Judge Withdraws Over Philip Roth's Booker Win
Source: guardian.co.uk
Author and publisher Carmen Callil has withdrawn from the judging panel of the Man Booker International prize over its decision to honour Philip Roth with the £60,000 award. Dismissing the Pulitzer prize-winning author, Callil said that "he goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book. It's as though he's sitting on your face and you can't breathe".
One of three judges on the panel for the literary award, alongside rare book dealer and author Rick Gekoski, who acted as chair, and novelist Justin Cartwright, this morning Callil revealed that, after the decision was made to give the prize to Roth from a shortlist which also featured Philip Pullman, Anne Tyler and Marilynne Robinson, she decided to retire from the panel.
"I don't rate him as a writer at all. I made it clear that I wouldn't have put him on the longlist, so I was amazed when he stayed there. He was the only one I didn't admire – all the others were fine," said Callil, who will explain why she believes Roth is not a worthy winner in an outspoken column in the Guardian Review on Saturday 21 May. "Roth goes to the core of their [Cartwright and Gekoski's] beings. But he certainly doesn't go to the core of mine ... Emperor's clothes: in 20 years' time will anyone read him?"
Founder of the feminist publishing house Virago, Callil is also the author of Bad Faith, a history of Vichy France. "I've judged many prizes before and I've rarely had my own favourite – it's always a question of 'I think X is a genius and you don't, so let's go for Y'. That didn't happen," she said. "We should have discussed everything more, but Philip Roth came out like a thunderbolt, and I was too surprised. We took a couple of days to brood, and then I spoke to Justin and said I thought I should give in, if I didn't have to have anything to do with the winner. So I said I didn't want my name attached to it, and retired. You can't be asked to judge, and then not judge."
Gekoski, speaking from the Sydney Writers' festival, said that the decision to give the prize to Roth had been reached "slowly and with a great deal of discussion and a considerable amount of argument".
"Three is a very dangerous number, a hard number to come to a decision. Two people came in very, very strongly supporting one writer, and one not," he said. "Literary prizes are generally pretty contentious [and] you have to guard against satisfying the judges rather than picking the right author. Saying let's compromise – nobody wants [this author] to win but we can live with it ... Well, my view is you want to get passionate support for someone."
All three judges, said Gekoski, "felt very, very strongly about the reading, about the process, about who should win". "We have read our guts out for the last 18 months, so to do that and not come up with someone you can care about is a painful thing and not a desirable thing. I entirely understand that," he said. But, he went on, in a field that included Roth, "tell me who else we could have picked".
"In 1959 he writes Goodbye, Columbus and it's a masterpiece, magnificent. Fifty-one years later he's 78 years old and he writes Nemesis and it is so wonderful, such a terrific novel ... Tell me one other writer who 50 years apart writes masterpieces," Gekoski said. "If you look at the trajectory of the average novel writer, there is a learning period, then a period of high achievement, then the talent runs out and in middle age they start slowly to decline. People say why aren't Martin [Amis] and Julian [Barnes] getting on the Booker prize shortlist, but that's what happens in middle age. Philip Roth, though, gets better and better in middle age. In the 1990s he was almost incapable of not writing a masterpiece – The Human Stain, The Plot Against America, I Married a Communist. He was 65-70 years old, what the hell's he doing writing that well?"
In her Guardian Review column, Callil also writes of her disappointment that the prize failed to celebrate writers in translation – the shortlist also included the Chinese authors Wang Anyi and Su Tong, the Spanish Juan Goytisolo, Italian Dacia Maraini and Lebanese Amin Maalouf – honouring instead "yet another North American writer".
"Obviously [writers in translation] have a disadvantage and there's no sense pretending they don't, of being read in translation," said Gekoski. "They are disenfranchised in that way, [but] ask me who my favourite writers are and it's Flaubert and Dostoyevsky – if the quality's there, it will shine through."
The prize in his view, though, is "not about who's the best: I think that's fatuous". Instead, it's about honouring "achievement in fiction".
"Are we saying Philip Roth is the best living novelist in the world? I don't know I want to say that. But he is the one we have chosen to honour and there are very good reasons for that," he said.
There's a market for high-end, luxury books
How much would you pay for a book?
Not for a rare book, a Shakespeare folio or a Gutenberg Bible to keep under glass, but for a volume simply to grace your bookshelves or your coffee table.
Would $199 be too much? Sports artist Dick Perez hopes that 5,000 people are willing to put out that amount for The Immortals, a collection of his portraits of Baseball Hall of Famers.
