People of the Book
A Blog about Book Publishing from a Catholic Perspective

“It is a day of joy: it is good to be joyful—it is wrong to be otherwise. For one day we may put off the burden of our polluted consciences and rejoice in the perfections of our Savior Christ, without thinking of ourselves, without thinking of our own miserable uncleanness; but contemplating His glory, His righteousness, His purity, His majesty, His overflowing love. We may rejoice in the Lord, and in all His creatures see Him. We may enjoy His temporal bounty, and partake the pleasant things on earth with Him in our thoughts; we may rejoice in our friends for His sake, loving them most especially because He has loved them.

“God has not appointed us unto wrath, but to obtain salvation through Our Lord Jesus Christ, Who died for us, that whether we wake or sleep, we should live together with Him.” Let us seek the grace of a cheerful heart, an even temper, sweetness, gentleness, and brightness of mind, as walking in His light, and by His grace. Let us pray Him to give us the spirit of ever-abundant, ever-springing love, which overpowers and sweeps away the vexations of life by its own richness and strength, and which above all things unites us to Him Who is the fountain and the center of all mercy, loving-kindness and joy.
–John Henry Newman, Sermon for Christmas Day

The critic Terry Teachout praises the Loyola Classics series in a weekend column in the Wall Street Journal. It’s available on the web today, but it may disappear behind a subscriber wall soon, so here’s a quote:

A similar venture for which I have nothing but admiration is the recently launched Loyola Classics series of reprints of long-unavailable novels by Roman Catholic authors. Imaginatively and resourcefully edited by the religious writer Amy Welborn (who blogs at http://amywelborn.typepad.com/openbook/), the Loyola Classics series is remarkable for its unusually broad stylistic range, which takes in everything from highbrow titles like François Mauriac’s “Viper’s Tangle” and Evelyn Waugh’s “Helena” to such unabashedly popular novels as Morris West’s “The Devil’s Advocate” and John R. Powers’s “Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up?”

This small-c catholicity of taste makes for a backlist whose appeal deserves to reach well beyond Catholic readers alone. Among the important books Ms. Welborn has restored to circulation, for instance, is “The Edge of Sadness,” a novel by Edwin O’Connor, author of “The Last Hurrah.” You don’t have to be Catholic (I’m not), or even religious, to appreciate this intensely moving tale of the midlife crisis of an Irish-American priest, which won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize but is now wrongly forgotten.

Publisher Michael Hyatt revises and extends his remarks about the “death of traditional book publishing� that we talked about a few days ago. He does not really think that traditional publishing will die; just that it’s in for big shakeup:

All I am arguing is that a shift will occur. A big enough slice of the book reading public will opt for digital delivery and that will have a significant, disruptive effect on the entire industry. Trust me, it won’t take much. This is not an industry awash in profits. A 5-10 percent reduction in sales would wreak havoc. It’s already happening with newspapers and magazines.

Book people who are interested in the future of publishing should go to Hyatt’s original death-of-the-book post and scroll through the comments. Many agree that the e-books will transform book publishing. Many are quite skeptical. Some highlights:

The tsunami that publishers better brace themselves for is book ‘ripping’. Already, if you know how to do it, you can rip a book pretty quickly and easily with a digital camera and OCR software, and it’s only going to get easier and better.

As a woman and avid tub reader, it would need to be something that wouldn’t curl my hair if I dropped it in the tub!

Look, for ebooks to best the paper book (a technology that’s had hundreds of years to be perfected, incidentally, instead of the what, fifteen years of ebooks?) it has to do everything a paper book can, plus add something. It can’t just tie — if there’s a tie the paper book wins, just for fact of it’s being around longer, which in itself is a natural advantage. . . . I see nothing to date to suggest that ebooks can win in this competition. Everything I’ve seen touted as the virtues of ebooks (portability, ease of reference)already exist in books.

