Recessions and Reading goes up!Ben Macintyre in the UK Times writes:
"Publishing may be facing the same problems as other businesses, but some books are booming. Escapist romantic fiction is in the pink. Mills & Boon is selling three books a second, and Cheryl Cole, of Girls Aloud, has signed a £5million deal to write romantic novels. Sales of misery memoirs, by contrast, are dwindling: the pleasure of wallowing in someone else's unhappiness, it seems, is less poignant in hard times. Some recessionary reading is self-explanatory, such as Gill Holcombe's bestselling How to Feed Your Whole Family a Healthy Balanced Diet, with Very Little Money and Hardly Any Time, even if You Have a Tiny Kitchen, only Three Saucepans (One With an Ill-fitting Lid) and no Fancy Gadgets - Unless You Count the Garlic Crusher...Books about growing vegetables, slow cooking and knitting are all doing well.
Marx is selling well, as is Keynes. Galbraith's 1954 treatise on the implosion of Wall Street, The Great Crash, 1929, has become required reading: politicians make a point of claiming to be rereading it, a sure sign they have never read it before.Sales of Dickens, Thackeray and Trollope have jumped by more than 15 per cent in the past few months, as readers hark back to a Victorian world in which financial uncertainty was ingrained in daily life, and the soul-deadening pursuit of money ruthlessly satirised.
Where we have Bernard Madoff, Trollope invented Augustus Melmotte, the unscrupulous fraudster and stock-swindler, and Dickens created Mr Merdle, the dodgy financial fat cat of an earlier age: “All people knew (or thought they knew) that he had made himself immensely rich; and, for that reason alone, prostrated themselves before him.” ...
But there is another recession-driven bestseller that speaks volumes about attitudes towards the global economic crisis. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand's epic 1,000-page novel extolling capitalism and the virtues of self-interest, has tripled its sales in the past seven months, and sold an astonishing 200,000 copies in the US in 2008, more than at any time since it was first published in 1957". Read more here
A Dysfunctional Reading Quiz
The UK Guardian asks readers to find out how messed up their reading habits are "by taking this therapeutic quiz about some of literature's most remarkably messed-up characters, including Jane Eyre, Oedipus Rex, Anna Karenina, Phèdra and more".
The Helen Coonan Cocktail
The National Press Club's member's notice board lists their March Cocktail of the Month as The Helen Coonan at $8!
"The Helen Coonan by Tim O'Shea - Muddled lemon shaken with frangelico, grey goose vodka and ice. Named after the Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs and Manager of Opposition Business in the Senate as it is a pale blonde in colour".
Will Jason Donovan make a good drag queen?
The UK Times has an interview with Jason Donovan who is about to star in the West End production of Priscilla Queen of the Desert: the Musical "once he's learnt the steps". Donovan looks lean and toned, far less podgy than a couple of years ago. He has less hair than he had 20 years ago, but he's not nearly as bald as pictures can suggest. We have met to discuss his forthcoming role in the West End stage production of Priscilla Queen of the Desert the Musical. This should not be referred to as a “comeback”, for reasons that we shall address, but it will be his most visible performing incarnation in a few years, at least since he wandered back into public consciousness as everybody's favourite I'm a Celebrity... contestant in 2006. With a few weeks until the curtain goes up, Donovan is excited and terrified. Many actors would hide the terror. Donovan doesn't hide much."
A Swift Acquisition
Rare Book Review and the British Library have reported the acquisition by the BL of the archive of noted British novelist Graham Swift. The collection of 75 file boxes dates back from the 1970s and contains manuscripts, notes, revisions, and proofs for Swift's eight novels including, Waterland, his Booker Prize-winning Last Orders, and his recently published non-fiction collection Making an Elephant... The archive also draws together professional correspondence between Swift and his contemporaries: Andrew Motion, Kazuo Ishiguro, Pat Barker, Michael Ondaatje, Ted Hughes and Caryl Phillips.
Jamie Andrews, Head of Modern Literary Manuscripts at the British Library, explained how the Swift archive ties in with other British Library collections. "There are significant connections with archives the British Library already holds - particularly the recently acquired Ted Hughes archive. Hughes's letters to Swift record fishing trips they enjoyed together that Hughes himself describes in the fishing diaries in his own archive. In addition to the wonderful manuscripts, letters, scrapbooks, and tapes, we will also be using panoramic digital photography to record a 3-D simulation of Graham Swift's workspace, as part of our new process of 'enhanced curation'," he added.
"I'm delighted my archive will have a home not just in this country, but in the British Library in London,” said Graham Swift. “I can't think of where it could be better looked after, but as I'm a Londoner it's in every sense ideal. I shall always know my manuscripts are just up the road."The total cost to purchase the archive, including cataloguing and conservation costs, was £110,000, and £10,000 of that was generously funded by the Friends of the British Library.
