From The New Publishing Standard:

A survey of the 154-member Association of University Presses (AUP) reveals the pandemic has set in train a rapid and likely unstoppable transition to digital.

As reported by the UK trade journal The Bookseller, the Cambridge University Press (CUP) saw the expected fall in sales as lockdown closed schools and universities, but while print sales are reviving, the pandemic has, according to CUP’s MD of Academic Publishing Mandy Hill,

accelerated the shift to digital for both institutional and individual customers.

Per The Bookseller’s summary, Hill expects that trend to continue.

Anthony Cond, MD of the Liverpool University Press (LUP), said the pandemic had presented uni presses with,

the unique opportunity to reset spending.

Cond said the shift online of conferences and events had delivered increased engagement and financial savings.

. . . .

David Clark,managing director of the academic division of the Oxford University Press said that institutional customers have,

moved wholeheartedly to digital formats.

Link to the rest at The New Publishing Standard

Having worked in the university library during his freshman year in college, PG has no doubt that college and university libraries find that ebooks save lots of money that would otherwise be spent on employees returning physical books to their proper place in the stacks, helping confused students find where the Armenian Anthropology books reside, etc.

As PG discovered, if the library is large enough, a book reshelved in the wrong location is as good as lost. More than one student who pulls out a physical book on one floor of the library who can’t find a study carrel on that floor or is meeting friends for joint “study” on another floor will quite often put the book on the most convenient shelf available on the way toward the closest exit.

PG once discovered a thin volume that had slid down a gap between two large metal bookcases that were placed back to back. How long the book had been hidden in that location between the bookshelves, PG could not speculate other than to say there was a great deal of dust on it.

From JSTOR Daily:

If there’s a style that defines 2020, it has to be “cottagecore.” In March 2020, the New York Times defined it as a “budding aesthetic movement… where tropes of rural self-sufficiency converge with dainty décor to create an exceptionally twee distillation of pastoral existence.” In August, consumer-culture publication The Goods by Vox heralded cottagecore as “the aesthetic where quarantine is romantic instead of terrifying.”

Baking, one of the activities the quarantined population favored at the height of the pandemic, is a staple of cottagecore, whose Instagram hashtag features detailed depictions of home-baked goods. Moreover, the designer Lirika Matoshi’s Strawberry Dress, defined as The Dress of 2020, fully fits into the cottagecore aesthetic. A movement rooted in self-soothing through exposure to nature and land, it proved to be the antidote to the stress of the 2020 pandemic for many.

Despite its invocations of rural and pastoral landscapes, the cottagecore aesthetic is, ultimately, aspirational. While publications covering trends do point out that cottagecore is not new—some locate its origins in 2019, others in 2017—in truth, people have sought to create an escapist and aspirational paradise in the woods or fields for 2,300 years.

. . . .

Memories of Arcadia

Ancient Greece had an enduring fascination with the region of Arcadia, located in the Peloponnesus, which many ancient Greeks first dismissed as a primitive place. After all, Arcadia was far from the refined civilization of Athens. Arcadians were portrayed as hunters, gatherers, and sensualists living in an inclement landscape. In the Hellenistic age, however, Arcadia became an idea in the popular consciousness more than a geographical place.

Alexandria, founded by Alexander the Great, had become a metropolis of more than a million people. The city was filthy, polluted, and ridden with disease. Its citizens developed what we can now call nostalgia for simpler times. They turned to Arcadia, which came to represent both an untainted, yet benign countryside and the spiritual haven of a simple life.

The Sicilian-born poet Theocritus (316–260 BCE), widely credited as the inventor of pastoral poetry, gave form to this longing for a return to the simple life. He wrote many Idylls, where shepherds and shepherdesses frolicked in nature and engaged in poetic and song contests. Theocritus raised shepherds and country people above their social and cultural status: they speak sophisticatedly, and they spontaneously engage in poetry contests. The target audience for this poetry, however, was the educated urban class who wanted to escape to the countryside while preserving their own refinement: “Theocritus’ shepherds (who seem to spend more time in pleasant conversation and lively love song contests, lying lazily during the resting hour on the grass by a river or spring, under shady trees, than in tending their flocks) move in an atmosphere of peace, quiet and happiness that is far removed from the harsh reality of pastoral life in all times and places,” write the scholars J. Vara and Joanna Weatherby in Mnemosyne.

