At BookExpo America, ForeWord named the University of Nebraska Press our 2008 Independent Publisher of the Year. Here is the speech delivered by ForeWord's publisher, Victoria Sutherland:

I’m not going to preface the announcement of this award for best publisher with a statement about what an awful year it’s been for publishing.

After all, aside from the fact that everyone lost money, it’s actually been a stellar year—over half a million books were published in 2008 according to Bowker.

And that’s not all. Amazon Chief Scientist Andreas Weigend, in an article for HarvardBusiness.org, predicts that “In 2009, more data will be generated by individuals than in the entire history of mankind through 2008.” Although, we suspect that much of that data will consist of works once published and out of print. Gutenburg’s been scanning away for years, Google gobbles up everything, and universities are now getting in the act—Cornell just announced that it’s making 80,000 public domain titles available through Amazon through print-on-demand.

Don’t get me wrong: we’re all for open access to information, all information, as much information as possible. But the idea of opening our computers, or a bookstore’s doors for that matter, to this much uncurated information is crushing, as I suspect—as one publisher speaking to many editors and publishers—most of that information is junk.

And that’s the reason why we’re here, isn’t it. Because editors and publishers know how to make choices. Of course different editors will make different choices, but there still remains that responsibility for the acquisition, subjective as it may be, and the care of the manuscript. There is monitoring for quality. And ultimately, there is the accumulation of a house’s taste—call it cultural heritage—through backlist.

This is where independent publishers can and do differ from the conglomerates. When an independent chooses to publish an author, it’s because they truly believe that the author’s work contributes to the press’s “cultural heritage.” Independents don’t have the luxury of throwing authors up against walls to see what will stick.

Luxury is probably—is definitely—the wrong word. It isn’t luxury to publish thousands of titles a year, It’s glut. It’s flood. It’s content chaos. It’s what editors and publishers are supposed to prevent.

So, we’d like to honor today a publisher that excelled in its role of keeper of the cultural heritage. A university publisher that has deliberately made a place for itself in the world of trade as the curator of consistently wonderful books in several special markets. This university press not only publishes scholarly work, fine translation, classic reprints, and regional fiction and poetry, but it has made a name for itself in the categories of memoir, combined with history and travel, and in sports.

This publisher fulfills its roles of editor and curator in a way that makes them indispensable in libraries and bookstores. Whomever or whatever they choose to look at, to listen to, to get to the bottom of, is important or beautiful or entertaining, and always, always enduring. At ForeWord, we are always excited to receive a new catalog from them because we’ve discovered over the years that if they’ve chosen to publish a book, then it is surely a contribution to the world library, not just another wet noodle.

Please join us in recognizing the University of Nebraska Press as the 2008 ForeWord Magazine Independent Publisher of the Year.

Dusting my bookshelves this weekend, I came across a couple of Georges Simenon titles, Dirty Snow and Three Rooms in Manhattan. I love those books, I think to myself. Maybe I should put them on my iPhone as calculated additions to the permanent ambulatory library in my pocket.

But the thought of a library always at my beck and call got me thinking about all the books I’ve read because there was nothing else to read. The Thorn Birds, for example. Or, out of the same isolated bookshelf, Jane Goodall’s My Life with the Chimpanzees and William Burroughs’ Factotum. (How those three books ended up in the same small library in a house with a bed, a garden, and two enormous doors is provoking, wouldn’t you say?)

There was the year spent teaching English to fifth and sixth graders. I was not in India, but the only English books happened to be Kipling’s collected works in pocket-sized hardcover. And there was my mother’s house one summer, broke, and Dickens. Or an ornamental Jane Eyre from a leather-bound collection of classics bought on subscription by my great-grandmother. No one had ever read any of them and I had to dig up a letter opener to slice the pages apart. It was terribly romantic.

So, here’s the question: Would I have read Jane Eyre at some point later in life if it hadn’t been in the glass-fronted bookcases of my home? Maybe. Although, it has never been required in any course I’ve taken. No one has ever recommended it or handed me a copy. (So sad.) And it’s not a book I recall seeing on jungle bookshelves (I do, however, remember a copy of Nabokov’s Lolita in a Maryknoll mission in Guatemala) or foreign language school bookshelves. If, at the age of twelve, I’d been offered the choice between Jane Eyre and, say, a contemporary equivalent to Twilight would I have chosen the former? Would my son be reading the Economist Book of Obituaries if it weren’t the only thing in print in the bathroom?

Interesting to ponder, the pros and cons of having everything you ever wanted. It’s hard to be critical of choice when the other option is totalitarian; on the other hand, necessity can make for strange and wonderful book choices.