What about $461.62? That's what online bookseller Amazon is asking for Microsoft executive-turned-chef Nathan Myhrvold's new, six-volume culinary compendium Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking.
How about $15,000, the publisher's list price for the "Champ's Edition" of GOAT: A Tribute to Muhammad Ali (Greatest of All Time), featuring more than 3,000 images, plus a small sculpture by Jeff Koons and four silver gelatin prints signed by photographer Howard L. Bingham and Ali? Or $4,500 for the "Collector's Edition," with a Koons photo-litho instead of the sculpture and without the silver gelatin prints?.
In an era when the popularity of e-books has exploded and hardcover volumes seem destined to go the way of the LP, high-priced books are holding on.
"Expensive coffee-table books are not facing the same pressures as other books," says Lynn Andriani, a senior editor for the trade journal Publishers Weekly. "The expensive books keep coming."
That's because e-books don't satisfy a book lover's yen for "that really nice special edition," explains her colleague, PW features editor Andrew R. Albanese.
Beauty sells, and costly books are all about beauty, usually in the form of art or photography. The book itself becomes a piece of art, "something tactile, that you can hold and feel and see the quality of," says Creed Poulson, public-relations manager for the American subsidiary of the German firm Taschen. Taschen publishes GOAT and other high-end books, including a "Collector's Edition" of Linda McCartney: Life in Photographs that comes in a clamshell box, is signed by Paul McCartney, and sells for $1,000. (The trade edition, not signed by Paul, is $69.99).
Rarely, an expensive book surprises even its publisher and sells a lot more copies than anticipated. The Red Book, a reproduction of an illuminated manuscript by the famed psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, has racked up about 50,000 sales in English language translation since W.W. Norton published it in October 2009, says James Mairs, its editor. The volume, which measures 18 inches long by 12.3 inches wide by 2.5 inches thick and weighs 9.4 pounds, carries a price tag of $195, but is available online for $109.
The Red Book is "an anomaly," Mairs adds. The manuscript, in which Jung worked out some of the essentials of his psychology, had lain unpublished for decades in a safe in Switzerland, where only a few people had access to it. "There was a pent-up demand that we don't see for many books we publish," Mairs says.
The coffee-table niche is seldom so wide. While expensive books may not be going away, their audience remains small and their production costs large, a combination that makes publishers cautious. Mairs' colleagues at Norton proceeded cautiously with The Red Book, rejecting Mairs' suggestion of a first printing of 15,000 in favor of a safer 5,000. Even Taschen does not deal exclusively in big-ticket books. Its catalogue includes a GOAT edition for $150 and other titles for less than $20.
Bookstores are even warier than publishers of expensive titles. Chain bookstores, which rely on moving large numbers of books quickly, don't want to carry books priced north of $200, says Publishers Weekly's Albanese. Independent bookstores are also chary of such costly books. Michael Fox, proprietor of Joseph Fox Booksellers in Center City, says he handles "maybe one or two at Christmas time."
Taschen solves the problem by having its own chain of 12 bookstores in the United States and Europe, but that's not a road many publishers want to travel.
Faced with cautious publishers and reluctant bookstores, some authors like Perez and Myhrvold opt for self-publishing, becoming part of what Albanese calls "a very strong trend."
"A lot of of authors are examining the price of production and finding that the margins kind of work for them," Albanese says. The Internet makes it possible for them to sell their books themselves rather than rely on a publisher for distribution. "It's not that difficult to reach a global market [online]," Albanese says, though he says it's "not exactly a mature market."
Still, Perez and Myhrvold think it's mature enough.
Perez, official artist of the Phillies and formerly official artist of the Baseball Hall of Fame, acknowledges that The Immortals is "a niche book, even though it's baseball and baseball is popular. It's not a Stephen King book, or Ken Follett, or whatever."
Which is why he decided to print only 5,000 copies of the 560-page book, which includes 1,400 of his paintings, about 400 of them not previously published. He has no plans for a second printing.
The former graphic designer put the book together himself. He got historian William C. Kashatus to write the text.
"It's a huge book," says Perez, in the living room of his Wayne home, which is lined with his work and lit like an art gallery. "The stock is 100-pound test, which is the best. The stock and the binding is probably more than the printing." He says each volume costs about $50 to $75 to produce, not including his time during the last three years.
Perez did his own marketing, designing a brochure and mailing thousands of copies. (The book is sold through Amazon.com and www.dickperezimmortals.com)
Perez' strategy has been to sell the book as a collectible. It helps that "people know me as the baseball artist," he says.
And while it's a product of passion, Perez wants it to be profitable. "I've got my legacy there," he says. "If I break even, maybe make a few bucks, I'm happy."
