Litterbox

A North Carolina pastor announced plans for a Halloween bonfire at Amazing Grace Baptist Church, and at least one local television station was credulous enough to send somebody out to hear his explanation.

Make that two local TV stations, with at least one Associated Press staffer figuring the story was worth bumping up the news chain. The gimmick here is that Rev. Mark Grizzard and the 14 members of his church believe that the King James Bible is the only version that counts, so they'll be burning copies of any other translation they can get their hands on, as well as books by "heretic" authors like Billy Graham, Rick Warren, and "the Pope" (although it's unclear whether they mean John Paul II or Benedict XVI). The one thing we're curious about: Where are all those books coming from, and how much did they cost? (OK, maybe that's two things.)

(Actually, now that we think of it, there's a third issue we can't quite shake: What are the non-English-speaking peoples of the world supposed to do for salvation if they can't read the "preserved, inspired, inerrant and infallible word of God" as laid out by King James' crew of 47 scholars? It's all very confusing.)

*That's right: We're stealing from ourselves. Also, yes, we recognize that, technically, the headline is inaccurate because the bonfire is still two weeks away.

Yesterday, at The eBook Test, Mike Cane reminded us that Charles Dickens was an outspoken advocate for writers' intellectual property rights, and that he took his crusade to the United States, where pirated editions of his novels once flowed freely. This put us in mind of a great episode of Bonanza we stumbled onto one lazy Sunday afternoon years ago, in which Dickens—played by Jonathan Harris of Lost in Space fame—arrives in Virginia City to read from Oliver Twist and is angered to discover that they are already familiar with the scene...

So, what happens is that the local newspaper is serializing Dickens without his permission, and when the publisher's office is destroyed... oh, heck, the whole episode is on YouTube if you want to take a look. We'll just point out one more scene where Dickens has a poignant conversation with Hoss Cartwright in which he compares his literary output to the Ponderosa by way of explaining why he's willing to defend his work against unauthorized publication...

continued...

Employees at one of New York's largest publishers were stunned to receive a memo about "an insect issue in certain areas on several of our floors" that is severe enough for the company to deny staffers all access to the premises from 1 p.m. this afternoon until Monday morning. The memo also asks employees to "1) leave your office doors, files and desks unlocked; 2) leave in place any items that have not been recently used, rather than take them home; and 3) make accessible the perimeter of your office/cubicle as much as possible."

Those specific instructions, combined with the vague description of the situation as an "insect issue," plus the announcement that "a representative from the pest control company will be here on Monday to answer any further questions you may have," have led staffers to suspect that what they're dealing with is bed bugs. "I thought the fact that they'll have a bug expert there to answer questions was a giveaway," an anonymous source told us. "You wouldn't do that for roaches or ants or mice." Having dealt with bed bugs ourselves, we totally sympathize with their concerns—and if that does turn out to be the problem, staffers may want to throw their backpacks in a washing machine (setting: hot) then put them in the dryer on high heat for an hour, just to be safe. We don't know what to do about briefcases; maybe you could leave them open on your chair with a post-it note asking the exterminators to spray them. Or maybe our readers have suggestions...

At UnBeige, mediabistro.com's design blog, Stephanie Murg informs us that it's the 40th anniversary of The Hungry Little Caterpillar, a classic children's book by Eric Carle that's sold more than 12 million copies in 45 languages:

The famed caterpillar actually began his life as an ordinary worm [Stephanie reports]. After some fortuitous experimentation with a hole puncher, Carle got to thinking about a bookworm and created A Week with Willi Worm, which ended with the title character growing into a morbildy obese worm. "I showed it to my editor, Ann Beneduce, and she didn't like the worm so much," explains Carle in a video on his website. "She said, 'How about a caterpillar?' And I said, 'Butterfly!'" And the rest is history."

• Random House, fed up with the performance of its Doubleday and Bantam Dell divisions, tore them apart and redistributed the pieces among the Knopf, Crown, and Random House publishing groups. Top executives Irwyn Applebaum and Steve Rubin were immediately displaced; the first wave of additional job cuts came a few weeks later.

• Houghton Mifflin Harcourt went into what outside observers quickly decided was a freefall: One day after the resignation of publisher Rebecca Saletan, executive editor Ann Patty broke the news of her own firing, after which we were hit with insider accounts of layoffs throughout the company.

