“Go,little book ...”: Getting a book to readers

An author, editor, agent, marketing director, and bookseller describe in turn how one book—Facing the Music: Short Stories by Larry Brown—made the journey from a writer's brain to readers' brains. Larry Brown is the author of two novels,Dirty Work andJoe, and two short-story collections,Facing the Music andBig Bad Love. His next book,On Fire, is a nonfiction account of his experiences in the Oxford, Mississippi, Fire Department. Liz Darhansoff is a literary agent with Darhansoff and Verrill Literary Agency, New York. Richard Howorth is an Oxford bookseller who serves on theParis Review's Booksellers' Advisory Board, the Board of Directors of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Board of Directors of the American Booksellers Association. He chairs the ABA's Publisher Relations Committee and in 1986 was awarded the Charles S. Haslam Award for excellence in bookselling. Shannon Ravenel is editorial director of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill and the editor of its annualNew Stories from, the South. From 1977 to 1990 she was series editor forBest American Short Stories, and she editedThe Best American Short Stories of the Eighties. Ina Stern is marketing director of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.     

The case for reader research

The author argues for a new attitude and praxis in consumer publishing that entails ongoing reader research. This change would reduce failure rates, increase profits, and better serve publishers’ cultural and economic objectives. Such studies would encompass both basic research and research on specific titles. John P. Dessauer founding editor ofBook Research Quarterly, has been a bookseller, publisher, and book club editor, official statistician for AAP, AAUP, ABA, and NACS; co-founder of BISG and editor ofBook Industry Trends from 1977 to 1988; contributing editor ofPublishers Weekly from 1971 to 1988; author ofBook Publishing: A Basic Introduction (Continuum, 1989)     

Computer staffing,planning and control in art museums: Findings from a national survey

The national survey, conducted for all art museums in the United States and Canada, resulted in 252 questionnaires, of which 166 were computer-user museums with acceptable questionnaires. The institutions using computers averaged 2.2 million in budget and had a median membership level of 860. Museums were divided in small, medium, and large budget categories by the budget ranges of2.2 million in budget and had a median membership level of 860. Museums were divided in small, medium, and large budget categories by the budget ranges of 0-210,000, 211-817,000, and211-817,000, and 818,000+.     

The Franco-American book trade in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries

The Franco-American book trade played a vital role in the struggle for mutual understanding during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. That trade is exemplified by the work of three colorful individuals: Joseph Nancrede (1761–1841), who left his native France and became a publisher in Boston; John Hurford Stone (1763–1818), English supporter of the French Revolution who set up his English Press in Paris, issuing works of American interest; and Nicholas Gouin Dufief (1776–1834), who fled the French Revolution and set up as bookseller in Philadelphia. Thanks to the efforts of Nancrede and Dufief, the writings of French thinkers were made available to American readers, and thanks to the presswork of John Hurford Stone, the writings of Barlow, Paine, Jefferson and others were circulated in France. As publisher, printer, and bookseller, these three bookpeople reflected the ups and downs of Franco-American relations and became instruments of international understanding. Madeleine B. Stern, partner in the rare book firm of Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern, has written numerous books on publishing and bookselling history, includingImprints on History: Book Publishers and American Frontiers. She is the editor ofPublishers for Mass Entertainment in 19th-Century America and is currently completingStudies in the Franco-American Book Trade in the Late 18th and Early 19th Centuries     

Growth and change in the world’s biological literature as reflected in BIOSIS publications

BIOSIS has abstracted and indexed the worldwide biological literature since 1926, publishing firstBiological Abstracts, later alsoBiological Abstracts/Reports, Reviews, Meetings, and more recently theZoological Record. The increases and changes in the contents of these publications, when taken in broad perspective, provide insights into the growth and patterns of life-sciences research worldwide in the past seventy years     

The economic context of book publishing

A healthy publishing industry flourishes in a healthy economy. This article (written June 1990) provides a brief forecast for the U.S. economy and overall consumer spending. The authors combine economic and demographic forecasts to predict trends in book sales. Jim Haughey is Vice President, Research and Economics, at Cahners Publishing Company, which publishesPublishers Weekly, Library Journal, and seventy other business and consumer magazines and newspapers. Deborah Selsky is the economist for the printing and publishing group at Cahners Economics. She regularly writes on economics forLibrary Journal and is the editor ofPublishing Markets, a newsletter.     

Visually Framing Press Freedom and Responsibility of a Massacre: Photographic and Graphic Images in Charlie Hebdo's Newspaper Front Pages Around the World

This research examines 441 front-page images published in 367 newspapers on the day following the shooting in Paris of 12 people at or near the Charlie Hebdo office. The aim of this study is to understand how mainstream media visually framed responsibility for the Charlie Hebdo massacre and how these visual frames coalesced to represent collective narratives about press freedom. Through a collaborative visual analysis, this study attempts to understand how the selected visual frames worked to communicate the causes, effects, and responses to the massacre and also to press freedom—an ideological construct that news media had a vested interest in advancing.     