The research doesn’t stop coming that apples and aspirins every day do the body good. A poem a day combines qualities of both the above—freshness and pain relief—and both work on the same root cause: distress from the everyday.

In honor of National Poetry Month (and because I’ve been saving these up all year long), we’re launching A Poem a Day on the homepage. To reap the full mind/body health benefit, read twice a day for thirty days.

Here’s one for bucking up and taking your medicine:

Raised Not By Wolves
by Lucia Perillo

The family sank into its sorrows—
we softened like noodles in a pot.
Whereas the bicycle’s bones were painted gold
and stood firm against the house
no matter how hard it rained.

Beneath the handlebar mount, it said ROYAL in red letters
unscathed despite the elements;
this was the bicycle’s first lesson,
to be royal and unscathed—

I pressed my ear-cup to the welds.

Pedal furiously, then coast in silence.
You will need teeth to grab the chain.
Exhortations with the stringent priggishness of Zen,
delivered by a guru who hauls you off and wallops you

in answer to your simple questions.

Though its demise is foggy,
I can conjure with precision its rebukes, the dull sting
when the boy-bar bashed my private place.

Then no talking was permitted
beyond one stifled yelp.

You could, however, rub the wound
with the meat of your thumb—so long
as you did this stealthily, pretending you had an itch.

From the book, Inseminating the Elephant (Copper Canyon Press)

This is the time of year when I hate my cats. The birds are back and the cats want to go outside, but there’s still several feet of snow out there and I can’t say, in all my cat years, that I’ve ever seen a cat prowl around on top of a snow bank.

So I should be pitying the poor dears, but I can’t. I’m sick to death of them. They’re underfoot. They’re sitting in a row when I open my bedroom door in the morning, waiting to herd me to the food bags. At night, they’re all over me before I can even get my coat off, shoving and yowling me to those food bags. They just don’t have enough to do and I’m feeling bullied.

To make matters worse, my mom goes away every winter and leaves her cat with me. (That makes a total of three—in my opinion, one more than the single female’s limit.) My mom’s cat is petite and delicate. She growls when the icy cold sidewalk touches her tiny paws. She refuses to do her business outside.

My cats are big brawny fellows who always do their business outside, except, of course, when a lady’s present. Then they want to do it right there with her. So, at the time of year when everything’s snug against the cold, I’m having to change litter every day to combat kitty fug.

That’s not the only problem: Miss Dainty also has special diet food to keep her slim. It comes in cans. It smells like tuna. Seriously—we’ve got two twenty-five pound cats and one ten pound cat and a can of faux tuna. Who do you think’s going to get that special stuff?

So not only am I getting bullied, but I’m having to break up fights. I hate my cats.

Which is why it’s so nice that Seller Publishing sent me this wonderful cat book, Best Seat in the House: Cats in their Windows. Each page has a photo and a caption, and all together, there’s a delightful story. Marcie Jan Bronstein, the author and photographer, hand-colored the photos, giving them the look of old Kodachrome snapshots from the sixties and seventies.

  

Best Seat in the House is a wonderful book for people who hate—oops, I mean love their cats. It’s also a lovely book for reading aloud to children.



Best Seat in the House: Cats in their Windows
Text and photos by Marcie Jan Bronstein
Sellers Publishing
Softcover with flaps $12.95 (112pp)
978-1-4162-0531-9

I am totally predictable in the mornings. I make coffee, turn on CNN, drink juice, scan the night’s email. When the coffee’s ready, I go to the New York Times online. There’s a whole litany of sites that follow: Slate’s news wrap, the Daily Beast for fun, the Guardian for books. . . but this morning I got no further than the news item that Amazon was offering a free Kindle app for iPhones. Way before 7 AM I downloaded it. Zip, zip.

There’s a button on the top of the app that says “Get Books.” Press it and you’re told to go to the Amazon/Kindle website. I did this, on my iPhone. Now, what book do I want?

My first choice was a novel called Adiós, Hemingway because a friend recommended it. Nope, they didn’t have it. Although that wasn’t terribly unexpected, it threw me for a loop. You don’t know me, but you must realize that I work for a book review magazine. On any given day, there are hundreds of books all over the floor of my office. At home, there’s a Post Office box next to the door full of books I’ve taken the time to read a chapter or two of, and discarded. On the shelves there are four generations of books read and saved and reread. I don’t have enough room to keep books that won’t be reread. How many books are up there? I don’t know the number but I know what I’ve got.

And I also know what I don’t need, what I’m not interested in spending $9.99 on, the going-price of most books in the Kindle store. I mean, I like to read mysteries as much as anyone, but $9.99 seems a wasteful, selfish amount to spend on a non-tangible, one-time-only book. At least if I buy the hardcopy, I can give it away to someone, and they can give it away to someone.

