can I teach my students to write decently," he asked, "when the English language has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Academic-Industrial Complex? Our language used to belong to all its speakers and readers and writers. But in the 1970s and '80s, arrogant ideologues began recasting English into heavy artillery to defend the borders of the New Feminist state."

The good-natured linguists over at the Language Log blog have taken his claims on here and here.

They point out that the claim that idea that "he" and "his" are sex-neutral pronouns is simply wrong, and they offer some examples as evidence. If "he" and "his" can accurately refer to women as well as men, then the following sentences should sound fine:

Is it your brother or your sister who can hold his breath for four minutes?

The average American needs the small routines of getting ready for work. As he shaves or blow-dries his hair or pulls on his panty hose, he is easing himself by small stages into the demands of the day.

Another blogger (A Billion Monkeys Can't Be Wrong) notices that our outraged Yale professor undermined his own point when he wrote: “Who can afford to allow a virtual feminist to elbow her way like a noisy drunk into that inner mental circle where all your faculties (such as they are) are laboring to produce decent prose?” Surely, A Billion Monkeys asks, that should be “elbow his way.” Not all feminists are women so the supposedly sex-neutral "he" should apply.

Then there's the Yalie's tirade against the singular their. He lauds Shakespeare and Jane Austen for their commitment to the English language, apparently unaware that they both used their as a singular pronoun. The Language Log has Shakespearean examples here and there's even a website devoted to Ms. Austen's (mis?)use of their.

Whenever possible, I try to avoid the s/he and singular their debates. In many cases, the writing is improved by making a specific point rather than a general one invoking a hypothetical he (e.g., "Judging from the extensive corrections to his manuscripts, Joyce was his own worst critic."). Besides, I have enough trouble deciding whether it should be Web site, web site, or website.

Scary Statistic

Fine Books is a semi-virtual operation. We have an office in Durham, North Carolina, but most of the people who work on the magazine are self-employed freelancers who work from home. We communicate mostly by email. I decided to clean out my sent mail box, which hasn't been touched since October 2006. It contained 7,733 emails, sent over the last 16.5 months. This does not count emails sent from my laptop when I was traveling. That comes to 16 per day. How did people get anything done before email? Or maybe the better question is How do we have time for anything but email?

The Times They Are A Changin'

I've read a lot of manuscripts in the last few years and I've started to notice certain words, phrases, and stylistic types that are quite fashionable right now. One that seems to turn up in virtually every unsolicited submission is "famously," as in "Lane famously shunned war yarns."

Surely you know which Lane we're talking about here, since he was famous for his stand on war books. No? Well the author was referring to Allan Lane. Many readers of this blog my recognize the name, but for those who don't Lane founded Penguin Books. Now Penguin Books, I'd say, is famous. But is Lane? He's influential, yes. Pioneering, yes. Prominent, yes. But truly famous? Not quite. So "famously" is inaccurately used in this context. In fact, it means nearly the opposite - it indicates a very specialized kind of knowledge that insiders know. If he were, in fact, famous, you wouldn't need to say it. No one ever writes, "George Washington, famously the first president of the United States...."

The people who write for Fine Books are influenced by writing elsewhere, and "famously" is a very popular word in contemporary journalism. It happens that Philip Corbett, the New York Times' language editor, - the guy who oversees the way loaded words and serial commas are used in the newspaper - is answering reader questions online this week. I thought I'd mention my pet peeve about "famously"--which appeared five times in the paper the day I asked the question--and he answered that it's on the list for reduced use. You'll have to scroll down a ways to get to it my question and answer, or simply search for "famously" when you get there.

I find discussions about words and their use and meaning to be very interesting. Now that I have to see so many words into print, I find I've become less dogmatic about it. It's tremendously difficult to get everything right all the time, and sometimes there's being right and being dead right. Some writers sound great until you start enforcing all the rules, and by the time you're done, all the life has gone out of the prose. So we do our best, knowing there's always another issue. And, even though I am now famously on record as opposing the word famously, it happens that I let "famously" slip into our November/December issue.

