E-books and the impact of technology on the publishing industry were an important ongoing conversation at the Winter Institute for booksellers in San Jose, but I came away thinking that reports of the death of print are greatly exaggerated.
The week of the conference, Macmillan titles briefly vanished from Amazon’s shelves in a dispute over e-book pricing. The writer Caleb Crain noted, "They're fighting to see who can lose more money. This is a very peculiar battle." This peculiar battle has a very definite provocation with the appearance of Apple's new iPad.
Yet there are abundant reasons to be hopeful that creative, passionate people have not given up on print culture. That same week we received our shipment of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern # 33: THE SAN FRANCISCO PANORAMA ($16) The new issue of Dave Eggers's (always elaborate, often whimsical) periodical is enough to warm the heart of even the most cynical ink-stained wretch. With writing and artwork from the likes of Andrew Sean Greer, Stephen King, George Saunders and Art Spiegelman it is the ideal newspaper as lavish, tangible object.
The medium is also the message in CODEX IN CRISIS (The Crumpled Press, $25), the scholar-of-scholars Anthony Grafton's meditation on the Republic of Letters in the 21st century. Each copy is hand bound in Brooklyn, New York in a happening akin to a literary quilting bee.
Just as photography freed portraiture to be more than - or differently - representational, one can hope that Kindles and iPads will stretch the possibilities of the book. One cause for hope is THE SELECTED WORKS OF T. S. SPIVET (Penguin, $27.95) by debut novelist, Reif Larsen. There is no sense spoiling Spivet's wonderful American picaresque by exposition. The cross country journey of its eponymous 12-year-old cartographer-hero is ingeniously interpolated with maps and diagrams integral to the plot. It borrows equally from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. It is, in brief, an utterly unique book.
~ Michael Allen
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