. . . .

But it was in Elizabethan England that the pastoral genre really became in vogue. Shakespeare has two pastoral plays, As You Like It and A Winter’s Tale, whose source material includes the tale of Daphnis and Chloe. As You Like It contains a debate between pastoral and anti-pastoral: one character, the jester Touchstone, feels better at court, while he looks down on country people, while the shepherd Corin defends his own lifestyle. It’s actually not clear who wins the debate. What’s more, Shakespeare’s plays, including As You Like It and A Winter’s Tale, feature aristocrats play-acting being shepherds and falling in love with shepherdesses, but only marry them when they find out that said shepherdesses are abandoned royalty themselves.

Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to his Love,” is one of the best-known examples of English Renaissance pastoral poetry, with a shepherd inviting his beloved to enjoy a romp in his own version of Arcadia, a vision of eternal spring. It inspired poetic replies from other poets, from John Donne to Dorothy Parker. Quite tellingly, the most famous reply comes from sir Walter Raleigh (1554-1618), who had the shepherd’s beloved rebuke him, uttering words such as:

Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses
Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies
Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten: In folly ripe, in reason rotten.

She points out, in other words, that the idea of Arcadia is rooted in fallacy.

Pastoral poetry, while detached and elitist in theme and style, is still marked by a sense of community, which is expressed through the form of invitation. “The invitation demonstrates that the pastoral landscape has something to offer, whether it is a rustic feast, country entertainments, or simply a homely cottage in which to rest for the night,” writes the literary scholar Kimberly Huth in Studies in Philology. Huth examines the spoken act of invitation in the context of early modern pastoral poetry, writing:

It acts as the first step in extending that community to others who may be passing through the pastoral world by offering not only a comfortable place to rest but also fellowship and belonging. The pastoral landscape is often imagined as an ideal world of respite from corruption of the court or city, but it is actually the invitation that creates the ideality of that world, which is only recognizable through interactions with other people in the landscape.

Cottagecore too has a strong community aspect, even if its invitations are mostly digital.

Link to the rest at JSTOR Daily

From The New Yorker:

Long before the coronavirus pandemic accelerated the devastation of newspapers and media outlets of all kinds, book reviews around the country had already started to disappear. Papers like the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post eliminated their standalone sections; the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Dallas Morning News let their book editors and staff critics go; coverage evaporated in the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Orlando Sentinel. News outlets that once reviewed more than five hundred books every year—and, in some cases, three times as many—now rarely cover them at all.

That national crisis came for the Volunteer State just over a decade ago. Tim Henderson, the executive director of Humanities Tennessee, the state’s affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, remembers noticing fewer book reviews and fewer publications, but also talking with struggling local arts and culture writers. “When we saw the disappearance of arts coverage across the state, it was obvious we should respond,” Henderson said, “but not how.”

Humanities Tennessee eventually created something called Chapter 16: a part-digital, part-print publication that covers literature and literary life in the state by doing what almost any other outlet would—running reviews, profiles, interviews, and essays—but also by doing what almost no other outlet could afford to do: giving away its content for free, not only to readers but to any publication of any kind that wants to reproduce it. “We knew there was an audience for this, and we serve readers, not a bottom line, so we wanted to find a way to provide this free of charge,” Henderson said.

That is why, every week, as many as half a million people read something from Chapter 16, and it is why, although the outlet calls itself “a community of Tennessee writers, readers, and passersby,” it offers what might be a model of sustainable arts coverage for the rest of the country.

. . . .

 “The creative talent was there, and the readers were there,” Gerbman said, “and we felt like it was our responsibility to showcase it.”

