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Last weekend I got around to reading The Intellectual Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy by Douglass Adair. The book began as his doctoral dissertation in 1943 and went unpublished until 2000, 32 years after Adair took his own life. Not many Ph.D. papers are of wide interest so long after they were written, but Adair’s was [...]
Filed under: Books, Conservatism, Liberty, Philosophy
There’s an irony worth pointing out in the story of the “Net Book Agreement,” which sounds like it ought to be something dealing with e-books but was actually a pact between British publishers and booksellers agreed to in 1899. The NBA specified that shops should sell books for prices set by the publishers; any discounting [...]
Filed under: Books, Ideology, Philosophy
Long-time readers of the Tory Anarchist will remember this post from two years back in which I called attention to a colorful anecdote involving Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand in William F. Buckley Jr.’s memoir of the Goldwater era, Flying High. It sounded almost too scripted to be true, and a reader wondered whether [...]
The best analysis I’ve seen of the clash between Macmillan and Amazon over setting the prices for e-books comes from Paul Carr at TechCrunch. He provides some necessary publishing-industry background:
In the UK, way back in 1900, publishers corralled retailers into the Net Book Agreement (NBA); an agreement between British publishers and booksellers that books [...]
One of the media transformations I expect to take place over the next 10 years, if not sooner, is that book publishing will become more blog-like — that is, micropublishing, the interest of the New York houses in putting out blockbusters, and the decline of the industry (and its retail counterpart) generally will lead to [...]
Mother Jones has an essay up by the editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review on the death of the literary journal. I agree with Ted Genoways on this much at least:
[T]he less commercially viable fiction became, the less it seemed to concern itself with its audience, which in turn made it less commercial, until, like [...]
M.E. Bradford on John Dickinson’s Letters From a Farmer in Pennsylvania:
The manner of Dickinson’s twelve letters is well suited to their matter. In form they belong to the “high” or “sober” tradition of English political pamphleteering — as does Common Sense to its “rough and ready” but popular counterpart. In the one company we find [...]
Filed under: Books, Conservatism, Philosophy
In his autobiography Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, J.G. Ballard raises the question Pat Buchanan asks in Churchill, Hitler, and the “Unnecessary War”:
Should we [i.e., Britain] have gone to war in 1939, given how ill-prepared we were, and how little we did to help Poland, to whose aid Neville Chamberlain had committed us when [...]
Christopher Buckley’s short story “Cynara” reads well on the Kindle, which proves to be a good format for short fiction. Alas, it’s not such a good format for magazines — I’ve been trying out The Nation’s e-reader edition, and it’s terrible. There’s no proper table of contents, only section links. And again, not being able [...]
Filed under: Books
Despite arguing a few months ago that the iPhone could already do most of what I might want a Kindle to do, I’ve lately come around to the virtues of e-readers. More than that, I’ve actually bought a refurbished Kindle. What prompted me to do so was seeing that the 12-volume works of Edmund Burke [...]
Filed under: Books, Technology