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Facsimile dust jackets and ebook artifacts

This morning Very Short List pointed to Facsimile Dust Jackets LLC, a project from Mark Terry. Since 1999 he's been archiving images of book dust jackets, and offers prints of them for sale on his site. Here's one from William Faulkner, one from Agatha Christie and one from Don DeLillo.

I've been kind of obsessed with these today; not because I'm interested in ordering replacement dust jackets, but just with the idea of replacing the "book on the shelf" as the signifier of ownership (and maybe even actual enjoyment) of books. Facsimile dust jackets are one angle, of course -- and repro's of vintage titles are the library nerd equivalent of the old Italian movie poster. But are any book publishers taking the approach that TopSpin championed with musicians?

• Give me the digital sample chapter in exchange for my email address
• Sell me the ebook for $9.99
• Sell me the ebook plus a frameable repro of the book cover for $19.99
• Sell me all that plus a hardcopy for $29.99
• Sell me all that plus an archivally printed copy of background material, editor's notes, rough drafts, etc., for $99.99
• Etc., etc.

Following in the footsteps of the music business, if the book itself is no longer an artifact, can publishers create new ones that fans are willing to pay for?

match the delillo to the cover

Pan Macmillan is republishing Don DeLillo's back catalog, with new covers commissioned from New Studio London with illustrations by Noma Bar. They're not only beautiful, but highly evocative of the books themes and major plot points.

If you're a DeLillo fan, you'll want to take my "match the title to the cover" quiz. I whipped it up this morning, cropping the title from each of the books.

If you're really good, you won't need the answer key. But if you need to cheat, check out the grid of covers at New Studio London's site.

cosmopolis fan art

As previously blogged, David Cronenberg is directing the film adaptation of Don DeLillo's novel Cosmopolis. It stars Robert Pattinson, which means there is already plenty of enthusiastic online coverage of the movie. Like, say, cosmopolisfilm.com, which features fan art that combines heart throb shots of Pattinson with text from DeLillo.

Mind blown.

charlotte's web and fear of dying

Hillel Italie, AP's book writer, has a great piece on how novelists have been trying to make sense of September 11, with bits on Jess Walter, Joseph O'Neill, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, John Updike, Amy Waldman, Jonathan Safran Foer, Don DeLillo and even performance artist Karen Finley.

I loved the closing argument from writer Moshin Hamid, who recommends that we re-read Charlotte's Web...

If I had to prescribe a book about Sept. 11, certainly 'Charlotte's Web' would be high on the list. Because in secular societies in the West, the discourse about death has been marginalized as something for religion to deal with. I think we should plop 'Charlotte's Web' in the middle of that and say, 'Look, we have to accept we are going to die, and that a certain amount of courage is required.'

start reading it in under a minute

Nicholson Baker's new novel House of Holes, a Book of Smut is out today. The Times Magazine had a nice profile of Baker this weekend, but I also like The Millions' review, which (more succinctly) connects the dots between Nicholson's non-smut work like The Mezzanine and Room Temperature to Vox, The Fermata and now House of Holes.

Nicholson Baker has been thinking about rigid stonkers and prime Angus cockbriskets spewing hot loads of silly string into various slutslots and lettuce patches. That, plus cold iced tea, and the little bubbles that you see when you shake up a bottle of salad dressing. Baker’s many fans are sure to lap it up. The rest of us will be slightly amused but ultimately bored.

I'm a fan, and I'll lap it up. But I have to wonder just how many people will be reading it undetected on their Kindles on the subway or the bus, enjoying their own little Fermata-like moment, undetected. I'm sure Baker's curious, too; remember his ambivalent piece on the Kindle in The New Yorker from two years ago?

I had some success one morning when I Kindled my way deep into “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing Erotic Romance,” by Alison Kent. There are, I learned, four distinct levels of intensity in the erotic-romance industry: sweet, steamy, sizzling, and scorching.

My God, the guy can even make the word "Kindle" sound dirty.

off and on

This weekend I managed to make it 7% of my way through James Gleick's The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. I consider that a major accomplishment, especially since my primary reading device is essentially a beautiful distraction machine.

I did manage to highlight this little bit in the introduction, where Gleick recalls a letter that Claude Shannon wrote to Vannevar Bush...