Publishers,authors, and technology: A look backward and forward

New technology is not always used to its full potential. Economic and market considerations, issues of quality, and the social and political setting may impose barriersto the exploitation of new inventions. This article describes the impact of the typewriter on the division of labor between author and publisher and analyzes the reasons for the general delay in its adoption. It then reviews obstacles to greater use of the computer and offers some predictions for the near future. Beth Luey, senior lecturer and director of historical editing and publishing at Arizona State University, writes frequently on author/publisher relations. She is the author ofHandbook for Academic Authors (Cambridge, 1987) and editor ofBook Research Quarterly.     

Ellen,Television, and the Politics of Gay and Lesbian Visibility

–The discourses constructing the coming-out of Ellen DeGeneres/Ellen Morgan, star of and lead character in the ABC television sitcom Ellen, were permeated with implications of authenticity and liberation, illustrating the continuing power of the confessional ritual described by Michele Foucault in The History of Sexuality. In contrast to the popular interpretation of the coming-out as an escape from repression, media treatment of the Ellen phenomenon was productive, in Foucault's sense, constructing a regulatory discourse that constrained the implications of gay visibility on commercial television by channeling it through a narrative of psychological autonomy, through television norms for representing homosexuality, and through an overarching strategy of personalization. I conclude with a discussion of the problems of “poster-child politics” as exemplified by the Ellen discourse.     

Archival theory in Italy today

Archival theory in Italy has a long tradition, going back as far as the second half of the nineteenth century, and with roots in the 17th and 18th centuries. Central theme in the theory is themetodo storico, the principle of provenance, for the first time expressed in the late 19th century by Bonaini and Bongi. In the following decades archivists like Casanova and Cencetti were among the leading authors. Elio Lodolini assigned himself the task to synthesize ideas and notions, within a clear distinctions between records (registratura) and archives. One of the overall characteristics of the rich Italian literature is the stressing of the cultural value of archives. I have twice treated before the theme of archival theory in Italy from the fifties up to the nineties. The first time on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of theScuola speciale per Archivisti e Bibliotecari dell'Università degli Studi “La Sapienza” di Roma in 1989, when there was an international round table on archival science in the State Archives of Rome. My essay,Italian archival science today, has been published in the proceedings of the meeting (cfr. Donato Tamblé,L'archivistica in Italia oggi, inStudi sull'archivistica, by Roma: Elio Lodolini, 1992). Some years later, in 1993, I published a book on contemporary Italian archival theory (Donato Tamblé,La teoria archivistica italiana contemporanea (1950–1990). Profilo storico-critico (Roma, 1993) which was the sequel to the volume of Elio Lodolini on Italian archival history — (Lineamenti di storia dell'archivistica italiana (Roma, 1991). The purpose of my book was that of locating and identifying the scientific object of archival science as it developed and was clarified in the thinking and in the lucubration of the contemporary Italian Archivists.     

Archival theory in Italy today

Archival theory in Italy has a long tradition, going back as far as the second half of the nineteenth century, and with roots in the 17th and 18th centuries. Central theme in the theory is themetodo storico, the principle of provenance, for the first time expressed in the late 19th century by Bonaini and Bongi. In the following decades archivists like Casanova and Cencetti were among the leading authors. Elio Lodolini assigned himself the task to synthesize ideas and notions, within a clear distinctions between records (registratura) and archives. One of the overall characteristics of the rich Italian literature is the stressing of the cultural value of archives. I have twice treated before the theme of archival theory in Italy from the fifties up to the nineties. The first time on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of theScuola speciale per Archivisti e Bibliotecari dell'Università degli Studi “La Sapienza” di Roma in 1989, when there was an international round table on archival science in the State Archives of Rome. My essay,Italian archival science today, has been published in the proceedings of the meeting (cfr. Donato Tamblé,L'archivistica in Italia oggi, inStudi sull'archivistica, by Roma: Elio Lodolini, 1992). Some years later, in 1993, I published a book on contemporary Italian archival theory (Donato Tamblé,La teoria archivistica italiana contemporanea (1950–1990). Profilo storico-critico (Roma, 1993) which was the sequel to the volume of Elio Lodolini on Italian archival history — (Lineamenti di storia dell'archivistica italiana (Roma, 1991). The purpose of my book was that of locating and identifying the scientific object of archival science as it developed and was clarified in the thinking and in the lucubration of the contemporary Italian Archivists.     

Publishing,property, and the national information infrastructure

Upon reviewing thePreliminary Draft of the Report of the Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights, given the titleIntellectual Property and the National Information Infrastructure, one immediately confronts the grand ambiguity that resides in the two words: “intellectual property.” That the task force on the information infrastructure, enshrined with the acronym NII, had to locate precedent for its missioning Supreme Court Justice Story's 1841 observations on copyright issues as an area involving the “metaphysics of the law” indicates what a long reach the very notion of intellectual property entails in a democratic society. He is the author ofCommunicating Ideas: The Politics of Publishing and has published widely in the journal literature, includingScholarly Publishing; Logos; Publishing Research Quarterly; Journal of the American Society of Information Science, among others.     

