Category Archives: Publishing

Publishing, Religion

Hat tips to Veith

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Gene Edward Veith, of the Cranach blog, provides today’s subject matter.

First of all, he links to this article, which tells how the Beatles, John Lennon especially, tried to make a deal to film The Lord of the Rings back in the 1960s.

According to Peter Jackson, who knows a little something about making Lord of the Rings movies, John Lennon was the Beatle most keen on LOTR back in the ’60s—and he wanted to play Gollum, while Paul McCartney would play Frodo, Ringo Starr would take on Sam and George Harrison would beard it up for Gandalf. And he approached a pre-2001 Stanley Kubrick to direct.

Fortunately, Prof. Tolkien was still alive at the time, and he put his brogan down firmly on the idea.

Prof. Veith also writes about the new NIV Bible, which (most of us weren’t aware, I’m sure) is now going to supersede both previous versions of the NIV.

…But still there remains lots of interpretations for the sake of modern readers in place of simply rendering what these non-modern texts literally say, this being part of the translating philosophy of the NIV. Here too is that tendency in American evangelicalism to cut itself off from the church of the past (eliminating “saints”?). Not to mention the presumption of correcting the Bible’s “sexist” language.

This seems like an excellent opportunity to publicly thank Dale Nelson, for his generous gift of a copy of the new The Lutheran Study Bible: English Standard Version from Concordia Publishing. Thus am I delivered from the quagmire that is the NIV Study Bible.

Publishing

Cooks Source Publisher Regrets Trouble

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The publisher of Cooks Source magazine, who also edits and distributes it herself, is sorry for the mess she has caused her publication and advertisers. If the magazine continues, she will be more careful about attributions, but she may need help with copyright law.

She questioned how a chef using a recipe he or she finds online for profit in a restaurant is any different from a magazine publishing one found online. “There’s a big question about recipes,” she said.

This is a bit said, actually. I hope she doesn’t face a lawsuit or huge debt over this, even though she appears to have neglected intellectual copyright entirely. I think the Internet is a mystery to many people who don’t ask if they should do something that their technology allows them to do.

Blogs, Socials, Publishing

Theft as Research: Magazine Steals Recipes from Various Sites

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Ed Champion reports on the flagrant theft of copyrighted writing by a cooking magazine named Cooks Source. First, the food historian behind this 16th century apple pie article noticed that her article was printed without permission in the magazine. She asked about it and was asked if she didn’t want it published, since it was already online. Once Champion learned about it, he looked for other copy-n-pasted articles in the magazine and found at least five definite instances and several possible ones.

Bookselling, Publishing

PW Best of 2010

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Publisher’s Weekly has ten of their picks for best books this year. Here’s one. The Surrendered by Chang-rae Lee. PW says: “Grim, but so is Dostoyevski. Lee, who can craft a sentence, follows several decades in the lives of an American soldier and a Korean orphan whose paths cross during the Korean War, the reverberations of which, Lee shows, are now deeply woven into the fabric of what it means to be American.”

Bookselling, Publishing, Reading

Boogieman as Censor

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Loren Eaton talks about censorship in light of last week’s banned books celebration. Did you attend any book burnings or Protest The Read rallies? I was out of town, so I missed the usual fun.
From the Wall Street Journal article to which Loren links, complaints are as good as actual bans for the American Library Association (ALA): “For the ALA, what makes them censors is that they spoke up at all: ‘True’ patriots, presumably, would have kept quiet. Who, then, is afraid of discourse?” Indeed.

Bookselling, Publishing

Are Paperback Original Lesser Works than Hardbacks?

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Joanne Kaufman writes about paperbacks for the Wall Street Journal, saying many people prefer hardbacks.

The belief that a paperback original, however worthy, will be given short shrift by reviewers tells part of the story. “Critics pay more attention to hardcovers even if they say they don’t,” said one agent who requested anonymity.

Vanity plays a role, an anonymous publisher tells Ms. Kaufman. “In almost every deal I do, the agent tries to get a contractual hardcover commitment even if the book isn’t written yet and down the road it might become clear that paperback original is the way to go.”

Publishing

The Sagas of Heidrek, and of Lars the Far-Travelled

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Dale Nelson passes on this link to the blog Sacnoth’s Scriptorium, passing on information about the upcoming re-release of Christopher Tolkien’s translation of The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise.

I’m particularly happy about this since HEIDREK’s is my favorite saga, and the first one I read (back when I had to get special dispensation from the college library to check out books there, since I was still in high school). Though it came as a bit of a shock to discover that Heidrek himself was the ‘hero’ of the saga only in the sense of protagonist: a kin-slayer and wife-murderer and generally dangerous and disagreeable person to be around. The most striking character for me was (and is) not Heidrek but his mother, Hervor*, who summons her own dead father from the grave to demand the family heirloom, the cursed sword Tyrfing (made by Durin & Dvalin), which had been buried with him. This scene was one of the first bits of Old Norse lore to be translated into English** at the beginning of the revival of interest in old legends and mythologies and literatures in the mid-18th century. Tolkien fans will probably be more focused on the Riddle-game, which was surely one of Tolkien’s main sources for Gollum’s riddle-game (along with two lays in the ELDER EDDA): one of Gollum’s riddles (“no-legs”) actually appears in one of the HEIDREK manuscripts. There’s also the famous battle between the Goths and the Huns that ends the saga, although this occurs after Heidrek’s day and in fact is set in motion by his children.

In personal news, blogging will be light next week, as I’ll be heading out Monday for my annual migration to Minot, North Dakota for the Norsk Hostfest. I hope to keep you posted to some degree, as I’ll be taking my laptop and they do have WiFi, which sometimes works.

Back next Monday, but I make no promises about posting that day.