The Times Literary Supplement (Paul Gifford) wonders if Paul Valéry is the ultimate French intellectual?
"T. S. Eliot hailed Paul Valéry as the representative poet of the first half of the twentieth century (“not Rilke, not Yeats, nor anyone else”). This new biography broadens the specification: the most distinguished, versatile and best-connected mind of his time; the ultimate French intellectual; le contemporain capital, whose life (from 1871 to 1945) forms the most searching prism held up to a world-changing epoch of European history.
Such large claims belong implicitly to this doorstopper of a book, over 1,300 pages in length, richly illustrated and with scholarly notes for specialist readers, as well as a serviceable index (helpful to the far greater number who will consult it as a reference work). The thoroughness of Michel Jarrety’s research produces a plethora of evidence: private letters made available by copyright-holders, memoirs of contemporaries, recently published diaries of key figures in Valéry’s personal life, newspaper articles and reviews; the proceedings of the organizations in which he held high office, personal papers of all kinds (love poems, draft letters, invitations, bank statements, stock exchange reports - Valéry threw nothing away)...
Valéry’s circle of contacts remains dazzling. He was intimate with leading poets and writers (Mallarmé, Gide, Rilke); he worked alongside Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Thomas Mann, Gabriele d’Annunzio, John Galsworthy and Stefan Zweig; he exchanged ideas with André Malraux, Jean Giraudoux, Colette and Paul Claudel (but also with George Meredith, Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley); his lectures at the Collège de France were an influence on Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Michel Tournier, Yves Bonnefoy and Paul de Man. Who else with such a profile could also have had Einstein as trusted interlocutor and colleague, discussed atoms with Niels Bohr, or the crisis of representation in sciences with the likes of Paul Langevin and Émile Borel; compared notes with Ravel and Stravinsky, Degas and Picasso; collaborated with Bergson and Sir James Frazer; interacted with both Pétain and de Gaulle; interviewed Mussolini and crossed paths with an entire gallery of Europe’s interwar power-brokers? To say nothing of the cast list of princesses, duchesses, countesses and other denizens of the cosmopolitan, high-society Paris salons who provided the writer with dinners, contacts, funding, entertainment, country-seat vacationing, confidantes and lovers." More here
Our guilty secrets: the books we only say we've read
The UK Guardian reports that in a recent survey 65% admitted lying about classic novels. "George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four comes top in a poll of the UK's guilty reading secrets. Asked if they had ever claimed to read a book when they had not, 65% of respondents said yes and 42% said they had falsely claimed to have read Orwell's classic in order to impress. This is followed by Tolstoy's War and Peace (31%), James Joyce's Ulysses (25%) and the Bible (24%). The poll, conducted to tie in with World Book Day today, also reveals that many of us are impatient readers - we skip to the end - and are not particularly bothered about how we treat the actual book - we turn the page to keep our place.
While 33% say they have never lied, a clear majority have. The writer Francesca Simon, creator of the Horrid Henry children's books, believes it is possible to get sucked into making false claims. She recalled an Oxford don asking her if she knew the works of Italo Calvino. "I said that I'd heard of him and she started questioning me over which books I had read and I couldn't get out of it. It felt lamer to then say 'yes I've heard of him'. Like saying 'yes, I've heard of Shakespeare'. I think she just thought I was stupid. When asked to name the writers they really enjoyed, 61% of people ticked JK Rowling and 32% John Grisham."
The Jane Austen Quiz on "Jane Austen and the Clergy"
The March issue of the Jane Austen Newsletter has a quiz with questions inspired by a recent reading of "Jane Austen and the Clergy" by Irene Collins. Note the "quotations" are Ms. Collins' and the 'quotations' are Austen's.
The Victoria and Albert Museum is "talking 'bout my inspiration"
As the V&A opens its new Theatre and Performance Galleries, the UK Times reports on leading figures in show business who have chosen a favourite exhibit. Two are listed here.
"Darcey Bussell, dancer
Tutu worn by Margot Fonteyn in Swan Lake, Vienna Ballet, 1964. My mother sent me to ballet classes when I was 5 and from then on I wanted to keep perfecting the technique and dance. When I did see ballet on the stage it blew me away. You suddenly realise why you're training day and night. At first I just wanted to impress but then it became something very different.
