TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti’ Category

By Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti

[Editor's Note: this is the second part of Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti's article. The first part can be found here.]

I tell you, I like libraries. Those old stone buildings with lion statues in front and aisles of rare editions. I think it’s sad that they are becoming more and more obsolete. I like the fact that my house looks like a library with thousands of books when you walk in the door. That is “home” to me. Maybe that is because of what I do for a living. Probably so. But my books breathe a secret history that is all my own. For every stage of my life, every season, every everything, I can point to a book that reminded me of the then of the then. A book that either spoke to the moment or, not only spoke to the moment but made a profound impression on me. I like to see those books.

The e-books that I read are simply print books that have been turned into electronic books and I likely own both in most cases – both electronic and print. And yes, the e-book can be just as effecting, just like my online writing is just as affecting as my print writing (which is why I think it’s absolute nonsense that publishers do not “care” about Web writing because writing is writing is writing and that if I gather my writings from online and present them to a publisher, they will sell. But again, I’m told I’m wrong). That said, I do not expect the New York Times to review my online collection of poetry, which is much like an e-book essentially, until I gather those poems in a print book as a selected edition (that said, getting poetry reviewed anywhere is a hard sell).
(more…)

By Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti

Editors note: This is the first part of a two part article by our long-time contributor Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti. The second part of the article will be published here on Wednesday. PB]

Years I have worked in publishing – in fact, my whole career. I have worked in every capacity you can think of in the field and I wear that as a badge of pride because it is fully clear to me that in order to ever become an Editorial Director and run a successful house or imprint, as I did with Lumen Editions (an imprint I founded to publish works in translation as well as the work of new, up and coming authors – first time authors), you truly need to know every aspect of publishing from stuffing jiffy bags to hardcore line-editing to street-pounding publicity. It’s a tough road to hoe, but the rewards can be great.

Lumen was, I was told, a “risky venture”. I was also told that it would never work. That our books (which I published in matte-laminate softcover with a notch-binding with photo images by Ralph Gibson) would never be reviewed because, “Only hardcover books are taken seriously.” This, of course, was, as I had always known, not the case.

I can tell you with absolute honesty that every single Lumen Editions book received a review in the New York Times. Sometimes a full-page, sometimes a half, sometimes a smaller space, but regardless, not once did we miss. We never published e-books then, but e-books were not an option in publishing at that time, not in the popular community, and we would not have benefited in any way. In fact, e-book sales would have hurt our print book sales.

(more…)

By David Rothman

Lewis Carroll’s popularity goes on and on. Just a minute ago I checked Project Gutenberg’s hit lists and found that the writer behind Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass was #17 among yesterday’s downloads. In fact, Carroll was the second most downloaded of all children’s authors, surpassed only by L. Frank Baum, the playful soul behind The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

But who was Lewis Carroll (penname  of the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) and how did his life influence his works? That’s what Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti analyzes her forthcoming book, The Bedside Bathtub & Armchair Companion to Lewis Carroll (purchasing information here).

Epilepsy: The real origins of the creative bizarreness

Carroll, it turns out, suffered from epilepsy, and Sadi says that shaped his imagination and led to surrealistic passages in his works—and maybe even in part to the birth of surrealism itself, for Carroll was surrealistic before the word existed. Think of that next time you read, say, of Alice falling down a rabbit hole or shrinking to three inches or growing to nine feet.

In other words, rather than slapping all kinds of Freudian explanations and tags on Carroll, a biographer might do better to search The Reverent’s diaries for his unwitting descriptions of the disease. Sadi says her work is the first book not to gloss over the epilepsy. In Carroll’s days, epilepsy bore enough of a stigma to discourage doctors from making such a diagnosis despite the obvious signs in his diaries such as the headaches and particular kinds of hallucinations.

(more…)

By Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti

Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti shared with us a moving remembrance of Steven T. Florio, ex-CEO of Condé Naste, who mentored her. Both were the first in their families to reach college, and among other things, Sadi benefited from his book recommendations. Here’s an MP3 of Sadi’s podcast of “Losing Steve”—well worth your time even if you earlier read the essay.

If you haven’t already, why not subscribe to our podcasts, mostly from Sadi?

By Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti

Moderator’s note: Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti was first in her family to go to college. Wouldn’t this happen a little oftener if more library books were free online, TeleRead-fashion—to entice the young with just the right titles? Meanwhile sympathies to Sadi over the death of Steven T. Florio, who helped her break through “the blue-collar barrier.” - D.R.

It is a lonely feeling to lose anyone: a lover, friend or family member. To lose a mentor, though—how does one begin to express what this feels like?

Were it not for Steven Florio, I would not be in book publishing or publishing in any way. I always knew I would be a writer, but I never for a minute believed I could succeed as a publisher, as an editor, editorial director, acquisitions editor and more—the myriad jobs I have held so far in my career. Never did I think I could publish my work with some fair measure of success that could please Steven. It was Steven who first got me interested; or, rather, it was Steven who noticed my interest and watered it until it grew such that it became for me an ambition.