Like Perez, Myhrvold, Microsoft's former chief technology officer, decided to self-publish his big book. He talked to commercial publishers, but decided early in 2010 to go his own way, said Wayt Gibbs, the cookbook's editor.
"There were a couple of factors," says Gibbs, a former senior writer for Scientific American magazine. "Commercial publishers are limited in some respects with books for which demand is unproven. The natural thing is to err on the side of prudence and order fewer rather than more. There's a pretty steep manufacturing cost, so the price has to be pretty high for that reason - so much so that it's terra incognita for commercial publishers. Nathan comes from a different business perspective. It didn't make sense to sink all this capital into producing so few books that you barely make a profit at it."
Gibbs explains that Myhrvold "set out to make a smaller book that would be priced under $100," but the scope of the project "grew and grew," expanding to six volumes - five volumes of recipes and a one-volume kitchen manual.
About 50 people worked on the project at one time or another, says Gibbs: "Four full-time research cooks, an art director . . . dozens of free-lance writers and editors, as well as two indexers."
Why did someone like Myhrvold, with his extensive computer background, not just opt for digital publication?
The beauty factor.
"He chose print because it's the best way to show big, beautiful, explanatory photos," Gibbs says. "If you shrink that down and put it on a small screen, the text becomes illegible."
By mid-April, orders for the set had reached 8,000, exceeding the first printing of 6,000 copies, according to the Modernist Cuisine website. "The remaining 2,000 or so orders . . . will be filled when copies arrive from the second printing, starting in July," Gibbs continued.
Myhrvold and his team "are quite relieved and pleased with the demand for this book," Gibbs says. "We're looking for a much larger second printing."
[Top]Signed, Limited Orlando by Virginia Wolf Offered For Sale
Source: Paul Frasier Collectibles
Rare limited edition copy of Orlando signed by the author
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is often regarded as one of the foremost modernist figures in literature of the 20th century.
Her most famous works include Orlando, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse.
After battling bouts of depression for much of her life, Woolf filled her pockets with stones and drowned herself in the River Ouse near her home in Sussex in 1941.
Offerred for sale is a magnificent book. It is a hardcover first edition of Orlando, measuring 6.25" x 9.25". It is one of only 800 limited edition copies of the book signed by the author, this being number 465.
Orlando, published in 1928, is a novel partly based on Woolf's lover Vita Sackville-West.
The book has been signed by Woolf in purple ink on the reverse of the half title page. The autograph is in excellent condition.
The book also features an owner's bookplate which has been affixed to the front pastedown showing the books original owner was the famous American Impressionist landscape painter Daniel Garber. This copy originates from Garber's personal library - the bookplate reads "Ex Libris - Daniel and Mary F Garber". Garber's paintings are now on display at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C.
Pencil notations have been made on the first, blank page. The book also features some light overall toning and some light sunning to the spine, otherwise it is in fine condition.
A rarely seen signed edition of an important 20th century novel with great provenance having come from the library of Daniel Garber.
For sale: £1,950 About $3170 For More Information contact Paul Frazier Collectibles
Opportunities like this don't come along very often, especially not with a 15% discount on the market value. Be quick to act and secure this magnificent item.
[Top]Magnificent Desolation Signed by the Astronaut Buzz Aldrin
Source: Paul Frazier Collectibles
Buzz Aldrin is an American mechanical engineer and astronaut who was the Lunar Module pilot on Apollo 11, the first manned landing on the moon in history. On July 20 1969, he became the second person to set foot on the moon behind mission commander Neil Armstrong.
Magnificent Desolation (2009) is a book by Buzz Aldrin which features beautiful images from the Apollo 11 mission with words from the famous astronaut. It was published to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the first manned lunar landing in history.
This first edition copy of Magnificent Desolation is limited to five hundred copies, all of which have been signed by Aldrin.
This copy features Aldrin's autograph clearly in blue ink on a white page at the front of the book. It comes complete with a Certificate of Authenticity stating that the book was hand-signed by Buzz Aldrin on August 21 2008 in the presence of Jack Bacon (publisher). The certificate is signed by Bacon and Gregory G. Krisilas of Coconut Rosie Books.
Buzz Aldrin signed book
A wonderful memoir of one the most incredible historic events.
For sale: £595
All items are sold with:
A Certificate of Authenticity
Free insured delivery
Paul Frazier Collectibles
Considering that Buzz's autograph on a signed photo has increased in value by 347.5% in the last 10 years we reckon these books offer a great opportunity, especially given the price...
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