The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas recently acquired the David Foster Wallace archive:
The archive contains manuscript materials for Wallace’s books, stories and essays; research materials; Wallace’s college and graduate school writings; juvenilia, including poems, stories and letters; teaching materials and books.
Lots of scanned images.
Craig Mod’s recent essay, Books in the age of the iPad—I recommended that you read the whole thing now before pushing on—raises some interesting points about the philosophical challenges and opportunities introduced by the iPad and its ilk.
I thoroughly enjoyed his insights. I’m on the edge of my seat, here, imagining how Mod’s concept of vertical chapters might be realized.
But I couldn’t help but be vexed by an offhanded remark he makes in his introduction:
As the publishing industry wobbles and Kindle sales jump, book romanticists cry themselves to sleep. But really, what are we shedding tears over?
We’re losing the throwaway paperback.
The airport paperback.
The beachside paperback.We’re losing the dredge of the publishing world: disposable books. The book printed without consideration of form or sustainability or longevity. The book produced to be consumed once and then tossed. The book you bin when you’re moving and you need to clean out the closet.
These are the first books to go. And I say it again, good riddance.
Anyone who buys books will probably understand what he’s talking about. Even while running your eyes over the shelves at a bookstore, it’s not impossible to fantasize about which books you’d proudly keep on your bookshelf when you’re finished and which ones you’d probably resell on Amazon1—the fact that you haven’t actually read any of the books you’re judging notwithstanding.
Of course, physical dimensions are a helpful guide; he doesn’t explicitly write it, but the throwaway/airport/beach paperback is often a mass market paperback. In case you’re not familiar with the terminology, close your eyes and visualize a novel from any one of the genres—romance, science fiction, fantasy—that have always been relegated to the critical ghetto. Note the diminutive 4×7 cover, the thick binding, the cheap paper. It’s an unmistakable image.
Despite the fact that I’m just as priggishly dismissive of such books as the next guy,2 I can’t help but disagree with Mod’s assertion that they are expendable.
As is the case with TV, it’s the tremendous profits from the popular stuff that subsidizes the high-investment/low-return niche stuff. To lose mass market paperbacks—worthless or not—is to lose a large chunk of revenue. Which translates into a loss for all professional publishers and writers and a grievous blow for the ones with limited commercial appeal.
Though Mod’s publishing credentials are infinitely more impressive than my own (as in, he has actually published books), I worry that he’s mistaking ‘foundation’ for ‘dead weight’.
With large publishers scrambling to rebuild the bottom line, would it really be a stretch to imagine that a printed version of Infinite Jest
There’s simply no telling whether an ebook model would suit the mass market format. Though Apple and Amazon will have no trouble matching the basement-level pricing scheme, one cannot look past the fact that getting them into the casual consumer’s hands will first require getting a $250+ device into the casual consumer’s hands.
It seems to me that the path of least resistance (and thus the most likely next step) will be the opposite of what Mod suggests—to send the niche publications to the ereaders and continue to sell the mass-market stuff for as long as the demand holds out.
The shortcomings of such a reality are apparent. Compiling a worthy bookshelf is, to the devoted aesthete, one of the unmatchable joys of life. Physical books can be lent to friends and colleagues, or dog-eared, or forgotten in airplane seat-backs. Losing these small things will be a bitter pill to swallow.3
There’s no questioning that the iPad will do for boutique publishers roughly what the Internet did for graphic designers and software engineers. Which is to say, in a decade, small publishers might find their thoughts drifting to how they ever got along without it. That’s the core of Mod’s essay, and I can only echo his hopes that it will become a reality.
But because the niche typically encounters tremendous resistance when it tries to cannibalize the mainstream—for the mainstream would probably rather just stop reading than read more challenging things, if forced to choose between the two—it seems a little shortsighted to cheer the possibility of a large-publisher apocalypse between then and now. There are few who would profit from it.
. [↑]The Wall Street Journal recently printed an interview with Don DeLillo to discuss his new book, Point Omega.
There are also some brief insights into DeLillo’s off-kilter writing style:
His approach to writing borders on obsessive. He fixates on the shapes of letters and words, and judges each phrase for its visual appearance as well as its rhythm and clarity.
An admonition against mythmaking in yesterday’s New York Times: J.D. Salinger, famously reclusive author, didn’t actively cultivate that sort of reputation. He just moved to a small town in New Hampshire and was, by all accounts, a pretty good neighbor.
Want to bury some warm childhood memories under a mountain of cold analysis? A close examination of the ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ aesthetic.
A recent post of Things Magazine—where I happened upon the above link—offers a review, of sorts, of such ‘graph fetishism’.
A short article in the LA Times on the twilight years in the life of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick.
The Books of the Century includes, among other things, nearly every Publishers Weekly annual bestseller list compiled since 1900.
An incredible, and incredibly rare, selection of William Burroughs’ audio experiments, recorded on a variety of tape decks in London, Paris, New York and Tangiers, at various dates from the mid-50s to the late 1970s.
If you want to hear Burroughs at his best—that is to say, in the midst of his many brilliant, unsettling and incoherent moments—then have at it.
The ongoing fracas over Jack Kerouac’s estate—centering on a jilted wife and a forged will—sounds like some sort of noir novel.
David Foster Wallace, in a 1998 issue of Waterstone’s Magazine, connects the dots between Terminator 2 and its thematic/artistic cousin, hardcore pornography.
Hearkening back to Zak Smith’s illustrations for each page of Gravity’s Rainbow: here’s somebody who’s going to spend the next year and a half doing the same thing to Moby-Dick.
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