There’s a mystery in Scotland. No, not a new Ian Rankin or Alexander McCall Smith novel. But it does involve books – cut up, dissected, bent, and folded. And they’re all the more beautiful because of it.
This is the second year that wonderful paper sculptures made from books have been appearing throughout the country, in time for Book Week Scotland, which closed on December 2. Last year, there were 10 sculptures. This year there are five. Who is the artist? That’s the mystery. All that is known is that she is a woman.
These sculptures are quite magical. You can see all of them on the Scottish Book Trust site.
My favourite this year is Peter Pan and Wendy ....
... but then, I can’t go to London without visiting Peter’s statue in Kensington Gardens.
Books used as an art medium is not a new thing, but it is to me. I came aware of it just a few weeks ago when media covered the unveiling of The Machine Gunners, more-than-life-sized replicas of toy soldiers made from recycled books on the topic of war, appropriately in time for Remembrance Day.
When I started researching this art form, I found sculptures made from children’s books, fantastical bas relief from carved out books, abstract art, landscapes, portraits, even pop-ups. Check out some of these creations on the Hongkiat website and on this Tumblr page. There’s even a Pinterest site for "altered books". Who knew?
I’m now looking at the overstuffed bookcases at home with a new eye. The ebook willnever look so good or inspiring.
The Canadian Journalists for Free Expression want your input on how access to information could – and should -- be improved in Canada. For those who don’t know CJFE, it’s an independent Canadian organization that works to protect journalists, freedom of expression, and access to information in Canada and around the world. They’re good guys.
Tomorrow is the 2012 CJFE Gala “A Night to Honour Courageous Reporting.” The event is an opportunity to recognize the courage of those who stand up for free expression. This year they will be honouring Rami Jarrah (Syria) and Mae Azango (Liberia) with the International Press Freedom Awards. Daniel Henry (Canada) will be receiving the Vox Libera Award, and Radio-Canada's program Enquête (Canada) will be accepting the Tara Singh Hayer Award.
A note: Last year’s winner of the Vox Libera Award was Ron Haggart, honoured posthumously. His daughter—my colleague Kelly Haggart—has very recently published an ebook of her father’s writings, Cool Heads at Kingston Pen, his account of the 1971 riots at Kingston Penitentiary. Haggart was instrumental in mediating an end to the crisis.
Tomorrow CJFE also launch their new video on the current state of access to information in Canada.
If you don’t have time to watch it (it’s really short) the bottom line is this: Canada ranks 55th out of 93 countries surveyed for freedom of expression. The study was carried out by the Centre for Law and Democracy.
And so, CJFE asks your input into a submission for the Office of the Information Commissioner on the changes needed to update and improve the system. Help improve the state of access to information in Canada: complete the survey.
What do you think about LinkedIn endorsements? LinkedIn introduced these in September, as an easy way for you to recognize your contact’s skills and abilities. Sounds like a good idea at first blush, but do these click-recommendations really mean anything?
Many LinkedIn users think not and are annoyed by the feature, and they’ve been saying so on the site itself. Forbes refers to them as "The Stove Top Stuffing version of recommendations." The general impression is that these endorsements can’t be taken as serious recommendations and that, if you want to recognize someone’s abilities, you should take the time to pen—or type—a recommendation.
I started getting emails about people who had endorsed me some 3 or so weeks ago. Fortunately, these are from people I actually know and who know me professionally (well, almost all). I don’t have dozens of endorsements. And I admit I’ve fallen for the box that pops up when I log into my account, asking me to endorse some of my contacts—I’ve endorsed some, but by no means all -- only those I can vouch for and I would stand behind that endorsement. But then, I am only connected on LinkedIn to people I know and whose work is relevant to mine – apart for a very few exceptions who are friends rather than colleagues.
But some people are being endorsed by complete strangers, which is silly and meaningless.
As this light-recommendation mode gains further momentum, can one really ignore it? If you don't play the game will you be sidelined when it comes to finding a new job or contract? I’m still undecided.