• Other publishing companies that laid off employees in December: Thomas Nelson, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan. (Macmillan had also implemented a salary freeze for employees making more than $50K a year, as did the Penguin Group.)

• In the midst of all this upheaveal, somebody's always ready to complain, but we want no part of that death culture. One day soon, it'll all settle down, even if everything seems to be up in the air at this time.
  

Oh! We almost forgot: Over the holidays, another memoirist turned out to be a big phony: Berkley cancelled the publication of Herman Rosenblat's Angel at the Fence when the author admitted that he did not actually meet his wife from opposite sides of the barbed wire fence at Buchenwald twelve years before their first date. As HarperStudio chief Bob Miller pointed out, everybody rushed to blame Oprah for Rosenblat's ability to perpetuate his fraud as far as he did.

• Barack Obama won the presidential election, and it wasn't long before publishers began announcing new Obama books.

• Leonard Riggio of Barnes & Noble predicted the worst holiday season for booksellers in 40-some years.

• Radar claimed that Sarah Palin was close to a $7 million book deal—to be honest, we were amazed anybody took the story seriously.

• Michael Crichton and John Leonard both died of cancer, a day apart from each other.

• Houghton Mifflin Harcourt declared a "freeze" on new acquisitions. This prompted a bunch of outside observers to declare the publishing apocalypse had begun...
  

• Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, declared that it wasn't likely an American writer would be getting the Nobel Prize for literature any time soon, because the United States was "too isolated [and] too insular" to produce real literature, like they do in Europe.

• The New York Observer added to the aura of doom, gloom, agony, and despair within the Manhattan publishing community, but at least this time the diagnosis wasn't fatal—just the arrival of "an age in which the gambling spirit that has kept book publishing exciting gives way to a shabby, predictable environment" where only celebrities and authors who've already proven themselves are likely to get book deals.

• Donna Tartt left Knopf, her publisher of nearly two decades, and sold her third novel to Little, Brown.

• Doubleday laid off several employees; we considered the possible explanations—could it be Dan Brown's fault?

• It's taken nearly 20 years, but Nick Cave finally finished his second novel.
  

Jason Boog joined the GalleyCat team, and the industry news kicked into high gear...

• New York warned that the end was near for book publishing, which was good for a laugh.

• Beaufort Books became Sherry Jones's new American publisher; The Jewel of Medina was also picked up for UK publication by Gibson Square, although a firebombing of that publisher's offices derailed those plans.

• Oprah Winfrey picked The Story of Edgar Sawtelle for her book club; GalleyCat readers saw that coming a mile away, even if the blog's senior editor couldn't.

• Much time was spent wondering whether Sarah Palin was a book-banning fool. Technically, she wasn't, but not for lack of trying, especially where the gays were concerned.

• David Foster Wallace committed suicide; legendary publisher Robert Giroux died in his sleep.

• Random House told Sherry Jones that, after signing her to a six-figure deal for two novels about one of the wives of the prophet Muhammad, they were afraid of terrorist retaliation, so they cut her loose. This spurred a lively debate over censorhsip with much posturing on both sides. All of this controversy, Jones told us in one of her first interviews, came as a complete surprise. None of this was good for Random House's reputation, but they didn't come out of it nearly as badly as Denise Spellberg, the woman who sabotaged Jones's path to publication. (Though only briefly, as we'll see in later posts.)

• Chelsea Green had a book about Barack Obama they wanted to rush to market; they weren't going to have finished copies in time for the Democratic National Convention, so they distributed coupons for an exclusive print-on-demand edition available only through Amazon.com. That got indie booksellers good and mad; even Barnes & Noble cancelled its order in retaliation. But the issue wasn't that simple.

• Threshold, the conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster, published a book called Obama Nation written by one of the guys who swiftboated John Kerry in 2004, which was good for a couple days of fake controversy.
  

• Randy Pausch died. After being diagnosed with cancer in 2007, the Carnegie Mellon professor had skyrocketed to fame after delivering a "last lecture" to students; the Wall Street Journal article about that lecture led to a book deal for Pausch and WSJ reporter Jeffrey Zaslow, and when the book came out in April, it was an immediate bestseller.

• Science fiction writer, poet, and literary critic Thomas M. Disch committed suicide, in between the publication of his last novel and a collection of short stories.

• Twelve publisher Jon Karp wrote an article about the state of the industry, which argued for establishing a quality niche rather than trying to be everything to everybody; Richard Nash of Soft Skull expanded on the idea.