Publishers from around the world met in Rome last week to talk about the rights to Pope Benedict’s writings. The CNS report on the meeting included this troubling paragraph:

In a separate note, Cardinal Sodano said the Vatican publishing house would hold all rights “in perpetuity and throughout the world” to anything written by Pope Benedict during his pontificate, “especially the acts and documents through which the supreme pontiff exercises his magisterium.”

This seems like a big change from the policy under John Paul II, where the pope’s written and spoken words could be freely quoted and republished by anyone. Will publishers (and authors, bloggers, teachers) now have to get permission from Libreria Editrice Vaticana, the Vatican publishing house, to quote Pope Benedict? As they say, this is a developing story.

In a Godspy interview, Anne Rice talks about her return to the Catholic Church, art, her new novel about Jesus, and her writing plans. About her return, Rice says “I simply felt an overwhelming desire to come back, to go to Communion, so I asked the Lord to help me. ” She calls herself a very old fashioned Catholic who is very liberally socially. Her return to the Church has upended her writing career; she says she will never again write the florid vampire fiction that made her rich and famous, but will instead pursue the four-volume story of Jesus that began with her new novel Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. Rice has this to say about the spiritual function of art:

Art can give you an experience of Jesus that is available to everybody. Art seeks to resolve theological questions by the use of specific images, I think–to embody ideas–rather than long verbal arguments. It seeks to move you emotionally so that you accept in a way that you may not be able to intellectually if you’re dealing with argument. And I think that’s a magnificent thing.

Several friends in the publishing world have noted this post by the critic Terry Teachout, in which he talks about his recent brush with death. Back home, Teachout reflects on how he reacted, and quotes this wonderful passage from Edwin O’Connor’s The Edge of Sadness:

I believe with all my heart in the mercy and providence of God, and I believe in a future unimaginably brighter and better than anything I have known here—and yet of course the whole difficulty is that I have known and have loved “here.� Very much. So that when the time comes for me to go, I know that I will go with full confidence in God—but I also know that I will go with sadness. And I think for no reason other than that…well, I have been alive. An old priest who was dying, one of the saintliest men I have ever known, one of those who had greatest reason to expect God’s favor, many years ago surprised me by telling me, with a little smile, that now that he was going, he wanted desperately to stay.

“A single memory can do it,� he said.

And I suppose he was right. The memory of an instant—of a smile, of leaf smoke on a sharp fall day, of a golden streak across a rain-washed morning, of a small boy seated alone on the seashore, solemnly building his medieval moated castles—just this one, single, final flash of memory can be enough to make us want to stay forever….

Loyola Press has just reissued The Edge of Sadness in its Loyola Classics series.

Some months ago, stories circulated that the producers of The Da Vinci Code movie were thinking of changing the script to make the film more acceptable to Christians and others offended by the suggestion that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were a happily married couple. Not so, says director Ron Howard. There’s “no placating. It would be ludicrous to take on this subject and then try to take the edges off. We’re doing this movie because we like the book,” he tells Newsweek. Howard’s only concession to the book’s opponents is to clearly label it as fiction. That’s something that author Dan Brown did not do. The movie opens on May 19.

Author Pamela Paul calls it “Internet-assisted narcissism.” It’s the habit many writers have of tracking what bloggers are saying about their books. It’s easy to do through blog search engines like Technorati, IceRocket, and Feedster, and it’s yet another indication that blogs are becoming an important channel for book publicity. Writing in the Times, Paul quotes both blogphobic and blogphiliac writers. Says one, “It’s the first evidence that there’s a conversation out there about my book.” But some writers hate what they see on blogs. Says novelist Rick Moody, ” “It’s like taking a pill to enhance suicidal ideation. Even the good ones make me want to kill myself.”