“We are all Americans.” – whether Romney or Obama -- or both--proclaimed this, the US media coverage of last Tuesday’s elections seemed to put that to the lie. What we heard-- and what struck me-- from all commentators, on all networks, was not "American voters", or Florida, or Maine, or Utah voters, but white voters, black voters, African-American voters, Hispanic voters, Latino voters, women voters, youth voters. In the following days, analysts further divided these into Christians, Evangelicals, non-Christians.
The melting pot most definitely is not. And the media offered sheets of statistics to back that up.
The headlines on the Web in the days following the election pored over the new demographics.
Nowhere, however, was the electorate parsed by income. The word "poverty" was not one of the factors examined. I'm willing to bet that the balkanized voters would seem a lot more homogeneous if the mean family-- or personal-- income was applied. Poorer people -- the hispanics/latinos and blacks among them-- more than likely voted for Obama. The rich white guys, well, they went the other way.
Back in 2008 journalist Bill Bishop wrote in The Big Sort that you could tell how people would vote by their zip code. This was a somewhat sophisticated version of "birds of a feather flock together" theory.
Perhaps he was right. Certainly his thesis was picked up in The Tennessean where Chas Sisk analyzed voting patterns in Nashville. He quotes Marc Heatherington, a Vanderbilt University professor, who said:
"People aren't choosing to live because of their politics, but where they are choosing to live seems to be highly correlated to their politics."
I find this worrisome, not just for the US, but for Canada. Did we not see similar patterns start to raise their heads during the last elections when candidates and parties set out to win "the ethnic vote"?
The Ottawa media last week debated the pros and cons of the cancelled trip to Ohio by Catholic Orleans students. Was the trip partisan? Was it pro-choice? Why not hitch onto the Romney campaign instead? Why study American politics? Did the teacher have a hidden agenda?
There ensued learned discussions about the value of civics education, about experiential learning, about the need to keep politics out of schools, about Canadians messing in US elections.
Jeff Spooner of The Ottawa Citizen referred to the cancellation as “an illustration of everything that is wrong with the much-praised social media.” But social media had its up-sides: the day after the cancellation, students began a Twitter campaign using the hashtag #TeamSearle to clear the name of their teacher fingered as the culprit in planning the trip.
One point seems to have been overlooked in the numerous reports I read and heard: the school and the board caved in to bullies. After all, the cancellation resulted from anonymous comments reported in an article on a pro-life website. Isn’t that much like what the cyber bullies have been doing to school kids?
So instead of using the comments as a teachable moment about staying the course with your plans, defending your beliefs, ignoring the nay-sayers, the kids learned to give in whenever someone criticizes you, even anonymously. So when these schools teach kids to stand up to bullies, aren’t they being hypocritical?
I bought a novel today--Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo. And yes, I bought it for me. It came very highly recommended by my eight-year-old grand-daughter. And she's a pretty good judge of what makes a good story. Her opinion is backed-up by the Newberry folks who made it an honour book. It's also won many other awards. And it's been made into a film a few times already.
But I'll wait until I finish the book before seeing the film. As my grand-daughter recommends.
That raises the question of what makes a really good child's book. Or what makes a kids' book great?
Speaking at an
inaugural
children’s publishing conference last May 31, in New York City, Richard Robinson, President and CEO of Scholastic Inc, the kids' book empire, said that a great book is…
One that contains a simple and original idea presented with clarity and great power.
One that connects with the reader, asserting its world directly into the reader’s mind.
One that makes the world seem larger and more interesting.
One written with humor and a light touch.
One that is a realization of a complete but very different world.
That could apply to books for all ages, not just kids. Kids interviewed in an un-named survey thought fun and funny were important, as well as a resemblance to their lives. That would explain the shelves full of Judy Blooms and similar authors. My grand-daughter did think the Junie B. books were funny when we read them together a couple of years back, but not great. She lost interest quite quickly, to the relief of her father who worried she may take lessons from the irrepressible Junie.
Certainly kids' lit is a booming business-- the Frankfurt book fair is testament to that. And one that has not yet shifted to digital in any big way. Can it be that the bulk of buyers are grand-parents who can't quite fathom snuggling down for a bedtime story on screen?
