Filed under: Lost art of doors
For the past few months I have been taking pictures of beautiful/strange doors, mostly in London, in an attempt to showcase what I regard as an often-overlooked piece of architecture. Not only do doors reflect on the building they belong to, but they also imply things about the inhabitants of that property, and what adventures may lie ahead when the door is opened. For each door I’ll try to describe what it was that drew me to it, and maybe write a short piece about what I think might be behind it. All of the door images will be archived on my Flickr stream and will be geo-located using Google Street View.
Without further ado, here is door number one:
Filed under: Personal
Found this a few days ago via The Casual Optimist. It’s really beautiful, corporate but beautiful.
Filed under: Past perspectives
First article in this issue and we find the then Vice-President of the Authors’ League of America complaining about the degree to which book clubs influenced the American publishing industry. In 1951, all but 15% of US authors earned less than $3,000pa, which, according to this helpful inflation calculator I found, would equate to about $26,000, or £17,500 in 2010 – not a great deal. This is where the book clubs come in. (more…)
Filed under: Past perspectives
Recently I came into possession of a stack of The Author magazines from the ’50s, so I thought it would be interesting to see how far the industry has come in over 50 years, or if it has even changed at all. (more…)
Filed under: Publishing
Pretty hectic at work right now, lots going to press, but here are a few links of interest.
Good example of an author using his imagination, expect to see more of these kinds of stunts in the summer. (more…)
The other day KindleKarnage made the eminently plausible suggestion that e-book DRM was something that authors were pushing for. This makes sense, considering the increased media coverage of digital piracy, and some writers, such as JK Rowling, have even refused to have their books translated into a digital format at all. The latter is ludicrous, especially for such a successful author, but more on that later. (more…)
Filed under: Publishing
Poetry isn’t dead.
Inmates’ words
Inaugural poem (more…)
I was in the London Review Bookshop this weekend and it got me thinking about the experience of bookshops. This isn’t another post extolling the virtues of indie bookshops and demonising Waterstones/Borders, though; I think we can all agree that they aim to serve quite different customers. However, I think that the advent of e-books is going to hit the latter much harder than the former. (more…)
This article really caught my attention. If we can look past the battle of the sexes, and give some men enough credit that a cover like this wouldn’t put them off reading a book, I think this article is tapping into an important point. While we must always take the image portrayed by the national media with a pinch of salt, it would be fair to say that there are a large number of children in the UK who are pretty bored, don’t have any prospects and don’t really care what happens to them. Combine this with their natural mishchievous, inquisitive natures, and perhaps it’s not so hard to see why we have a young offenders problem today. (more…)