John Allen’s latest “Word from Rome” column in the National Catholic Reporter is about his tour promoting his book on Opus Dei. Allen is a very sharp observer and an excellent writer, and he puts the Opus Dei story in an especially interesting context:

Opus Dei is a classic illustration of what we might call the “Wojtyla Revolution” inside Roman Catholicism. By way of analogy to the “Reagan Revolution” in American politics, John Paul II changed the terms of debate in the church. In October 1978, it was to some extent an open question, at least in the popular mind, whether Catholicism would evolve in the direction of mainline Western Christianity, embracing steadily more progressive positions on issues such as women clergy and gay rights, or whether it would reassert a more traditional vision of its identity and thereby challenge modernity on its own terms. Not in a narrow or fundamentalist way, but in a clear way, John Paul embraced the second option. On his watch, the old Catholic right became the center, and the center became the left. Opus Dei was in a sense the boat lifted highest by that tide, and thus opens a window onto deeper and broader trends.

Janet Maslin, writing in the Times, makes a shrewd observation about a certain kind of gift book:

Gimmicky books make awful gifts. Why? Because they’re so much easier to give than they are to receive. They’re so much more gratifying to gift givers than they are to recipients. And the act of follow-through is not often a big part of these transactions. A gift book may be chosen on impulse, but it can confound whoever winds up with it for a long, long time.

Small publishers need to pay close attention to the long-running struggle between publishers and internet companies over the digitization of books. “Virtually every major book publisher is trying to determine a digital strategy for creating profit opportunities while preserving its copyrights,” says The Wall Street Journal in a recent piece. An interesting fact: it costs about $30 to scan, digitize, and tag a 300-page book.

That’s the theme of the new marketing campaign from Audible.com, the leading audio book distributor. Check out their cheeky website dontread.org, and be sure to read the sassy FAQs. Tip of the hat to reader Barbarba KB.

Blogger Michael Hyatt, who holds down a day job as president and CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, the largest Christian publisher in the world, thinks that traditional book publishing will inevitably be transformed by the digital revolution. “I am convinced that we are only one device away from a digital publishing tsunami,� he writes. The new device will change publishing in the same way that the iPod is changing the music business. What will the device look like? This is Hyatt’s vision:

• It looks similar to a tablet PC slate. No keyboard, no monitor, and it folds in half.
• It is the same size and thickness as a hardcover book, say 6″ by 9″ by 1/2″. Unfolded, it is 12″ x 9″ by 1/4″. It feels great in your lap. It can even be bent slightly like a book, so you can curl up on the sofa and read away.
• It uses a tablet PC interface with a built-in stylus that feels like a high-end pen. You can use it to make menu selections, enter text (via handwriting recognition), or highlight passages in books.
• It weighs less than a 256-page hardcover book (about one pound). It therefore dramatically changes the shape and heft of your computer bag.
• It has a battery life of 12–18 hours.
• It completely replaces your computer and runs all your favorite applications.
• It has 256 gigabytes of flash drive storage. It has room for tens of thousands of songs, photos, movies—and books. Because it has no moving parts (unlike a hard drive), it is faster and more reliable.
• It is wi-fi enabled (of course).
• It includes a software application similar to iTunes for the purchase and download of books. Heck, maybe it’s just a modification of iTunes.
• It has a simple, elegant book reading application, similar to Microsoft’s Reader.

Podcast is the “word of the year,” selected by the New Oxford American Dictionary, which defines the term as “a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the internet for downloading to a personal audio player.” Publishers and many other media providers are scrambling to understand and use this new technology, as we have reported on this blog. (Look here and here.) Other words considered for “word of the year” honors included bird flu, trans fat, sudoku, lifehack, and rootkit.

As booksellers head into the prime selling season, two publishing trade groups report that book sales have been slow this year. The Association of American Publishers reports that hardcover adult trade sales are off 2 percent from last year. The American Booksellers Association estimates that overall bookstore sales are down 2 percent for the first nine months of 2005. Particularly hard hit is fiction, which has been in the doldrums since 2001. Read the New York Times report here.

