Health Insurance and Shostakovich — Caustic Cover Critic interviews über-book designer Peter Mendelsund:
Book jackets, mind you — which are already needless, redundant, frivolous items in life’s already cluttered inventory — themselves need designing. This arcane little tidbit came as something of a shock to me. “Someone gets paid for that?”
The Ampersand — a blog about ampersands. Really.
Hard Decisions — the National Post interview Andrew Steeves, co-founder and co-publisher of Gaspereau Press, about their recently announced cutbacks:
I think it’s important to stress that I don’t think this is directly related to the more general economic downturn. Honestly, when you start a business from scratch you gradually try and figure out what size works for what you’re doing. I mean, you go through so many years where there isn’t a normal; the year previous can tell you nothing about what to expect.
And more good stuff from the National Post — In this month’s installment of their Ecology of Books series, Mark Medley talks to Evan Munday of Coach House Books, and looks at the thankless task of being a book publicist.
The Wankers Shelf — Nicholas Royle on the ethical dilemma presented by authors who are wankers (via 3:Am Magazine):
Do you have a Wankers shelf? I do. It’s for books by Wankers. Books that are so bad – or books by authors who are Wankers, whose books might actually be OK, from time to time, but they themselves are such unbearable Wankers – that you wonder if the best thing to do, rather than giving these books to charity, is to keep them out of circulation.
I fear the nuance is lost here for North American readers — but anyone associated with McSweeney’s is probably a Class A wanker if that helps. Martin Amis, he’s a definitive wanker. Who would be on your wanker shelf?
And lastly…, I may have rather unfairly dismissed the new volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Century: 1910 as “mildly disappointing”, but — like most of Moore’s work — it is undisputedly clever and even if I read 1910 another half-a-dozen times, I’ll still miss half the allusions, references, and knowing winks… Fortunately Jess Nevins has posted some very helpful annotations for the amateur nerd (via LinkMachineGo).