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

Jody Bottum of First Things writes an insightful note about the popular mid-century novelist Morris West. West’s best book, The Devil’s Advocate, has been released in a new Loyola Classics edition. Bottum himself has helped Loyola bring another classic back — A.J. Cronin’s The Keys of the Kingdom. Bottum wrote a fine introduction to the new edition, which is mostly set in the Catholic missions of pre-World War II China. Bottum makes this shrewd observation: “It’s a little-remarked-upon story, but the real origins of modern Christian unity are found in the mission fields of China and Burma and Indonesia—where much of the ancient feud of European Protestantism and Catholicism was set aside in a kind of ecumenism of the trenches. All this is what Cronin knows and his novel captures. Surely that makes a world still worth recalling. Surely that makes The Keys of the Kingdom a novel still worth reading.” Read Bottum’s introduction here. Scroll down a bit. Publication date for The Keys of the Kingdom is a month away, but you can get a copy from Loyola Press here.

From the Catholic Book Publishers Association

HARDCOVERS

1. Values in a Time of Upheaval
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI). Crossroad

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

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

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

5. Rediscovering Catholicism
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing

6. Perpetual Motivation
Dave Durand. Crossroad Publishing

7. Mother Angelica
Raymond Arroyo. Doubleday

8. The Book of Courage
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing

9. My Life with the Saints
James Martin. Loyola Press

10. Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church
Libreria Editrice Vaticana, USCCB Publishing

PAPERBACKS

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

2. The Da Vinci Deception
Mark Shea, Edward Sri & the Editors of Catholic Exchange. Ascension Press

3. Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church
USCCB Publishing

4. God Is Love (Deus Caritas Est)
Pope Benedict XVI. USCCB Publishing

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

6. Day by Day Revised
McNally & Storey. Ave Maria Press/Sorin Books

7. Come, Holy Spirit!
Lorie Simmons. Liturgy Training

8. 101 Questions & Answers on The DaVinci Code and the Catholic Tradition
de Flon & Vidmar. Paulist Press

9. De-coding DaVinci
Amy Welborn. Our Sunday Visitor

10. The Slow-Release Miracle
Andrew Nugent. Paulist Press

The Jesuits of the new Orleans Province have produced a PBS-style documentary on Francis Xavier, the great missionary whose story is one of the most inspiring of all the saints. I’m especially impressed by the way his missionary career began. Ignatius Loyola had other plans for him, but he asked Xavier to head a mission to India when another Jesuit fell ill. Xavier agreed immediately. He wrapped us his affairs in a matter of days and departed for the East, never to return to Europe. It’s a response to God’s call as dramatic as the apostles’.

The film is narrated by Liam Neeson and makes extensive use of Xavier’s own words in his letters. Go here to watch the trailer. More about the film here.

Pentateuch is the latest in the series of full-color reproductions of the St. John’s Bible, the extraordinary handwritten, illuminated Bible commissioned by Liturgical Press. The St. John’s Bible is a stunning work of visual art, and the reproductions of it that Liturgical Press is publishing are wonderfully-crafted works of the bookmaker’s art. We hear a lot lately about how technology will replace the traditional book. Books as beautiful as Pentateuch, and Psalms and Gospels and Acts that preceded it, remind us that some physical books will never be replaced. These are books to love. Go here for a multimedia explanation of the St. John’s Bible project. It’s the first handwritten, illuminated Bible to be commisioned in 500 years.

Shelf Awareness, the daily email newsletter for the book trade, is a year old today. It’s consistently informative and useful. And it’s free. Go here to sign up.

One recent commenter pleaded with me to put more baseball on this blog, so, by popular demand, I’ll oblige. This year I’m a different kind of baseball fan than I’ve been in years past. I’m a Fan Who Cares. Baseball used to be a detached pleasure – a savoring of its landscape, its history, statistics, and nuances, its myths and its tensions. Now it’s an affair of the heart. Now I cheer and groan in front of the TV, plan my evenings and weekends so I can catch at least the last three innings of games, and look ahead to upcoming games and speculate about the starting pitching rotation.

The object of my passion is the Detroit Tigers, my local team for more than 30 years. Incredibly, the Tigers have the best record in baseball, and have had for many weeks. The Tigers have been bad for more than a decade. Three years ago they were atrocious – one of the worst teams of all time. Now they are on top of the AL Central, two games in front the White Sox. They clearly have the starting pitching, fearsome bullpen, and slashing hitters to keep them in the pennant race to the very end. The best thing about the Tigers’ renaissance is that it’s a surprise. The Tigers don’t have to win the World Series to have a successful season (unlike our rivals, the White Sox, who won it last year and will be miserable if they don’t do it again). It’s all delightful for a fan – a surprise rise from misery to mastery. Every victory is an astonishment. There’s probably a spiritual lesson here, but I think I’ll just enjoy the baseball. We’ve won 11 out of the last 12 games. It’s the summer of the Tiger.