Philip Jenkins, author of many books on American religion, takes a skeptical look at the familiar slogan, “I’m spiritual, but not religious.” In a book review in the December First Things, Jenkins writes that the term “spiritual” in this context usually means “a free-floating mysticism that abhors creeds, orthodoxies, or rituals.” The book he reviews, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality by Leigh Eric Schmidt, traces the roots of this “seeker” spirituality deep into American religious history. Schmidt assesses this spiritual tradition positively. Jenkins says he neglects its darker side. Seekers often stumble into the weirdly esoteric, he says, and too many fall prey to authoritarian gurus. Jenkins’ harshest criticism is for this tradition’s “endemic elitism and contempt for the ordinary religion of the masses. If spirituality is the ‘higher side’ of religion, what then is the ‘lower side’? Presumably, anything that involves faith, dogma, ritual, and more or less what the common folk in the pews do.” The churches have a message to send:

They need to show “seekers” that virtually everything they are seeking can in fact be found within the cultural resources of Christianity–and that includes such heady concepts as union with the divine. As the phrase should read, “I’m religious, and that includes spiritual.”

With the Narnia movie launch a week away, veteran religion journalist Richard Ostling has written a concise, thoughtful assessment of C.S. Lewis. Ironies abound. Lewis was a great imaginative writer, but he is best-known for his elegant apologetics. Americans care much more about him than his fellow Britons do. Mainline Protestants, of whom Lewis was one, are not much interested in him. Evangelicals and conservative Catholics love him. Ostling quotes Alan Jacobs of Wheaton College, who says that Lewis’ greatest achievement was making “holiness and the Christian life attractive, beautiful and radiant” for both children and adults.

In an interview with Christianity Today, Anne Rice reveals some details about her return to the Catholic Church. Books played an important part. She says, “I read myself right back into faith” while researching Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, a novel about Jesus at age 7. “The Lord came looking for me,” she says. “Everywhere I turned, I found images of the Lord and his love . . . . I’ve had wonderful experiences as a writer. I’ve stepped out of limos in New York City to crowds wanting autographs and embracing me. There are no words for that. But this is the biggest adventure of my life. Thrilling beyond everything.”

The new list from the Catholic Book Publishers Association is out. Most of the titles and authors are familiar. Only two of the twenty books are both new books and new to the bestseller lists. They are Matthew Kelly’s The Seven Levels of Intimacy and the 2006 Catholic Almanac from Our Sunday Visitor.

Hardcover

1. Mother Angelica
Raymond Arroyo. Doubleday

2. The Seven Levels of Intimacy
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing/Fireside

3. The Rhythm of Life
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing/Fireside

4. Catechism of the Catholic Church
Doubleday/Our Sunday Visitor/USCCB Publishing.

5. The Poetry of John Paul II
John Paul II. USCCB Publishing

6. Rediscovering Catholicism
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing

7. The Holy Longing
Ronald Rolheiser. Doubleday

8. Henri Nouwen: His Life and Vision
Michael O’Laughlin. Orbis Books

9. The Book of Courage
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing

10. Hail, Holy Queen
Scott Hahn. Doubleday

Paperback

1. Catechism of the Catholic Church
Doubleday/Our Sunday Visitor/USCCB Publishing

2. Waiting in Joyful Hope
Katherine L. Howard. Liturgical Press

3. Handbook for Today’s Catholic
A Redemptorist Pastoral Publication. Liguori

4. A Year of Sundays: Gospel Reflections 2006
Upchurch & Yeary. Liturgical Press

5. Theology of the Body for Beginners
Christopher West. Ascension Press

6. National Directory for Catechesis
USCCB Publishing

7. 2006 Catholic Almanac
Matthew E. Bunson. Our Sunday Visitor

8. Return of the Prodigal Son
Henri J.M. Nouwen. Doubleday

9. Awareness
Anthony DeMello. Doubleday

10. “I’m Not Being Fed”
Jeff Cavins. Ascension Press