Tag: books

Another One from the Department of Nifty Stuff

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When it comes to typography, there are people who like to mess around with fonts (I plead guilty as charged) and then there are people who are obsessed with fonts . . . and those people can get just plain weird.

Consider the case of the Doves typeface, created in the late 1800’s for the Doves Press, a small press associated (like William Morris’s Kelmscott Press) with the Arts and Crafts Movement.  The typeface’s creator, after a falling-out with his business partner, dumped all of the type — and the matrices for casting more — into the Thames River, in an effort to insure that no other press would ever use them.  A century later, a digital font designer spent three years working from copies of existing books in the Doves typeface, re-creating the font in digital form.

It’s a fascinating story; you can read the whole thing here.

Another Nifty Thing

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People at the University of Turin (and at the University of Pisa, and at the University of Mississippi, among other places) are digitizing the Vercelli Book, and the beta version is now on-line.  The Vercelli Book is the Old English manuscript that contains, among other things, the poem known as “The Dream of the Rood” — “A Vision of the True Cross” would be a more accurate title, in my opinion, but custom is custom.

Seriously, folks, I would have given my eye-teeth for something like this back when I was studying Old English in graduate school.  And the on-line grammars, and the on-line dictionaries . . . I counted myself fortunate, in those days, that I was able to convince my parents that copies of Bosworth-Toller (the big fat dictionary for Old English) and Cleasby-Vigfusson (the equivalent for Old Icelandic) made excellent Christmas and birthday presents.  Given their size and weight, they also made excellent doorstops.

Why are Italian universities spearheading the Vercelli digitization project?  Well . . . the Vercelli Book is called the Vercelli Book because it lives in the library of the cathedral in Vercelli, Italy.  How a collection of Old English poetry ended up in Italy nobody is certain, but it’s been there since the 11th century at least.  (Things became unsettled, to put it mildly, in England during the latter part of the 11th century; it’s possible the manuscript left home at that time.  But nobody knows for sure.)

We’ve come a long way since the days when putting together a grammar or a dictionary or a variorum edition meant working with stacks and stacks of index cards.  God, I love technology.

Amusements for the Coming Solstice

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I could have saved this for posting a bit closer to the day, but by that time we’re going to have a house full of people and I’ll be lucky to get up a few sentences griping about punctuation trivia.  That being the case, herewith a few of my favorite winter-holiday stories and characters from both written and visual media:

  • The visit from Saint Nicholas at Christmas in Nazi-occupied Holland in Hilda Van Stockum’s The Winged Watchman — I read this one when I was a kid, and it helped start me off on my ongoing fascination with history and the people who were part of it.
  • Father Christmas in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, whose arrival with gifts for the Pevensie children signals the end in Narnia of “always winter and never Christmas.”
  • The New Year’s feast at Camelot that kicks off Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  For those who feel up to tackling the thorny Middle English dialect of the original, there’s a text on-line here. My co-author and I liked it so much, in fact, we wrote our own short story about the events of that particular Arthurian feast, “Holly and Ivy.”
  • The third-season Christmas episode of Supernatural, for the way that it combines the Winchester brothers’ childhood memories of The Worst Christmas Ever (everybody has at least one of those in their memory book) with the sense of impending doom that hung over all the episodes of that particular season, and still manages to finish up the episode on a warm, if bittersweet, note.
  • The first Die Hard movie.  (Of the others in the franchise, we will not speak, except to say that I’m happy Bruce Willis has a long-running franchise to keep his own Christmas stocking full.)  Underneath all the blood and explosions, it’s a romantic comedy for the Christmas season . . . how often, after all, do you get a rom-com where the hero is literally willing to walk barefoot over broken glass for the sake of his one true love?

More From the Department of Interesting Stuff

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A couple of interesting links:

The British Museum (with help from Microsoft, who did the digitization) has released over a million images from books of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries onto the internet.  A few of the highlights are here.

With the end of the year coming up, a lot of people are posting their best-reads of the year list.  Science fiction author Fran Wilde has an interesting one, here.  Full disclosure:  my co-author and I have a story on the list.

Support Independent Booksellers!

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It’s not that I have anything against large booksellers, or against chain booksellers . . . but I do believe that a rich and varied bookselling ecosystem is a good thing.

Right now, Star Cat Books is running an Indigogo fundraising campaign to help with the startup of a used-and-new bookstore in Bradford, Vermont, specializing in science fiction and children’s books.  They’re looking to raise $8000 by the end of the campaign, and have just secured a matching donor for the next $2500 of the fundraiser, so for a limited time only any contributions made will go twice as far.

A Brief Guide for the Perplexed

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The book cover theory of genre fiction, as articulated by Debra Doyle, aka me:

Short (classic) form:

If it’s got a rocket ship on it, it’s science fiction
If it’s got a unicorn on it, it’s fantasy.
Once a book has a rocket ship on its cover, the only way to change it back into fantasy is by the addition of the Holy Grail

The inevitable smart-ass in the back of the room: But what if it’s the Holy Grail in the shape of a rocket ship?
Me: Then you’ve got the Hugo Award.