I launched People of the Book a year ago today. It’s been fun for me, always stimulating, at times demanding. I hope it’s been interesting and useful for you. If you’ve been reading it, you’ve noticed some changes. I began People of the Book as a blog “for and about the Catholic book publishing community.” I now call it a “blog about book publishing from a Catholic perspective.” That’s because I realized after a while that this is more of a publishing blog broadly speaking than an “insider” blog about the Catholic part of the publishing business. Many people launch blogs as vehicles for their opinions. That’s fine. I read and enjoy opinion blogs. But that’s not my goal here. People of the Book is mainly a place where I point out things that interest me. You can probably guess at some of my views by looking at what I’m interested in, but I don’t see this blog as a place where I sound off. I dread being boring. Publishing, books, writers, new media, poetry, baseball – all these things are more interesting than I am.

Traffic has grown slowly but steadily since June 2005. May was the best month ever, with more than 2000 unique visitors and nearly 9000 visits. My Technorati rank this morning was 122,480. That doesn’t sound too impressive until you find out that Technorati tracks 45 million blogs. So I tell my friends that People of the Book ranks in Technorati’s top .003 percent.

I’m planning some changes over the next few months. I want to add more links to the sidebar – publishing links, Catholic links, and a blogroll. I might have to find a new template for the blog to accommodate what I want to do. I would like to review more Catholic books. I want to delve more deeply into new media, and the impact the internet is having on all of us in the book publishing business.

Thanks for coming. Comments and suggestions are always welcome. I try to answer email promptly. Send me links to sites and news and blogs that you find interesting. I pay a lot of attention to what you think.

In Believing Scholars, a recent book from Fordham University Press, ten scholars write about how their Catholic faith has influenced their scholarship. The essays are largely personal, not scholarly, and they show how thinkers think differently, and more deeply, because of their faith. Of particular interest are Mary Ann Glendon’s essay on Catholicism and human rights, Peter Steinfels’ examination of liberal Catholicism, and Cardinal Avery Dulles’ reflections on the faith of a theologian. I was especially struck by the Cardinal’s account of his conversion. A turning point came when the young Harvard student stumbled on a Sunday evening benediction service in a Cambridge church:

A large congregation of working class people was singing Latin hymns such as the “O Salutaris” and the “Pange Lingua,” which I recognized as the work of St. Thomas Aquinas. Here, most evidently, was the Church to which I must belong!

I’ve done some ghostwriting in years past and I’m interested in news about this hidden art. Ghostwriters are in demand. Publishers Weekly had a recent piece about a New York agent who represents only ghostwriters. Her clients have written seven New York Times non-fiction bestsellers in the last two years. UK blogger Michael Allen offers this post on “Ghostwriting for Beginners,” in which he confesses that if he were younger, and determined to write books for a living, he would choose a career as a ghostwriter. Allen lists the skills that ghostwriters need. Among them: “You need to be able to make some fine judgement calls as to how much you can embellish and expect to get away with, without generating a James Frey-type scandal.” And: “You have to be genuinely and entirely satisfied with taking the money and none of the fame.”

Nobody writes better supernatural thrillers than Dean Koontz. He’s setting the standard for authors’ podcasts too, if his first effort is any indication. Go here to listen. Hat tip to Joe Durepos, Dean’s number one fan.

Brainstorming sessions are a near-ubiquitous feature of business life, and they frequently frustrate the people involved in them. One reason, according to Jared Sandberg of the Wall Street Journal, is that participants are urged to believe something that’s demonstrably false: “There’s no such thing as a bad idea.” Thus, many bad ideas are inevitably advanced in brainstorming sessions, and participants exert much creative energy telling others that their ideas are bad without actually saying that. Group dynamics can be troublesome. Someone will often hijack the session with too much talk. One person’s forcefully-presented bad idea will limit the range of the group’s ideas.

Individual brainstorming is usually better, say the experts who talked to Sandberg. One study showed that four individuals brainstorming alone performed twice as well as four people brainstorming together. Teams achieve better results when participants bring their ideas to the group session and then brainstorm alone afterwards. “It’s ironic: you tap the benefits of the group alone,” says one consultant. Read Sandberg’s piece here.

James Joyce fans honor his memory on June 16, the day that the events of his novel Ulysses occur. I’ll honor Joyce with this paragraph, the concluding words of his great, perfect short story, “The Dead.” Gabriel Conroy has learned that his wife had once loved another man, now dead. Joyce conjures an image of a bleak heart merging with a frozen Ireland:

“A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

Check out these recent reviews of notable books: Matthew Lickona’s Godspy piece on Debra Murphy’s fine theological thriller The Mystery of Things; Chris Gonzalez on Scot McKnight’s Praying with the Church; and The Anchoress on Fr. Jim Martin’s acclaimed My Life with the Saints.