Years before, Gerbman had driven the Tennessee novelist William Gay to and from a reading in Clarksville. They got lost that night on the way home, and a long conversation turned longer; in the course of it, Gay, who had spent much of his life hanging drywall and painting houses, and hadn’t published anything until he was in his late fifties, got to talking about his sadness that Tennessee didn’t show as much pride in or offer as much support for its writers as neighboring Mississippi. “That struck me,” Gerbman said, remembering Gay, who died in 2012. A few years later, she thought of his words again, when the novelist Inman Majors came home to Knoxville for a reading and confessed his disappointment that no newspapers in Tennessee had covered his book.

“There are so many working writers here, publishing books and doing good work, and we felt it was important for people to see that,” Gerbman said. The founders of Chapter 16 made it the publication’s mission to try to cover every book by a Tennessee author, every book about Tennessee, and every book by any author coming to Tennessee for an event at one of the state’s more than two dozen independent bookstores and nearly one hundred colleges. Even their name reflected that regional pride: Tennessee was the sixteenth state to join the Union.

Link to the rest at The New Yorker

And here’s a link to Chapter 16

From Smithsonian Magazine:

On a Saturday afternoon in February 1933, at the Fort Apache Reservation in Arizona, a White Mountain Apache Indian named Silas John Edwards and his wife, Margaret, stopped by a friend’s place to visit and relax. Edwards, a trim middle-aged man with a penetrating gaze, was an influential figure on reservations throughout the Southwest. Hundreds of followers regarded him as a divinely inspired religious leader, a renowned shaman and medicine man.

When he and Margaret arrived at their friend’s dwelling, a tepee, they found people drinking tulapai, a homemade Apache liquor. Three hours later, the Edwardses joined a group heading to another friend’s home. People who were there reported that Margaret confronted him inside a tepee, demanding to know why he’d been spending time with a younger woman, one of Margaret’s relatives. The argument escalated, and Margaret threatened to end their marriage. She left the party. Edwards stayed until about 10:30 p.m. and then spent the night at a friend’s.

Shocking news came the next day: Margaret was dead. Children had discovered her body, along with bloody rocks, at the side of a trail two and a half miles outside of the Fort Apache town of Whiteriver. They alerted adults, who carried her body home. “I went in the tepee and found my wife in my own bed,” Edwards later wrote. “I went to her bedside and before I fully realized what I was doing or that she was really dead, I had picked her up in my arms, her head was very bloody and a part of the blood got on my hands and clothing.”

He was still kneeling there, holding his wife’s body, when a sheriff and an Apache police officer arrived.

A medical examiner reported that Margaret had been killed by blows to her head and strangulation. Curiously, at least two of the rocks used to crush her skull were inscribed with her husband’s initials: S.J.E.

. . . .

Seventeen years later, in March 1951, Edwards—now 64 and still imprisoned at McNeil Island—wrote a desperate letter. “Up ’til now you have never heard of me,” he began, and then repeated the protestations of innocence he’d been making ever since his arrest. He had affidavits from witnesses who’d said he could not have committed the murder. The White Mountain Apache Tribal Council had unanimously recommended his release from prison. Another suspect had even been found. Edwards had pleaded with authorities for a pardon or parole, but nothing he did could move them.

This letter was a last-ditch effort to avoid dying of old age behind bars. Edwards thought the man he was writing to could get him out. The man was Erle Stanley Gardner, the author of the Perry Mason mystery books.

. . . .

At the time Gardner got the letter from Edwards, he was living on a ranch in Temecula, California, about 60 miles northeast of San Diego and just outside the borders of a Pechanga Reservation. (Today, the ranch is part of the reservation itself.) His office was decorated with American Indian artwork, baskets, masks and moccasins. But Gardner, a Massachusetts native, had little knowledge of the religious life or cultural significance of the man who wrote to him from the McNeil Island Penitentiary.

What Gardner did understand were the flaws in the prosecution’s case. A bespectacled man with a commanding gaze, Gardner had spent years practicing law in California. In the early 1920s, he’d started writing mystery stories for pulp magazines. He’d published his first Perry Mason novel one month after the murder of Edwards’ wife. Over the years, Perry Mason—a fictional defense attorney who usually defended innocent clients—became the center of a literary juggernaut, generating sales of more than 300 million books as well as a popular TV show.