"Off and on," Shannon wrote to Vannevar Bush at MIT in 1939, "I have been working on an analysis of some of the fundamental properties of general systems for the transmission of intelligence."

Gleick, ever the master of restraint, doesn't bother to call out the brilliance of that first clause. He leaves that to the reader.

interactive paper books

And two makes a trend! Last month Berg London (yep, them again) published SVK, a comic from Warren Ellis and Matt Brooker. A critical piece of the story line is printed with invisible ink that you can only read with the "SVK object," a UV light source that's packaged with the book. I had a chance to see it in person when I was in London and it's very, very cool. The technique is integrated into the plot in a way that rewards the reader for investing the effort in reading in a new way.

On Friday, via Brainpickings comes news of a fall children's title from McSweeney's that features heat-sensitive invisible ink. The preview video is fun, and gives you a sense of what it's like to rub the pages to reveal what's underneath...

More like this please. And there's a lesson in here for designers that are crafting screen-based interactivity on top of classically narrative content: make sure the distraction and the effort that's required for readers to push, click, highlight, scrub, type, shake, tilt, etc. is worth it. If you're going to entice the reader out of their state of reading "flow," then make sure what you want them to do adds to their experience of your content.

pitchfork's favorite music books

I missed this when it was published last month, but I love Pitchfork's list of their 60 favorite music books. Blogging this as a reminder for when I somehow find myself without a new book in the queue.

Particularly loved this bit about the retitled Greil Marcus book, which went from Invisible Republic to The Old, Weird America.

With a single evocative phrase, Marcus inadvertently articulated a collective nostalgia (part real, part imagined) for the strange, creaky old folk songs that animated the first half of the 20th century in America.

It wouldn't be a Pitchfork list without some bitching about what they missed, so...how the hell did they not include Marcus' Lipstick Traces, too? He deserved to be on there twice.

i only made it 50 pages

Graydon at OR Books posts about the challenge of reading Finnegans Wake while lauding Stephen Crowe's page-by-page illustrations of that impenetrable fortress. "Have you ever attempted to just finish reading the first page? I have a better chance of getting called up by the Mets than finishing that thing, and I bat ninth and play right field for my rec league softball team."

mcsweeney's on books

McSweeney's is publishing some great research on the health of books. Physical books. "Book sales are up, way up, from twenty years ago. Young adult readership is far wider and deeper than ever before. Library membership and circulation is at all-time high. The good news goes on and on."

thinking outside the wrist

At Frog's blog, David Sherwin is sharing challenges from his book Creative Workshop: 80 Challenges to Sharpen Your Design Skills. I like this first one, a little challenge to rethink the most popular piece of wearable tech...the watch.

For one week, keep a diary about time. Every day, as you interact with your watch, phone, computer, or clock, write down how you feel when you check the time. When the week is up, use the data that you gathered to design a “watch” prototype that redefines how people keep track of time—both in their day-to-day life, and in their pursuit of fashion. You can only take two hours to design the prototype.

I have no time to do this.

three highlighted passages from super sad true love story

Location 2230:

And the looks on the faces of my countrymen—passive heads bent, arms at their trousers, everyone guilty of not being their best, of not earning their daily bread, the kind of docility I had never expected from Americans, even after so many years of our decline. Here was the tiredness of failure imposed on a country that believed only in its opposite. Here was the end product of our deep moral exhaustion. 

Location 4265:

We drank and let the passing joint add a tasty green humidity to our uncertain moods, danger pulsing behind my cornea, yet the field of vision bright and clear as far as my affections were concerned. If I could have my friends and my Eunice forever and ever I would be fine.

Location 5581:

Instead, with each armful of books tumbling into their cardboard graves, I found myself focusing on a new target. I felt the weakness of these books, their immateriality, how they had failed to change the world, and I didn’t want to sully myself with their weakness anymore. I wanted to invest my energies in something more fruitful and conducive to a life that mattered.

And then I found this at the end:

Which is an easter egg I've yet to open.

two quick delillo notes

First, Richard Rayner posts an appreciation of White Noise on the occasion of its 25th anniversary.