Rose fast, oversaw magazines reaching 70M readers a month

Steven T. Florio, was, at the time, the editor of GQ (Gentlemen’s Quarterly), having started at Esquire. He was still in his early thirties and had worked his way up from research assistant to editor in a short span of approximately nine years. At Condé Nast, as reported in the New York Times, he was president and chief executive and “oversaw all 16 of the company’s magazines, which then included Glamour, Architectural Digest, Self, GQ, Gourmet, Bon Appétit, Condé Nast Traveler, Allure, Wired, Lucky and Teen Vogue, as well as Vogue, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. The magazines reach more than 70 million readers each month” (hyperlinks added).

In short, Steven Florio took a small-to-medium-sized publisher of magazines and made Condé’s magazines—such as Vogue, where I was placed—a force to be reckoned with in their respective industries. He was a whiz ad man, selling hundreds of pages of ads and thickening the magazines to more than twice their sizes at times. It was a gift—a gift of gab, for Steven was definitely a talker, although straightforward and down-to-earth. He didn’t screw around; he came not from Harvard Business School but from Jamaica, Queens (New York) where he was born in 1949.

Steven and the babysitter-journalist

I remember Steven asking me one day when I first left the U.K. for the States if I would watch his children. Not knowing (or particularly caring) who he was, I went to his house with my typewriter (which was a portable Olivetti in a black case) and my notes for my article for the local town newspaper.

(more…)

By David Rothman

I grew up across the Potomac from Washington and the Library of Congress, not the most kid-friendly place. Strict rules—I don’t recall the specifics—guarded against various services of the Library from being swamped by the pimple-faced hordes slaving on term papers. To what extent did William Randolph Hearst’s jingoist press cause the Spanish-American War? Such was my fixation for Ronald Savage’s history class, or maybe Bert Cohen’s; and unhappy with the pickings at my local public library, I talked the librarycrats into making me an exception.

But wouldn’t it be nice if the the Library were less aloof, not just from high school kids but from the Net as a whole? And so I’m delighted to learn that the acrobat image and some 3,000 others from the place will be available on Flickr—there to be enjoyed, picked up for other Web sites, and maybe even tagged and captioned in ways that bring new facts to light. That’s just a speck of the 14 million images at the Library, in part due to copyright restrictions, but it’s still a good start. Bravo! Would that even recent books from the library be online, too—something that would be possible, with compensation for writers and publishers, under a TeleRead-style approach.

Bookish truancy

With my high school episode in mind, I was amused early this morning to run across a somewhat similar tale, from an old school friend of my sister, Beth Wellington, the journalist-poet-activist whom Yahoo 360 dissed. Beth’s LOC item, however, provides twists going beyond my own, and here’s an excerpt from her post, which also passes on some disturbing details from the FlickR-LOC story:

“The Library of Congress is one of my favorite haunts. The first time I had to sneak in because I was still in high school. I confess this, hoping that the statute of limitations has expired. While other folks ditched classes to cruise the mall, I transgressed once by riding with Dad into the District to research a senior term paper, ‘The Effects of The Great Depression on Communist Party Membership in the United States.’ I had already tried the Richard Byrd branch library. Its only book—a 1958 tome by J. Edgar Hoover—warned that the shoe salesman peeking up my skirt might be a communist…The college libraries weren’t much better” in their selections. The truant office caught up with Mrs. Wellington, who later revealed that Beth was lucky in the wording of his question. “He asked whether I knew you were not in school and I said yes. If he had asked me if I knew you were skipping school I would have told him the same thing.”

‘Remnants of the McCarthy era’

“The shortage of books,” Beth recalls, “was my first experience with the remnants of the McCarthy era. Imagine, instead, a library where everything in print was available!”

Exactly. Or how about most everything available electronically—whether from the Library or from local systems or from the private sector, with ways to bypass the censorship that Washington might well try to impose?

The more things change…

Now, here’s the disturbing aspect of Beth’s post, something you may also see in a few other accounts of the Library-FlickR alliance. The Children’s Internet Protection Act, a godsend for vendors of filtering software, prevents certain school or library computers from accessing FlickR.

One fix could be for the Library site to mirror only “safe” parts of FlickR. A better one, though, as many have observed, would be to mitigate the legislation.

Will this happen soon? We’re not back in the McCarthy era, but the urge to repress is alive and well among no small number of voters and politicians. It’s not as if we should have kids gazing hour after hour at  porn—better for library bats to fixate instead on the causes of the Spanish-American War. But surely the act can be made less burdensome.