What publishers need in international copyright treaties

Publishers may reasonably expect international copyright treaties to (1) assurerecognition of publishers' contributions to literary works, (2) provide legal and politicalsecurity in the preservation of exclusive rights, (3) maintainpredictability in the contours of international commercial life, (4) establish standards ofenforcement, (5) beadaptable to rapidly changing technologies, and (6) conveydirection so that the copyright monopoly serves rather than subverts the values of free expression. Jon A. Baumgarten is a partner in Proskauer Rose Goetz & Mendelsohn, Washington, D.C., New York, California, London, Paris, and Brussels. He is a former general counsel, U.S. Copyright Office, and serves as copyright counsel to the Association of American Publishers. The views expressed here are the writer's and do not necessarily represent positions of the AAP. This article was adapted from a presentation at the seminar “East Meets West: Copyright and the Publisher in a Market Economy”, Hamburg, March 1991.     

The next ten years in publishing: National,international, and educational perspectives

In describing the Renaissance-style publisher of the 1990s, this article emphasizes the craft and skills needed to maintain quality. Ian Montagnes suggests that these skills must now be taught formally, rather than by apprenticeship. He also describes one such training program that he has conducted for editors in developing countries. Ian Montagnes is assistant director and editor-in-chief of the University of Toronto Press. He has served continuously as either associated editor or editor ofScholarly Publishing: A Journal for Authors and Editors since its inception in 1969. He has also been active in the Canadian and American associations of university presses and the Society for Scholarly Publishing     

An Interview with Joseph Miller

Joseph Miller discusses his career as a librarian and editor of the Sears List. Topics include his education, work with the Sears List, as well as trends in cataloging, the future of cataloging, and the teaching of cataloging in library schools.     

Concerns about Error go Beyond Cumulating Type I Error: A Response to Matsunaga

This study presents automated methods for predicting valence and quantifying valenced thoughts of a text. First, it examines whether Wordscores, developed by Laver, Benoit, and Garry (2003 Laver, M., Benoit, K. and Garry, J. 2003. Extracting policy positions from political texts using words as data. The American Political Science Review, 97(2): 311–331. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), can be adapted to reliably predict the valence of open-ended responses in a survey about bioethical issues in genetics research, and then tests a complementary and novel technique for coding the number of valenced thoughts in open-ended responses, termed Affective Intonation. Results show that Wordscores successfully predicts the valence of brief and grammatically imperfect open-ended responses, and Affective Intonation achieves comparable performance to human coders when estimating number of valenced thoughts. Both Wordscores and Affective Intonation have promise as reliable, effective, and efficient methods when researchers content-analyze large amounts of textual data systematically.     

Editing Conservatism: How National Review Magazine Framed and Mobilized a Political Movement

This article examines how National Review magazine helped to spark the 1960s American conservative movement through its particular framing of conservatism and how the magazine has worked to sustain that influence even until today. Using research on frame alignment in social movements, the first issue of National Review is analyzed and placed in context with contemporaneous events and publications. The creation and editing of the magazine is found to parallel the creative and deliberate framing of the early conservative movement. The implications of National Review's success for today's political movements and for creators of political media messages are also discussed.     

Henry Holt a-spinning in his grave: Literary agenting yesterday and today

The role of the literary agent and the reception granted agents by publishers have changed markedly over the course of the twentieth century. Henry Holt’s views of agents, written in the first decade of the century, help define the status and activities of agents at that time. These are compared with the role of agents today, using archival sources, the book trade literature, and interviews. Thomas L. Bonn, review editor of this journal, is a librarian, Library at State University College at Cortland. He is the author ofUnder Cover: An Illustrated History of American Mass Market Paperbacks andHeavy Traffic and High Culture: The New American Library as Literary Gatekeeper. He is working on a study of American literary agents.     

The history and scope of the American Economic Association’sEconLit and theEconomic Literature Index

This paper discusses the coverage and history of the American Economic Association's electronic bibliographic databases,EconLit andEconomic Literature Index. The author briefly traces the origins of the discipline of economics and discusses the history and early print bibliographies of the association, which were later expanded into electronic media with the creation of theEconomic Literature Index andEconLit. Tables show the subject and geographic scope, as well as the coverage dates and number of records, for the different document types contained in bothEconLit and theEconomic Literature Index.     

NSF grant policy on page charges

On December 18, 1992, the National Science Foundation published a notice in theFederal Register soliciting comments on a proposed change to Section 517d of theNSF Grant Policy Manual. The proposed change eliminated the prohibition on use of NSF grant funds for payment of page charges associated with publishing scientific research in journals operated for profit. NSF received numerous comments expressing divergent views on the proposed change. After considering all the comments received, NSF decided to adopt the proposed change. The following is the memorandum circulated within NSF, summarizing the comments and offering options for the National Science Board to consider.