For any collectors of Booker Prize winners out there, you will soon have a new gap to fill in your collection. Yesterday, the Booker Prize committee announced a long-list for a Lost Booker prize award. The Lost Booker will compensate for a 1971 rule change which left a number of important 1970 publications out of the running. Previous to 1971, the Booker prize was awarded retrospectively to a book published in the previous year. In 1971 the rules shifted and the Booker began to be awarded to a book published in the same year. (These rules still stand). The rule change created a multi-month gap that left a number of 1970 publications out in the cold.
To compensate for this loss, the Booker Prize Foundation announced the creation of a special Lost Man Booker Prize Award and drew up a long-list of 22 novels published in 1970 that missed previous consideration. The list includes Patrick O'Brien's "Master and Commander," Irish Murdoch's "A Fairly Honorable Defeat," Shiva Naipaul's "Fireflies," and Ruth Rendell's "A Guilty Thing Surprised." The short-list will be announced in March, at which point the public can vote for their favorite on the Booker Prize website. The winner will be announced in May.
Read a longer article about this new award from the Guardian here.
The Northeast Document Conservation Center, which has very likely handled book conservation needs for all the major rare book libraries, posted a heartening report yesterday about its role in helping preserve a mid-nineteenth-century map for a local community. The Historical Society of Charlestown, New Hampshire, had a topographical map of Sullivan County, published by Smith and Morley, that was "coated with varnish, and attached to a decaying cloth backing."
The Society applied for and received two small grants from local banks. With a little publicity on its side, the Society also pulled in a few more hundred dollars from a private foundation, thus enabling it to send the map to the NEDCC for treatment. There, conservators removed the yellow varnish using ethanol and washed the paper. "The decaying cloth backing was
removed before the map was lined with Japanese paper. After being
mounted on linen for additional support, the map was encapsulated in
transparent polyester film (Melinex®) to protect against dirt,
handling, and atmospheric pollution." World-class treatment for Sullivan County!
In this day and age of downsizing print and book coverage, Fine Books is returning to print!
February 1, 2010, Durham, NC. Fine Books & Collections magazine,
which targets collectors of rare and collectible books, will return to
a regular print schedule in April 2010.
The
magazine had suspended its bi-monthly publication schedule in November
2008, but published an edition in Fall 2009. Based on very positive
results, the publishers will return the magazine to print on a
quarterly basis. The annual subscription price will be $25.
In
announcing its plans, the magazine said it would continue its monthly
e-letter online and its very popular blog. According to associate
publisher Kim Draper, the web site has grown tremendously in the past
year, having just topped 50,000 monthly visitors.
"We don't
hope to achieve as much readership in print, but we do think print has
a certain charm and value that is impossible to obtain online," says
Draper. "It remains a conundrum why collectors of print love reading
online, but we are delighted to be able to serve both needs."
The
online editor, Rebecca Rego Barry, will also serve as editor of the
print edition. According to Barry, the content of the magazine will be
a collection of some material used online as well as new features,
columns, and resources that will not appear online. "We are intrigued
with the idea of archiving some of our best online stories in a print
format, but we will also be offering readers new content in each
issue. It was a formula that worked very well for us with the edition
we published last fall."
The magazine said that it plans some
operational changes to make publishing more affordable, most notably
that it will not process any subscription without a valid email
address. According to Draper, "When we looked at our operation, we
realized that contacting people via the postal service was just too
expensive. We plan to handle all renewals and communication efforts
via email, so there's really no point in having a subscriber with whom
we can't communicate."
Writers in the upcoming print edition
will include Nicholas Basbanes and Joel Silver, two stalwarts of the
book collecting world. The magazine will continue its annual directory
of booksellers started last fall that featured more than 700
book-related businesses, and it will add a feature called Biblio/360,
an annual guide to classes, societies, fairs, and symposiums related to
book collecting.
Fine Books & Collections was
founded by bookseller P. Scott Brown in January 2003 as OP magazine.
It changed names in September 2004 and adopted a color format. In
November 2008, Brown returned to bookselling full-time, and the
magazine suspended print publication until Fall 2009.
The magazine is published by Journalistic, Inc., a North Carolina-based media company. Click here to subscribe.
Alberto Manguel, known to us for his wonderful A History of Reading and The Library at Night, has a new collection of essays out this month, A Reader on Reading (which I had the pleasure of reading and reviewing for our upcoming February issue). He's in the states for a few days, for reading events at Yale University on Wednesday, Feb. 3 and City University of NY on Friday, Feb. 5. Manguel is a reader's reader, and the list of his 100 favorite books on his site is breathtaking. From The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland (of course), to Flaubert, Goethe, and Sophocles.
Photo by Philippe Matsas, from Alberto Manguel's website.