Like the hero he’d invented, Gardner felt drawn to cases involving the wrongly accused. He believed America’s criminal justice system was often biased against the vulnerable. In the 1940s, Gardner used his fame and wealth to assemble what he called the Court of Last Resort, a group of forensic specialists and investigators who—like today’s Innocence Project at Cardozo School of Law—applied new thinking to old cases.

Gardner’s team rescued dozens of innocent people from executions and long prison terms. Among them were Silas Rogers, a black man sentenced to death for shooting a police officer in Petersburg, Virginia; Clarence Boogie, a victim of false testimony in a murder case in Spokane, Washington; and Louis Gross, who had been framed for murder in Michigan. Gardner persuaded Harry Steeger of Argosy magazine to regularly publish his articles about his organization’s findings. “We are busybodies,” Gardner declared in a letter to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. “If, on the other hand, citizens don’t take an active interest in law enforcement and the administration of justice, we are going to lose our battle with crime.”

The letter from the Apache shaman made a strong impression on Gardner. “This Silas John Edwards case has been preying on my mind,” he wrote to James Bennett, the director of the Bureau of Prisons at the U.S. Department of Justice, on May 2, 1952. “This man is a full-blooded Apache Indian. There is every possibility that he didn’t get justice at the hands of a jury who may not have understood Indian psychology, temperament and custom. I think we should investigate the case.”

Link to the rest at Smithsonian Magazine

From Kristine Kathryn Rus ch:

Three days before I sat down to write this blog post, I finished reading Drama High by Michael Sokolove. I clutched the book to my heart, and thought, no one will ever see books like this again.

Then I mentally slapped myself. I had slipped into traditional writer think.

Drama High was published by Riverhead Books in 2014. Riverhead was once a literary imprint of Penguin Publishing, and got subsumed into the whole Penguin Random House merger. Imprints lose their identity in mergers like this, and Riverhead is no exception. I doubt the imprint would have published a book like this in 2019.

For those of you who haven’t seen the book, and I would assume that’s most of you, Drama High focuses on a high school in Levittown, Pennsylvania, that has developed a highly recognized theater department. The book, written by a former student, is a love letter to teaching as well as to theater. It’s filled with heart and compassion and general quirkiness.

The book ended up becoming a bestseller after it became the inspiration for the short-lived TV show Rise. I have no idea how I found it; probably the Amazon algorithm, because I haven’t been in a bookstore since the pandemic started.

But I got caught in that traditional publishing think: that only trad pub could take a risk with a small book like that and yet make sure it got to the places it needed to go.

And you know, in the limited book world I grew up in, that was true. When I came of age as a reader, there was a mountain of book outlets—not bookstores, per se, but places to buy books all the same. As a kid, I got my books (gothics and skinny mysteries and the occasional weird horror thing) from a drugstore a few blocks from my house.

By the mid-1990s, there were “dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of stores in the country that carried 100,000 titles or more” according to an October blog post by Mike Shatzkin.

That seemed like a lot of books. But we had to buy a title when we saw it, because if we waited, we might never see the book again. I searched for books by Phillip Rock for three decades, because I discover the first in the series in a used bookstore. I might never have found the last two books in his only series if it hadn’t been for Amazon and Downton Abbey.

Quirky books, like Drama High, only got commissioned because someone thought the book would do well enough. Had the book been published in the previous century, someone would have thought the book would do well in niche bookstores.

Only there really aren’t that many niche bookstores anymore. There are barely bookstores right now, because of the pandemic. This month, for example, we are losing one of our oldest bookstores here in Las Vegas. The owner finally decided—with the economic collapse and the pandemic—that it’s time to retire.

Other bookstores have other issues. It’s going to cost money for bookstores to get proper ventilation systems and, in some cases, put their inventory online. It’s not something you can just hire a few college students to do; it takes a true structure.