Special bonus side-cues:

If the cover features a person in heavy-duty powered space armor, it’s military sf.
If the cover features a person in a fancy uniform/dress coat with gold braid and similar decorations, it’s space opera.

And:
A zeppelin on the cover means alternate history.
A female person in corset and bustle, or a gentleman in a top hat, in the presence of either gears or zeppelins, means steampunk.

And finally:
Any otherwise mundane cover can be made into a fantasy cover by the addition of random sparkles.

Banned Books Week 2013

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It’s going on right now.

To my knowledge, I’ve never had one of my books banned someplace.  I’ve also never been required reading anywhere on the K-12 level, which — based on the books which do make the American Library Association’s “most banned” list – appears to be one of the common ways to get on the book-banners’ radar.  Friends and colleagues of mine, though, have been banned, and referred to as “tools of Satan”, and had copies of their books burned in public . . . so, no, I don’t approve of book-banning one little bit.

My mother was a school librarian for years, and at one point she was tasked with writing up the guidelines for people who wanted the local school board to remove a book from the local system.  When she was done, I looked at what she had come up with and said to her, “You wanted to make this whole thing as difficult for them as possible, didn’t you?”

And she said, “Yes.”

I don’t believe there were any successful book challenges during her tenure.

(Librarians . . . bringing the awesome ever since somebody with money and an empty storeroom bought a bunch of clay tablets/papyrus scrolls/parchment codices and said to somebody else with a great deal less money and an organized mind, “Hey, you.  Watch over these for me, will you?”)

Tales from the Before Time: No Respect

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Believe it or not, there was a time not so long ago when science fiction/fantasy was a pariah genre — a scant half a step above Harlequin/Mills and Boone category romances and nurse novels, and at least a full rung below westerns.  (Mystery novels were at the top of the genre heap, since the intellectuals of the day would sometimes admit to reading them  for relaxation in between thinking important thoughts.)  I have my own memory from those days, of once being asked, by the instructor of an undergraduate creative writing course I was taking, why I was wasting my talent on writing science fiction.  He clearly thought that “because I like to read it” wasn’t sufficient reason or explanation.

For writers, and even for readers, whose formative literary experiences come from that era, it’s hard to forget having been on the receiving end of all that reflexive critical sneering, and hard to unlearn the resentment and disdain for the literary establishment that rose up in response.  We have to keep reminding ourselves to do periodic reality checks, and to try to appreciate on a gut level that the world is different now:  fantasy and science fiction are major storytelling modes for the visual media, and no longer just the stuff of kids’ television and cheesy drive-in movies; mainstream fiction feels no compunction about borrowing genre tropes for its own purposes; and serious grownups with serious jobs can admit to enjoying sf and fantasy (and even comics!) without fear of losing all their adult credibility.

And if sometimes we feel like the long-time patrons of a little neighborhood bistro that’s suddenly gotten a rave review in some foodie blog and is now full of all sorts of outsiders who don’t really appreciate the original funkiness of the joint . . . well, it’s ungracious to begrudge the old familiar place its newfound good fortune, just because it isn’t exactly the way it was when we found it all those years ago.

Look What the Postman Brought

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One of the small pleasures of a writer’s life is the arrival of author’s comp copies in the mail.  The new-book smell, the solid heft of the real and physical object, the gratifying appearance of one’s name and words in crisp black type . . . there’s nothing quite like it, and it never really gets old.

Today’s mail included our comp copies of the Thomas Easton and Judith K. Dial anthology Impossible Futures, which contains our short story, “According to the Rule.”  We think the anthology looks nifty-keen, especially the cover art:

(This has been a shameless plug.  Buy one; better still, buy a dozen.  They’re just the right thickness to shim up that short table leg that’s been driving you crazy for months now . . . .)

A Poet Passes

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Seamus Heaney has died.

He was Ireland’s first Nobel-laureate poet since W. B. Yeats, but I — being a medievalist at heart, rather than a modernist — remember him with gratitude for his translation of Beowulf, which did so much to bring new readers to a work I’ve always loved.

For every reader, I think, there are some books that aren’t just books, they’re part of the permanent furniture of the reader’s mind; Beowulf was one of those for me.  I liked the brightly colored world of Middle English poetry well enough, but the sepia monochrome of the northern thing, with its occasional smear of red and flash of gold, was the landscape that I really loved.  It always disappointed me when modern readers would see it only as a primitive tale of monster-fighting — almost as much as it would disappoint me when critics failed to appreciate the monster-fights as much as they should have.  (Those are some damn fine monster-fights.)  Heaney’s translation may not have been scrupulously accurate; no poetic translation is ever going to be, and only a silly person would use a poetic translation as a crib sheet.  But it did much to convey the mood and the feel of the work, and showed the reading public why Beowulf is a major work of world literature and not just an interesting historical artifact.

And for that, as I said, I am grateful.

A recording of Heaney reading from his translations at the opening of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists Conference, at University College Dublin.