Reading Copy

If you pick up the New York Times on sunday, you will see this lovely essay in the book section. It’s a great article and shows how the biggest publishers can get it hopelessly, hopelessly wrong. I know this is a well-worn path (think Decca rejecting The Beatles) but it’s still a fascinating insight into the rejection process that so many books go through. How could anyone reject Anne Frank’s diary? How could anyone reject Animal Farm (especially because they thought it was a book about animals)?

Hindsight is, indeed, a glorious thing.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Our charity auction with Penguin, for a collection of 14 signed books, is now live on AbeBooks.co.uk and AbeBooks.com. It’s going to be interesting to see what the collection sells for. Last night, I started to read one of the books featured in the collection - Zoe Heller’s Notes On A Scandal. AbeBooks.com has a staff library of around 300 books and I borrowed a copy after the auction sparked my interest in an author I’ve never really paid much attention to.

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I’m sure many of you remember the online charity auction we staged in conjunction with Penguin last December. We sold four special editions of books redesigned by famous designers and raised $13,000 for English PEN - a charity that supports the rights of authors and freedom in literature.

Well, we’ve teamed up with Penguin again and this time we’re going to be auctioning a one-of-a-kind collection of 14 signed novels - all of them recent bestsellers such as Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Zoe Heller’s Notes On A Scandal and Nick Hornby’s How To Be Good. Once again, English Pen will receive all proceeds.

Penguin is reissuing 36 bestsellers in its famous retro striped cover designs on September 6 and it has taken the 14 modern fiction books from the series and got each one signed by the respective author. We’ll be selling them in a single lot.

The auction will be conducted on AbeBooks.com and AbeBooks.co.uk. It begins on Thursday 6 September and concludes on Tuesday 11 September at 1pm EST. The collection of signed books will not be available again.

The signed novels are:
Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
How To Be Good by Nick Hornby
The Accidental by Ali Smith
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Any Human Heart by William Boyd
How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff
English Passengers by Matthew Kneale
Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller
Regeneration by Pat Barker
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka
The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru
What a Carve Up! By Jonathan Coe
The Other Side of the Story by Marian Keyes
Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction by Sue Townsend

That’s a pretty decent group of writers - a set of signed books worthy of any collector’s bookshelf. I particularly loved English Passengers and White Teeth. Let’s hope we can once again raise a decent sum of money.

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Canada’s Globe and Mail has some fun with AbeBooks.com’s list of bestselling sex manuals. The list was topped by a Christian sex manual - Intended For Pleasure.

“You have God’s permission to enjoy sex within your marriage. He invented sex; he thought it up to begin with. You can learn to enjoy it, and, husbands, you can develop a thrilling, happy marriage with “the wife of your youth” - Intended for Pleasure: Sex Technique and Sexual Fulfilment in Christian Marriage, by Ed Wheat and Gaye Wheat

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You’ve written a great book but no-one will publish it. The Boston Phoenix reports that you’re probably too ugly to get into print.

Jhumpa Lahiri, author of Interpreter of Maladies, would turn anyone’s head. She’s also got one of the best names in literature too.

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The Wall Street Journal highlights some hefty and expensive coffee table books from Taschen but they pale when compared to the daddy of all Taschen books - GOAT (that stands for Greatest Of All Time - a very expensive limited edition book about boxing genius Muhammad Ali.)

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The Financial Times take a look at how the estates of dead authors keep the ball rolling.

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The Daily Telegraph reports, with typical Telegraph gusto, on how World War II remains a fertile theme for many (British) writers.

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A publisher is playing a game of hide and seek in London bookshops with its latest release reports The Times. (If you find one of the books, can you walk out without paying or will you be accused of shoplifting?)

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Emma Barnes, from the wonderful UK publisher Snowbooks, explains why book covers are important on The Guardian’s blog. Snowbooks publishes Mark Ames’ Going Postal in the UK.

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A French publisher has produced a manual to help prepare parents for homework tutoring. On the top of the bestsellers with over 90,000 copies sold
Le Cahier de Vacances Pour Adultes (Holiday Revision Guide for Adults) may just be translated to English and put (by your children) on your reading list next summer.

Popularity: 10% [?]