Book buying has changed, although reading hasn’t. As I’ve said in the previous two trainwreck blogs, traditional publishing needs to recognize how book buying has changed.

And it looks like some people in traditional publishing are finally beginning to understand that the changes they’ve been living through these past 20 years are permanent. The way Things Are Being Done has to change.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Here’s a link to Kris Rusch’s Author Page. If you like the thoughts Kris shares, you can show your appreciation by checking out her books.

PG says making certain the trains run on time is a different business than building a railroad or building and continually improving a quality ecommerce site.

Traditional publishing (and the big and habit-encrusted European conglomerates that own most of traditional publishing in the United States) is no place to seek innovation and nimble adaptation skills. Their evergreen solution to financial difficulties is to find another blockbuster celebrity book, “Michelle Obama’s Thanksgiving!” – “Tina Fey on Motherhood!” – “Isaac Mizrahi’s Styling Secrets!” AKA making the publishing business run on time.

Does anybody who can get a tech job (or maybe any job) at Amazon ever consider going to work for a New York City publisher? Ditto for Google, Apple, etc.?

What intelligent and aware college graduate is going to look for work at a traditional publisher unless there is no other choice available? (a possibility these days, PG admits). It’s the ultimate low-paying dead-end job. Period. Find a wealthy spouse ASAP.

Some of the senior people in publishing got into the business when it looked like it had a future, but if they’ve truly drunk the big publishing Kool-Aid, PG isn’t certain exactly where they’re going to end up when the consolidation of publishing starts up again. And it will. PG suspects some of the owners of traditional publishing companies are spending serious time trying to figure out who the greater fool might be so they can dump that boat anchor.

Whatever publishers survive will have Amazon to thank for it (although PG doesn’t expect them to acknowledge that fact).

PG is not a futurist, but he’s read enough from smart people who are to conclude that the effects of the world-wide economic shut-down on education, businesses, lifestyles, etc., are not going to end when Covid goes away.

A lot of small businesses that closed aren’t going to reopen. Landlords, many of whom are small businesses themselves, will understandably want to get any sort of tenant that will pay the rent in full and on time. PG doesn’t believe that bookstores will be exempt.

People who are buying lots of stuff from Amazon, including books, aren’t going to immediately snap back to traveling from store to store to buy things.

Later today PG is probably going to post about some of the long-term impact that the Spanish Flu had in the early 20th century that lasted long after the virus had petered out.

UPDATE:

PG promises that he had not heard about CBS trying to sell Simon & Schuster, as documented in the New York Times story he linked to a couple of posts above this on until after he put up the original version of this post earlier today.

He wonders if he needs to obtain some sort of license before displaying his prescience in public again.

From The Paris Review:

Nobody knows who made the Unicorn Tapestries, a set of seven weavings that depict a unicorn hunt that has been described as “the greatest inheritance of the Middle Ages.”

Without evidence, the La Rochefoucauld family in France asserted that the tapestries originate with the marriage of a family ancestor in the fifteenth century. The tapestries did belong to the La Rochefoucauld in 1793, before they were stolen by rioters who set fire to their château at Verteuil. The family regained possession sixty years later, when the tapestries were recovered in a barn. The precious weavings of wool, silk, gold, and silver were in tatters at their edges and punched full of holes. They had been used to wrap barren fruit trees during the winter.

In late 1922, the Unicorn Tapestries disappeared again. They were sent to New York for an exhibition, which never opened. A rich American had bought them and transferred them to his bank vault before anyone else could see them. In February 1923, John D. Rockefeller Jr. confirmed from his vacation home in Florida that he was the American who had acquired the tapestries for the price of $1.1 million. The tapestries were transferred to Rockefeller’s private residence in Midtown Manhattan.

Fourteen years later, Rockefeller donated the tapestries to the Cloisters, a new medieval art museum he had funded as a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The mysterious works were to be on regular public display for the first time in their five-hundred-year history. James Rorimer, the first curator of the Cloisters, had the intimidating task of interpreting them.