So what would I spend $9.99 on? Something I’d like to keep with me. A reference. For example, a few weeks ago I splurged on the Oxford American Dictionary app for my iPhone. I love it. I use it every day. Surely there must be something else, maybe something I’ve got in my library.

I get up with my coffee and stand in front of my bookshelves for a bit—what would be something more useful than Google to keep on my phone?

How about John Emsley’s Nature’s Building Blocks? That’d be fun. I key in the name. Nope. Sorry. There’s a book by John Emsley (same guy?) called The Elements of Murder: A History of Poison, and there’s also one (same guy) called Vanity, Vitality, & Virility: The Science Behind the Products You Love to Buy, but I’m not buying.

Okay, how about The Oxford Book of Military History. That could be useful for when I’m in waiting rooms filled with Good Housekeeping magazines. I key in the name. Nope. There’s U.S. Military History for Dummies (never understood why anyone would buy those books), and there are really odd (and suspicious) titles like The Art of Insurgency: American Military Policy & the Failure of Strategy in Southeast Asia. Who’s reading that, and where? Or even stranger, Marching Under Darkening Skies: The American Military & the Impending Urban Ops Threat. Wow. Are Special Forces guys with Kindles killing time reading this stuff in the field?

It’s getting pretty late by now. I need to get dressed and go to work. What am I going to do? All right, let’s just key in “Oxford” and see what comes up.

Lots. All sorts of weird “handbooks” on oncology, international relations, ethical theory. . . Wait! Here’s something. How about The Dictionary of Modern Quotations? That’d work. That’d be useful and fun. $9.99.

I hit the “one click” button and since I’ve already signed up for the app, Amazon recognizes my device. Apparently, if you have both a Kindle and an iPhone, your purchases will upload to both and will keep track of where you are in your readings no matter which device you use.

The WiFi at my house wasn’t working this morning, and there’s no 3G network in northern Michigan. Even so, it only took a couple of minutes for the book to show up in the Kindle app. I was immediately amused that the familiar Oxford font shows up on my phone. And the table of contents is a series of links—that’s good. Let’s try “Last Words.”

1    Bugger Bogner.

King George V. (1865 – 1936) on his deathbed in 1936, when someone remarked ‘Cheer up, your Majesty, you will soon be at Bognor again’; alternatively, a comment made in 1929, when it was proposed that the town be named Bognor Regis on account of the king’s convalescence there after a serious illness
K. Rose King George V (1983); see Last Words 190:5


I’d call this a success, wouldn’t you?

Extrapolating from my experience growing up, my children’s experience growing up, I’m going to go out on a limb and say everyone’s first book is handmade. Who here did not fold a piece of paper and make a book? How can you complete six years of elementary school and not make a book?

So everyone’s talking about ebooks and phone books and Twitter and FaceBook and even print-on-demand and how no one really reads anymore. I say bah. People read the backs of shampoo bottles, they read cereal boxes. People read all day on computers (whatever the size). They read advertisements and newspapers and junk mail and the scrolling text at the bottom of CNN. No one’s going to stop reading. An illiterate in the modern world is a severely handicapped. What is going to change, what’s already changing, is publishing.

Used to be you got your different mediums of communication: phone, fax, letters, books, papers, records, photos, movies, tv. Some came on paper, some on tape, some on vinyl, some through the “air.” Now, everything comes the same way: all 111s and 000s. I’ve got one device that fits in my pocket and all that stuff up above comes to me with the flick of my thumb. What do I need a tv for? And a book?

I need a book, a physical book, when I’m building a library on a certain subject. It’s still easier to scan physical books, and I like to write in mine. I also want a physical book if its concern is art – I want the big picture. Finally, I want a book if it’s special, either to me or because it’s one-of-a-kind.

A few days ago, David Buchan sent me an invitation through ForeWord’s generic write-the-editor email to view his handmade and limited edition books. What the heck? I did. They’re wonderful. Look at this:



I asked David about himself and he said he’d moved from Chicago to Puerto Rico in 1999 and he prints the books himself on an old press. “In Chicago, I worked in theater but found that when I got here that my Spanish was just not up to the task of doing theater. So, I made children's books. My first book about a mouse who can only speak in the language of the cats was an expression of that language change for me. My Spanish is still pretty so-so, especially compared to my three year old daughter, who is bilingual by nature, or nurture.”



The Bilingual ABC Book will charm the pants off any youngster who’s starting school and realizing, perhaps, that there are two different ways of saying the same thing. The adult version is wicked funny. See the whole collection at http://davebuchen.com. He makes beautiful calendars as well.