Recent news of the book’s ailing health might lead one to think that the publishing industry was on its deathbed or close to it. Nothing seems to be further from the truth, if events like the Frankfurt book fair—more than 7,000 exhibitors strong—are any indication. There are dozens of book fairs each year around the world, from Albania to Zimbabwe. While some are sales events, many, like Frankfurt are trade fairs, where agents, authors, and publishers come to buy and sell rights and services.
If alive and well, the book is, however, suffering from a split personality. It still exists as the physical object we have long known, but increasingly it has a digital life. And the soaring popularity of e-readers and e-books is bringing fundamental changes to the publishing industry.
I work for a public organization that has been in the e-book business for more than 10 years – the International Development Research Centre. For decades we have published the results of research we fund – there’s not a large market share for this product, obviously. While we originally did our own publishing, since 2000 or so we have worked in collaboration with commercial and academic publishers around the world. The deal is simple: essentially our publishing partners have all rights to the printed book and sales; we share e-rights and the right to publish the ebook on our website, full-text, free of charge. We support the publication through buybacks of books to distribute to our key stakeholders. We also distribute the books through aggregators like Googlebooks, NetLibrary, and other vendors. Our motive is not profit, but to ensure that the results of valuable research are as widely disseminated as possible.
So far, this has worked well and we have many copublishing partners. But this past year or two, many of them have also entered the epublishing world and are selling ebooks themselves and through the same aggregators. You can see the problem. What is the solution?
On the positive side is that e-readers appear to be increasing, if not the market for books, at least readership generally. The Pew Research Centre reports that close to 30% of Americans own one of these devices. Those who do read an average of 7 more books a year than those who don’t have an e-reader.
. Long live the book!
Tuesday 23 October 2012
Some fun facts about the Frankfurt Book Fair
Instructions for beginners:
Wear comfortable shoes.
Book your appointments ahead of time.
Drink lots of water.
Allow enough time between apointments to get to the other hall.
Wear comfortable shoes.
Do not leave your stand unattended.
Bring lots of business cards.
Wear comfortable shoes.
Security:
On the open days of the fair, Hall 8 is the only hall protected by guards at all doors who check all your packages every time you enter ("Oh, extra shoes-- just like a woman.") Perhaps being next to the World Bank and the IMF was not such a good idea after all...
But who are they kidding? The monstrous boxes and crates delivered over the two set-up days could have carried commando units, let alone little explosive devices.
There's always time for a touchup.
Saturday and Sunday, the fair is open to the public:
And if you're a teen-- or think like one-- you come dressed up as your favourite manga character or other beastie and get in free. Great fun. They mill around the square between halls 3 and 4. I'm sure I saw Howl, at least one of them.
Day 1: October 8
At a fast clip it was a 20-minute hike from the entance of the Messe to Hall 8, home of English language countries and international organizations. Or as one blogger put it, so far that it deserved its own time zone. The moving walkways are not-- and when they later do, they move at a geriatric pace
Set up day was obvioulsy not for small players like IDRC, with a 2x2 m booth and two boxes of display stuff. The hall was crawling with high loaders shuffling huge black plastic wrapped packages. Booths the size of homes were being erected.Some have enough furniture for a banquet hall.
The scene at booth N910 was dismal. Pieces of lumber on the plastic-covered floor, the table and chairs shrink wrapped, the shelves as dusty as some at home. Clearly no one from the Commonwealth Secretariat, right in front of me, has come. The OECD stand next door is being erected and plastic flowers planted. The World Bank's domain is wrapped in yellow tape like a crime scene. At least we're in good company.
I unwrap the table, mount the shelves and decide that tomorrow will be soon enough to open the boxes. Maybe someone will have swept the floor.
Day 2: October 9
Nope, the floor has not been swept but there are fewer impassable aisles and the highloaders are retreating. More boxes and packages are being brought in through huge bays-- unbelievable what some publishers ship. I open my two boxes and set up our modest display. After all, I'm not here to sell books, but to meet with our copublishers and distributors. And my dance card for the next 3 days is very full.