Editing a Magazine

This video is a British comedy sketch from Mitchell & Webb. It  shows how many of the contributors to Fine Books & Collections feel about the editing process:

Shrinkback

Shrinkback is not a bad 80s New Wave band (that was Shriekback). No, "shrinkback" is a particularly odious bit of corporate-ease from the magazine distribution industry. Magazine distribution has improved immeasurably from the days when it was mostly run by the mafia, but it's still a tough business. [This post is one of my periodic reports from the world of magazine publishing.]

A few years ago, Barnes & Noble came up with this new idea, "Pay on Scan." I've been told by people who were around when B&N went to that system that the idea was that B&N would pay for magazines as they sold them. In reality, we've had magazines in B&N for 15 months now and have received exactly one check, sometime last year.

No, Pay on Scan put B&N at the forefront of the biggest change in retailing. Big chain stores are gradually getting out of the business of owning inventory. They just sell stuff. The manufacturers still own it while merchandise sits in the store, and they take all the risk for theft and damage.

In our case (as shown in the scan above), B&N could not account for 53 copies of our July/August 2006 magazine. They might have been stolen, damaged, lost, or sold by a clerk who forgot to scan them in (magazines have to be scanned, then the price entered manually). In any case, they didn't get scanned and we didn't get paid. This is called "shrinkback." To top it off, our distributor says, "We sent the magazines out and didn't get them back, so as far as we're concerned they were sold, and we're taking our commission."

Another fun fact about distribution is that no one returns magazines anymore. They just fill out a form that says how many copies they are "returning," and then they are supposed to throw the rest away. Curiously, we have FB&C in stores that routinely "return" 7 copies when they only received 5. Nice.

As I said, retail distribution isn't for the faint of heart.

Meandering Monday

Just a few random thoughts to start of the week.

New Issue Our 25th issue arrived from the printer on Friday. Subscribers in New England (near our printer) should have the January/February issue any day now. They rest of the country will follow as fast as the Post Office will deliver them.

RK Narayan The December 18th issue of the New Yorker has a truly excellent article about RK Narayan, one of the authors I collect. I need just four books to complete my collection. I hope the current Narayan revival doesn't push them out of my price range when they finally turn up (in 15 years, I've never seen any of the first editions I'm seeking offered for sale).

The Believer McSweeney's literary magazine for November (okay, this is late, but I have a lot of magazines to get through each month and sometimes I fall behind) has an article by some-time FB&C contributor Paul Collins' about the murder of Maria Marten, which he links to the origins of modern crime reporting. It's an interesting essay based on the book and broadsides published about the case. [A list of books is here]. A copy of the primary account of the case and the trial was bound in human skin, a subject I blogged about as Paul was working on the article. Judging from the number of hits this blog gets on the subject, it's a popular topic, at least among a certain crowd.

Directory or No Directory?

One of the ideas we've been tossing about at Fine Books is to publish a directory of used and antiquarian bookstores. One one hand, an annually updated guide to bookstores seems like it would be very useful. On the other, there are fewer shops to visit each year and people buy and sell more and more online. What do you think? Are directories old news or just the ticket? Please post comments to elaborate on your views. We'd really like the feedback.

I thought I might respond publicly to a private comment - "Wouldn't this step on the toes of the folks who do the regional guides?" I suppose it's possible, but they coexisted with AB Bookman's directory and then there's Sheppard's directories, too. The regional guides are like the Michelin guides for restaurants. They go to every store. We wouldn't do that, but we might publish more often instead.

Complete Digital Issue

Today we launched a new feature on our website - a complete sample issue in a cutting-edge digital format. A lot of people want to see a copy of Fine Books & Collections before buying it so we created an online version of our January/February 2006 issue.

I think the technology's pretty cool - you can flip through the magazine, click the page when you want to zoom in to read. Click again and you're browsing again. You can even print a low-res version. As an added bonus, all the hyperlinks in the text and the ads are live.

Personally, I hate reading an entire magazine like this, and we don't plan to start publishing a digital edition, but for a sample copy, I've never seen anything better.

So take a look, and then subscribe. Six issues - nearly 500 pages on book collecting in full color - are just $25 (in the US). It's hard to beat.