Donning white globes to gaze at the art of Blake

Meanwhile, three other points. First I agree with Beth that E can’t replace everything library, whether as a social gathering sport or a place to see artifacts close up. Remember Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti’s post mentioning her visit to the Morgan Collection, where she told time off Lewis Carroll’s watch? Well, Beth has her own memories—of, for example, donning white gloves “to wonder at William Blake’s original illustrations”  at the Library of Congress.

Second, how can I conclude without direct links to 1,615 color transparencies, taken in the 1920s and ’40s by the U.S. Farm Security Administration and the 1,500 black and white shots on the sometimes-overlapping topics of politics, crime, sports, and theater (as well as shots of strikes and disasters)?

Third, isn’t it ironic that the FlickR end of Yahoo is laudably helping to preserve history, while the Yahoo 360 end is doing just the opposite—by shutting down 360 without promptly providing Beth and other bloggers with the tools they need to make smooth transitions to other hosts? I suspect I’m not the only Washington-area library fan who can relate to Beth’s recollections. Same for other people who follow the blogs of friends and acquaintances, in other locations and on other topics. There is no such thing as a generic blogger, at least among those who do more than rewrite the big news stories, and Beth’s latest item is a handy reminder to me to follow up with Yahoo’s “social networking guru” on the data portability issue. One Marc Davis—that’s Mr. Guru’s real name—has been by the TeleBlog if you go by a MyBlogLog image displayed publicly, courtesy yet another Yahoo service. Same guy? Either way, I’m hoping Marc has had time to reflect on the transition problem and can get his employer to make a serious pledge to help Beth and others chroniclers of history-in-the-making. Come on, Marc. We’re rooting for Yahoo to do the right thing, just as it has in its cooperation with the Library of Congress.

(”Ruth the Acrobat” image found via Beth’s blog.)

By David Rothman

You never know who’s reading the TeleBlog.

Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti recently told of the horrors of copyright law when she was getting permissions for her new book on Lewis Carroll, real name Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Well, who should write in but an old net.friend of ours, Nicholas Bentley, a copyright reformer, who, ironically, appears to be a very distant relative of—yes, Carroll (albeit not directly by blood).

Nicholas tells Sadi: “As far as I know, we have absolutely no contact with the Dodgson estate but as I said before, I have to check with my mother because she is the one who tracks all the family history and contacts. If anything comes up, I will get back to you.”

Meanwhile you can enjoy Sadi’s just-posted podcast of her essay (MP3).

Related: Earlier TeleBlog podcasts, mostly by Sadi. Subscribe here.

Technorati Tags: Lewis Carroll,Charles Lutwidge Dodgson,Charles Dodgson,Nicholas Bentley,Commonrights.org

By Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti

My forthcoming book is a primer on the works of the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson—also, a semi-biography for those who know a little but want to know more. That name might not ring a bell, but perhaps his pseudonym does, Lewis Carroll.

For a project like this, relying on old text and images from the nineteenth century, isn’t everything in the pub domain? Wrong. I must spend hour after hour researching rights, both in the library and on the Web. Consider the photographs taken by Carroll himself; many of the prints are in private collections, and the “proper” thing to do is to pay to license the photographs. That can get pricey.

Carrollian copyright maze

Dover published a book of Carroll “postcards” of his photographs, but I thought Dover printed only work in the public domain. Or maybe not? Should I call Dover, then, for permission? Or did the company, too, have to seek permission from someone else? I can’t say; all I know is that the bulk of Carroll’s work is not necessarily in the public domain for my purposes. For word counts, etc., I need to contact an agency in London and say “roughly” what I plan to use. This is where it gets really frustrating. I ring and ask, Should I send a list of the works I would like to reproduce? I get a flat answer, No. Then how will you know what I would like to use? Give us an approximation, the agency tells me. What does this even mean? I am caught in a Carrollian maze of complex rights issues.

Sir John Tenniel’s illustrations for Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are in the public domain, but not if they are in color, I am told. I am not sure if this is true, but it’s what I was told on good authority. As for other illustrators such as Harry Furniss, I don’t know. As much as I’d hope they are in public domain, I am nervous at this point about printing any image in the book without paying for it—no small challenge, since publishers hate to spend much money to license images for use in a typical author’s book. You need a huge name for the publisher to loosen the purse strings. I think, “Not yet. Maybe someday.”

The Ethernet surprise

Amid the challenges of my library work, I find pleasant surprises. I discover that The Morgan Library, in New York City, home to an excellent Carroll collection, allows you to use an Ethernet cable to access not only the Morgan holdings but also the Web in general. What you cannot use, surely for security reasons, is WiFi. The same is true of The Houghton Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at Harvard. You can bring your computer and be hooked up to the Ethernet with no problem. It’s actually surprising and wonderful to know that such old institutions that carry such rare material can be open-minded toward technology. I have found the IT people, the staff of the Reading Room, to be among the most helpful groups I have worked with.

But that does not spare me the problems of dealing with rights issues, especially for a printed book, which, ironically, counts more to Luddites than do print books.

(more…)