On July 26, 1942, the New York Times reported that Rorimer had identified symbols that proved the key to the mystery, among them a knotted cord, a pair of striped tights, and a squirrel. He identified these as symbols in a system that pointed to Anne of Brittany as their owner and decided the tapestries had been made to celebrate her marriage to Louis XII in 1499. No one who read the news that Sunday was able to see the Unicorn Tapestries for another two years. The weavings were moved to a secret location following the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Link to the rest at The Paris Review

From The New Publishing Standard:

The Buchmesse largely paid lip-service to the digital alternative while holding out hope the in-person event would go ahead. The ugly sister was to get a cheap make-over, but not plastic surgery.

Dressed up as “streamlining and restructuring”, the world’s largest trade publishing fair is finally catching up with the 21st century this year, embracing the digital advantage and opening up the fair to the world.

Of course the Buchmesse has long been a leader in pushing the global element of the publishing industry, but its approach was always, right up until 2020, via the analogue 20th century model that involved hauling people and companies halfway around the world to be paraded before an audience that likewise had to be able to travel half way around the world to engage.

By definition that closed off huge audience reach globally and denied publishing stakeholders in much of the world a realistic opportunity to engage. If a would-be participant or observer could not afford to be there or was not lucky enough to be on the much-valued subsidised invite list then the Buchmesse was just something we got to read about in the trade journals, and then of course only snippets from what the trade journalists had cobbled together. Because with the best will in the world the reporters who were able to be there could only be in one place and monitor one event at a time.

. . . .

Why was it that even as the pandemic took off in the spring of 2020 the Buchmesse, along with almost every other trade event (DBW the notable exception – all credit to Bradley Metrock), was stubbornly insisting the show would go on as it had always gone on?

. . . .

Reporting for the Buchmesse journal Publishing Perspectives, Porter Anderson said this past week that, having pulled in 200,000 digital participants in October, the Frankfurt Book was,

“modernising its concept” and restructuring some of its staffing (to) “ensure the continued existence of the fair” long-term.

Buchmesse CEO Juergen Boos, assuring us the traditional fair would resume in 2021 assuming Covid-19 conditions allowed, said in a press release,

At the same time, we must open ourselves up to alternative marketing and dialogue formats in order to meet the changing needs of all market participants.

Link to the rest at The New Publishing Standard

PG has read several articles lately written by people whose opinions he takes seriously to the effect that there are going to be some permanent changes, at least in the United States, resulting from not so much the Covid pandemic, but by the adaptations many have made during the pandemic.

Working from home instead of commuting to an office is one of the more prominent examples.

The Wall Street Journal published an article a couple of days ago that reported a significant number of San Francisco and Silicon Valley tech workers who have been working from home have discovered they they are more productive and enjoy their lives more when work doesn’t include a 1-2 hour commute to and from their home each day.

Some are even moving to Nevada, Utah or Idaho to take advantage of lower prices, lower taxes and an improved lifestyle while working for companies headquartered in the San Francisco area. Some parts of these states are also receiving transplanted companies from those Northern California locales.

For those outside of the United States, the cost of living in the San Francisco area, including Silicon Valley, a series of suburbs extending south of San Francisco for many miles, has become extraordinarily high. PG is informed that some lower-paid workers are living in their cars or vans, taking advantage of tech company exercise facilities or health clubs for showering, etc.

According to Zillow, the average cost of a middle-tier home in Palo Alto, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley is over $3 million, up 10% from last year’s average and forecast to increase another 10% next year. Traveling east from San Francisco a little over 200 miles just over the border to Carson City, Nevada, a prospective home purchaser would pay about 10% of the Palo Alto price for a middle-tier home.

On top of the savings from lower housing costs, a typical Silicon Valley tech worker will pay a California state income tax of about 10%. Nevada has no state income tax.

With his forecasting hat on, PG (along with people far more knowledgeable than he is) predicts that more and more employers will be willing to hire knowledge workers who want to work remotely now that Covid has demonstrated that it’s a viable business model.