Andrew White, guitarist, Kaiser Chiefs
Pete Townshend's smashed guitar. The first time I heard The Who, I was 5 or 6, and my brother, who was about 17, had a dodgy copy of Quadrophenia and he was watching it on Betamax. I saw the part where Jimmy was in the front room watching Ready, Steady, Go, and The Who were the act playing. Jimmy was air-drumming along and his dad was shouting from the kitchen: “What's that racket?”and Jimmy was saying “Shut up”. I've always had that image of The Who. The music they make, you can pose and strut to it. The Who have done a few film scores but even their other albums sound like film scores. There's so much imagery in the music, you can imagine standing on a cliff top. Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey's lyrics are amazing. They evoke so many emotions from such simple words. It's a huge stadium act - how can they be so grand and yet so personal? It's something we strive towards - and we fail. You want that pomp, the rock'n'roll, the lights, the explosions, but you still want to make the audience cry because of the music and it's very rare that bands can do that.
The guitar smashing thing, that's showmanship. I can't do that, I'm not that sort of person. I'm the opposite of what a guitarist should be. The Who and Jimi Hendrix, they were pioneers of rock'n'roll showmanship. They could still make good music even when they had no instruments, when Pete Townshend's guitar was jammed in the ceiling." More here
Jeane tte Winterson revisits Shakespeare and Company in Paris
Down and out in Paris For half a century, a crowded bookshop on the Left Bank has offered food and a bed to penniless authors - the only rule is that they read a book a day. More here
John Mullan in the Guardian lists ten of the best misers in fiction
"Malbecco
Mise rs often have attractive wives or daughters. In Book III of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, the knights Satyrane and Paridell seek shelter at a castle owned by suspicious old Malbecco, "a cancred crabbed Carle". His mind is set only on "mucky pelfe, / To hoord up heapes of evill gotten masse". Malbecco's frisky young wife Hellenore runs off with Paridell, and the miser's loot is stolen.
Shylock
Shakespear e's moneylender is surely a great miser, whose accumulation of wealth is his measure of his vengeful power. But then everybody in Venice is money-obsessed, and his most famously miserly exclamation - "My daughter! O my ducats! O my daughter!" - is reported by the unreliable Solario.
Volpone
Ben Jonson's fox-like anti-hero is the poet laureate of misers, uncharacteristically able to transmute his love of wealth into verse. "Dear Saint, / Riches, the dumb god that giv'st all men tongues." He uses his gold to make fools of greedy predators, basing his manipulation of others on the sound theory that they are as avaricious as he." More here
Big Money Signatures
Dealers in celebrity signatures, as featured in Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man, gathered on Saturday 7th March at a Heathrow hotel for the latest sale by International Autograph Auctions Ltd, Great Britain’s leading specialist autograph auctioneers. The top sales, just announced were:
Lot 543 - John F. Kennedy & Jacqueline Kennedy signed wedding photograph - £6,100
Lot 550 - Hirohito signed official presentation photograph - £6,000
Lot 321 - Albert Einstein signed photograph - £4,900
Lot 472 - [John Wilkes Booth] Walking cane - £3,800
Lot 325 - Alexander Fleming signed book - £2,400
Lot 515 - Napoleon I letter signed - £2,100
Lot 649 - Joseph Priestley A.L.S - £1,800
Lot 613 - Adolf Hitler signed photograph - £1,600
Lot 355 - Charles M. Schulz signed drawing - £1,450
Lot 614 - Adolf Hitler D.S. - £1,400
Shirley Hughes Interview
In the UK Guardian, there is a long interview with UK childrens author Shirley Hughes. "Once there was a soft brown toy called Dogger. One of his ears pointed upwards and the other flopped over. His fur was worn in places because he was quite old. He belonged to Dave. So begins Dogger, Shirley Hughes's 1977 story about the much-loved cuddly toy who went missing, turned up on a stall at the school fete and was ultimately reunited with the heartbroken little boy. The book, which won the prestigious Kate Greenaway award, elevated Hughes to the front rank of writer-illustrators for children and was the launchpad for sales that are now well over 10 million.
Although Hughes is best known for characters such as Dave, and even more so for Alfie, the perennial pre-schooler whose small-scale triumphs and disasters have sustained a dozen bestselling books, her work for young children forms only part of a remarkably varied and productive career. She has written more than 50 books - and illustrated many more than that for other people - that include history, memoir and stories for older children. At any one time she'll usually have four or five different projects on the go. At the moment she is at proof stage with a story featuring another pre-schooler and also has in her head an idea "that's too early in gestation to talk about sensibly." More here
Quote of the Week
"Elizabeth Taylor is the Queen of sequential monogamy". Arianna Huffington
Odd Book Title
Careers in Dope. By Dan Waldorf. Prentice Hall 1973.
In Libraries Australia here.
Pun of the Week
The first dog kennels were rented on a 20 year leash.
Email a friend