It was Dave who got me thinking about first books and handmade books. Once I made a flipbook for my daughter by drawing on the corners of Molly Katzen’s MooseWood Cookbook! And I have this friend in Mexico, Ambar Past, who made a business out of making books. Here are a couple of examples of her work, the first one being a book of spells, remembered by Mayan women of Ambar’s acquaintance. Appropriate cover, eh.

    

And this is an example of a kind of magazine she used to put out once a year. The whole thing is silk-screen then glued together as a long scroll. Magnificent. She’s got a beautiful store if you ever make it as far south as San Cristóbal de Las Casas, or visit her online at http://iweb.tntech.edu/cventura/paper.htm.

Up from History: The Life of Book T. Washington alludes in its title to the neglected nature of black activist's place on the biography shelves. (Washington, the last generation of African-Americans born to slavery, wrote an autobiography, published in 1901, called Up from Slavery.) Author Robert J. Norrell offers a comprehensive and thoughtful reassessment of the life of one of America's most famous in title-recognition, and at the same time, one of its most misunderstood. (978-0-674-03211-8, Harvard University Press, January)

For my last year of high school, I moved to a private school, Interlochen Arts Academy, and glutted myself on nonessentials like Aesthetics, British Lit, and Poetry. I also took an American history class, but only because I had to. Like my fourteen-year-old says now, I've been studying American history over and over since second grade… Isn't there anything else?

Well, yes actually, there is. It was in that class, for example, that I first saw the contradictory speeches given by Lincoln during his run for the presidency. I was shocked. Not only by the language and duplicity of the revered Abraham Lincoln, but that no one had bothered to mention this complication in all of my school years. (After close questioning of my son, they are still neglecting to publicly delve deep.)

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Donald Yacovane have collected speeches, letters, eulogies, and interviews to illustrate the not only the complexities of the times, but of the man himself. As Gates concludes in his brilliant and readable introduction,

"In 1922, [W.E.B.] Du Bois wrote that 'As sinners, we like to imagine righteousness in our heroes. As a result, when a great man dies, we begin to whitewash him…. We slur over and explain away his inconsistencies until there appears before us, not the real man but the myth - immense, perfect, cold, and dead.' Du Bios loved Lincoln but refused to deify him. 'I love him not because he was perfect but because he was not and yet triumphed…. The world is full of people born hating and despising their fellows. To these I say: See this man. He was one of you and yet he became Abraham Lincoln.'"

The book, Lincoln on Race and Slavery (978-0-691-14234-0) is available this month from Princeton.

Finally, Legacy Publications has published this month a book for children called Shackles. It's great material for use in schools as an early introduction to slavery in America because the narrative works much in the same way as good history: there's adventure, then a mystery, then discovery, disbelief, explanation, and at the end, the need to run out and tell someone. The story is set near Charleston, SC, and it's summertime. Three little boys are amusing themselves in the backyard, digging for treasure. They have a map from the Pirate Museum, nice black tri-corners, and wooden swords. They dig a hole, but what the oldest boy finds is "an armful of mud and metal. It is all as heavy as bricks, and I almost drop it." Shackles (978-0-933101-06-7), written by Marjory Heath Wentworth and illustrated by Leslie Darwin Pratt-Thomas, is highly recommended for school libraries.

The African American Experience:

Black History and Culture Through Speeches, Letters, Editorials, Poems, Songs, and Stories

Edited by Kai Wright
Black Dog & Leventhal
978-1-57912-773-2
$22.95 (736pp)

A fine collection of short pieces with introductions by Kai Wright, contributor to Mother Jones and Essence. The book begins with the building of the Spanish fort at St. Augustine in Florida, and “servants of your Majesty” asking for slaves from Havana to save the soldiers from tiring themselves out with “dragging in wood on their shoulders from the forests.” The last entry is Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech.

How Free Is Free?: The Long Death of Jim Crow
by Leon F. Litwick
Harvard University Press
978-0-674-03152-4
$18.95 (192pp)

Litwick, Pulitzer Prize winner, American Book Award winner, and recipient of the Golden Apple Award for Outstanding Teaching in 2007, examines the betrayals, broken promises, and dehumanization of black southerners, and their day to day acts of resistance and protest.

Making Freedom: The Extraordinary Life of Venture Smith
by Chandler B. Saint and George A. Krimsky
Wesleyan University Press
978-0-8195-6854-0
$18.95 (200pp)

Venture Smith (1729 - 1805), born Broteer Furro someplace in the area of modern Ghana, was captured, transported, and sold to Robertson Mumford for four gallons of rum and a piece of cloth. Later, he told the story of his life to a school teacher, who published it as A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa: But Resident above Sixty Years in the United States of America, Related by Himself. This book compliments the original with historical details and illustrations. A facsimile of the original publication is included.