Reviewing the Book Review


As the publication celebrates its 125th anniversary, Parul Sehgal, a staff critic and former editor at the Book Review, delves into the archives to critically examine its legacy in full.
Journalist goes through 125 years of book reviews looking for women, people of color, queerness.

Revisiting the midcentury: "I’d innocently ( Read more... )

Leah Price's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading" (2019), p. 23:

"Perhaps print is to digital as Madonna is to whore: we worship one but use the other."

We're currently shopping for button-making devices to up our give-away game. "The future of book history is _______". What would YOU finish the sentence with?

(So far I've come up with "feminist," "decolonized", and "anti-racist.")

By way of a listserv thread that devolved from a CFP on ancient texts and into grumps about the field's current trend towards globalized contexts ( Read more... )

The White House chief calligrapher has a higher clearance than Jared Kushner

Snip:

The calligrapher's office plays a key role in White House diplomacy. The East Wing, which oversees the calligrapher's office, declined to comment on the role of the chief calligrapher or why a top secret clearance is necessary.

But former chief calligrapher Rick Paulus ( Read more... )

I've talked about this before, but I just had to finish reading Fred Smeijers Counterpunch: Making Type in the Sixteenth Century, Designing Typefaces Now, and it made me angry, so I'm going to rant ( Read more... )

"Dark books:
What’s more wholesome than reading? Yet books wield a dangerous power: the best erode self, infecting readers with ideas" by Tara Isabella Burton

In his condemnatory tract Popular Amusements (1869), the American clergyman Jonathan Townley Crane cautioned his flock against reading novels: ‘novel-readers spend many a precious hour in ( Read more... )

"What is an @uthor?" by Matthew Kirschenbaum

But there is also a new kind of archive taking shape. Today you cannot write seriously about contemporary literature without taking into account myriad channels and venues for online exchange. That in and of itself may seem uncontroversial, but I submit we have not yet fully grasped all of the ( Read more... )

The Trickle-Down Effect of Genre Bookselling by Andrew Liptak

Paperback novels, largely denied a place in “proper” bookstores, had found their ways into consumers’ hands by going through magazine channels, which distributed books to department and grocery stores, as well as newsstands. In 1961, the first bookstore opened that sold paperback ( Read more... )

1) "Anonymous was a woman ( Read more... )