Blank pages count
Hyphen Press / 2023.05.15
As often, it began with a remark by Anthony Froshaug. I had told him that some book had a certain number of pages – it was an odd number. He observed that this must be a strange book. To imagine a sheet of paper with just one side, or to imagine a folded sheet or a gathered number of folded sheets, with five or seven or nineteen or twenty-one sides is to enter the world of M.C. Escher.
The right direction
Hyphen Press / 2017.05.08
A previous installment of this occasional series on book production concerned a novel by Julian Barnes, The noise of time. The book was published in 2016 in London by Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Vintage Publishing, and in turn part of Penguin Random House UK.
The wrong direction
Hyphen Press / 2016.02.11
Julian Barnes’s latest novel was published in London a couple of weeks ago. This is mainly a note on its qualities as a physical object.
A book of conversation
Hyphen Press / 2010.08.09
It’s been suggested elsewhere in these web-pages that we can judge the quality of a book by looking at its production as an object for carrying meaning. The space between the lines will tell us something about the quality of thought in the editorial-design processes, and so – because editor and writer might work hand-in-hand – in the writing too; and the glue on the spine will tell us something about the thinking in the publishing house
Designer as publisher
Hyphen Press / 2010.07.07
Some years ago – I recall events and publications in the early 1990s – there was some noise about the ‘designer as author’: graphic designers would have a hand in writing (or maybe ‘authoring’) the texts that they also designed, and designers could even be considered as authors.
Brecht and Benjamin in English
Hyphen Press / 2009.09.29
Last Thursday the London publisher Libris brought out Erdmut Wizisla’s Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht: the story of a friendship. This is an English-language edition of the book published originally by Suhrkamp. Behind that edition was a first embodiment, as its author’s doctoral thesis.
Benjamin and New Left Books (now Verso) – and Libris
Hyphen Press / 2008.12.13
Further to this discussion of the Benjamin archive book, published in English by Verso, some invaluable notes on the history of the publication of Walter Benjamin’s writings can be found [here], as a prelude to the publication next year of Erdmut Wizisla’s Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht: the story of a friendship, 1924–1940
Benjamins
Hyphen Press / 2008.08.22
Now that every word that Walter Benjamin published in his lifetime has been collected and republished, and now that his many unfinished words have been similarly collected and printed, and now that to this set of ‘collected writings’ we can add letters and diaries that he cannot have thought of publishing, there only remains to be transcribed and multiplied the scraps, cards, sheets, that fill up the rest of his archive.
Johnston’s ellipsis
Hyphen Press / 2008.02.27
Alastair Johnston, printer & publisher in Berkeley CA, but of UK origins, has collected more than twenty years’ worth of his occasional writings. The central theme of the pieces is the small press poetry scene on the West Coast and in the UK since the 1960s, with a sprinkling of articles on typography and publishing […]
The political economy of book production
Hyphen Press / 2008.02.18
Compare and contrast these two good books published by Verso in London and New York.
Nice book, well glued
Hyphen Press / 2008.02.17
Good evening, Mrs Craven, the collection of Mollie Panter-Downes’s stories written during the Second World War and published originally in The New Yorker, then collected in 1999 by Persephone Books (London), has just been reissued in their ‘Classics’ series.
Penguins lose the plot
Hyphen Press / 2007.11.01
As any long-term reader and watcher of Penguin Books knows, the company has always cultivated its own history, seizing the chance of an anniversary to make an exhibition or put out a book celebrating its own story.
Vertigo: Collecting W.G. Sebald
Hyphen Press / 2007.08.13
Terry Pitts’s blog about these books: interesting, and not just for the Sebald content.
Biospeak
Hyphen Press / 2007.08.09
Two demon constituents of capsule English-language biographies (for book-flaps, catalogues, CVs, and so on) are ‘currently’ and ‘based in’. ‘Cormac Wrathbone is a freelance writer and critic, currently based in London.’ What’s wrong here? It’s not just the tiredness of the phrasing.