Perhaps DeLillo came back to America and so soaked up the assault of its teeming everyday, its wondrous and paranoid present, that he couldn't help but enclose the darkness of the future. "White Noise" won the National Book Award in 1985 and quickly became an inspiration and influence. Without it, writers such as David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem, Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith and Richard Powers (who provides an excellent introduction here) don't happen -- or don't happen in the same way.

And Mark Athitakis has a copy* of the upcoming Point Omega and finds it lacking:

It’s fine if DeLillo chooses to abandon the tone he pioneered in White Noise. What’s disappointing is the loss of sure-footedness that’s come with it.

* Want. If you know any way to get me one, I'd love you forever.

why what matters now just won't

I love Seth Godin as much as the next guy, but I'll just come out and say it -- there's a 99% chance that I won't read What Matters Now. It has nothing to do with the content -- there are people in there that I enjoy and respect. Instead, it has everything to do with the form.

What Matters Now is distributed as an "ebook," which is a fancy way of saying "a PDF." This particular PDF is 82 pages long (one page per contributor), where some pages are designed as slides with illustrations, and some pages contain a micro-essay laid out in a two-column format. The only convenient PDF reading device happens to be a PC, and the likelihood of me shutting out the world and spending a couple of sessions with my laptop to read this ebook are slim to none (especially when there's so much compelling YouTube content out there). And offline consumption isn't really an option: I'm not really sure I want to chew up 82 pages worth of paper and printer ink on it, and I've learned that Amazon's PDF conversion service for the Kindle will puke all over the two-column layout.

This should have been a website. Each essay with its own permalink. With interlinking between pieces. With hyperlinking out to the rest of the web. With search. And a table of contents. And commenting, favoriting and simple social sharing tools. And it could have been a beautiful thing to experience -- on the web. Instead, it's a file that I won't experience, sitting in my Downloads folder.

invisible

This line knocked me out; as did the rest of Paul Auster's Invisible.

on a wave of schadenfreude

Nielsen Business Media is shuttering Kirkus Reviews. I'm sure there's more than one author who won't miss them.

Title of this post to be sung to the tune of this song.

book recommendations for ze

Ze Frank asked his followers on Twitter if they had "any recommendations for a great book?" and got flooded with replies. He compiled a list ("about a third of the titles that came back") and put it on his blog. They're not all great, of course, but it's an interesting list and says something about Ze's fans...

the color of money

If this is what happens when you finally get through your email, then I'm all for more of this Inbox Zero stuff from Merlin.

Today, I can’t handle currency, eat fresh peas, or walk on grass. Green is the color of my twisted terror, and it paints my dreams in endless verdant coats. Night after night after night.

If you haven't read it, I won't spoil it for you. But I can't help thinking of it as a response to Eggers' Max at Sea. (And, frankly, a much better response than Choire Sicha and Tom Scocca's chat transcript riff at The Awl, as much as I loved Choire's line "Wow, who's Renata Adler now?" line, since it's so far inside baseball as to be made of pure cushioned cork center.)

new delillo in february 2010

Via Curt Gardner's always fantastic reference, Don DeLillo's America, comes news of Point Omega, a new novel due in February.

A young filmmaker visits the desert home of a secret war advisor in the hopes of making a documentary. The situation is complicated by the arrival of the older man's daughter, and the narrative takes a dark turn.

Documentaries, deserts, secret war advisors? Yep, that's DeLillo alright.

For the hardcores, here's the Amazon pre-order page. And as a reminder, Wikipedia describes the Omega point as...

A term invented by the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to describe a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which the universe appears to be evolving.

what if the williams sisters had attended enfield?

From Peter Bodo's Tennis World blog.

One of the themes emerging from this edition of the Championships is that the Williamses may have gotten better with age, even as they've had to struggle with (or simply endure) waning motivation as the siren song of "normal" life has lured them toward the shoals of inconsistency. The girls may not be as reliably destructive as they once were, but when they paint on their game faces, they may be playing the best tennis either of them has ever conjured up. This may not be true at all tournaments, either, but if you're going to pick one event at which to go medieval on your rivals, this one would be it.

I'm in the middle of re-reading Infinite Jest, and so I can't help but be obsessed with tennis lately, and look at everything through the lens of Enfield Tennis Academy. The Williams sisters :: The Incandenza brothers as Richard Williams :: Himself? (Yeah, on second thought, maybe not.)