Self-publishing has been getting easier and cheaper. Now it’s looking better. Customers of a just-launched Web company named Blurb can download professionally-designed templates for various kinds of books, including cookbooks, photo books, portfolios and volumes dedicated to pets and babies. Blurb is targeting the gift and memento market, and a single copy of a book costs about $30. But there’s no reason why prices won’t come down and the market broadened, if not by Blurb then by competitors. Publishers, especially small publishers, need to take note. Professional design has been one of the proprietary services that publishers offer authors. Blurb’s templates — or another company’s — make quality design a downloadable commodity.

David Plotz, a proud but not very observant Jew, picked up the Bible one day and became engrossed in a story in the book of Genesis that he had never read before. He decided to start reading the Bible: “I want to find out what happens when an ignorant person actually reads the book on which his religion is based.” Plotz is also a writer and a blogger, so he wrote about what he discovered on the online magazine Slate. You can read his insightful and witty commentary on Genesis starting here. Sample:

Why Abram? There is no obvious reason. Unlike Noah, he’s not a “righteous man.” He’s 75 years old and hasn’t done anything with his life. He isn’t pious, rich, or accomplished. He’s not a king, not a chief, not a prophet, not a genius, not a warrior. He’s completely ordinary, and I suppose that’s the point. Abram isn’t special: It is God choosing him that makes him special. He is a regular man touched by God—just like any of us could be.

BookScan is the subscription service that tracks retail sales of books in chain stores, Amazon.com, and some independent and discount stores. It records books actually sold to customers, not books that have merely been shipped to stores and distributors, which is what publishers have long relied on to judge sales. This makes BookScan a powerful tool. Editors look up an author’s BookScan numbers when they’re considering a new proposal. Publishers and their marketing managers rely on Bookscan numbers to get an accurate bead on sales.

BookScan claims that the service reports about 70 percent of actual sales of a typical hardcover book. But some have their doubts. This week, the Shelf Awareness newsletter published the complaints of a couple of small publishers who say that BookScan is undercounting their sales. Said one, “I just checked two titles that have been out for three years, to get a sense of how the BookScan numbers relate to actual data over time. On one title they’re reporting 21% of our confirmed sales, on the other 22%.” Another small publisher refers to the service as “Bookscam.” Recently, Slate weighed in with an article about how journalists and reviewers misuse BookScan data.

The Philadelphia Inquirer publishes highlights of a Zogby survey of American Catholic opinion. Highlights of the highlights: solid majorities believe that the Catholic Church is the one true church, think it’s important to attend Mass at least weekly, and think that the church should approve artificial birth control. Smaller majorities actually attend Mass weekly and believe that the bread and wine actually become Jesus’ body and blood at Mass. Survey results are here. The Inquirer’s “state of the church” article is here.

Many publishers at last week’s Religious Books Trade Exhibition is St. Charles, Illinois, thought that the show was quieter and more sparsely attended than in years past. But Publishers Weekly reports that total attendance was up slightly and that bookstores attending held steady. Read PW’s report here.

A violent video game based on the bestselling “Left Behind” books was launched at the recent Electronic Entertainment Expo. The game, called “Left Behind: Eternal Forces,” has “all the Christian stuff, and it’s still got all the cool stuff,” its designer told the Los Angeles Times. The game, set in New York City, features a battle between the heroes in the Tribulation Force and the bad guys in the Antichrist’s Global Community Peacekeepers, an army modeled on the United Nations. According to the Times

Tribulation squads unleash the usual arsenal against the Antichrist: guns, tanks, helicopters. But soldiers lose some of their spirituality every time they kill an opponent and must be bolstered through prayer. The failure to nurture good guys causes their spirit points to drop, leaving them vulnerable to recruitment by the other side. The player’s choices prompt intervention by angelic forces or unleash demons who feast on the faithful. As players progress through the increasingly difficult levels, they see Scripture passages presented as secret scrolls and hear inspirational music.

Not surprisingly, some Christians are appalled. One told the Times, “Because of the Christian context, somehow it’s OK? It’s not OK. The context is irrelevant. It’s a mass-killing game.”

A Times piece looks at the impact of digital publishing. The piece is really about the potential of digital publishing, since its actual impact is rather limited. So far. A few authors are experimenting with digital books. A book that began as a blog has reached the Times bestseller list. Book people look at scanning technology, with its potential for linking books and parts of books, with a mixture of curiosity and fear. Says novelist Jane Hamilton: “When I read someone like Willa Cather, I feel like I’m in the presence of the divine. I don’t want her mixed up with anybody else. And I certainly don’t want to go to her Web site.”

From the Catholic Book Publishers Association

HARDCOVER

1. Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church
Libreria Editrice Vaticana. USCCB Publishing

2. The Shadow of God
Charles Scribner. Doubleday

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

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

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

6. A Mystic Garden: Working with Soil, Attending to the Soul
Gunilla Norris. BlueBridge

7. My Life with the Saints
James Martin. Loyola Press

8. Rediscovering Catholicism
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing

9. Mother Angelica
Raymond Arroyo. Doubleday

10. The Book of Courage
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing

PAPERBACK

1. The Da Vinci Deception
Mark Shea, Edward Sri & the Editors of Catholic Exchange. Ascension Press

2. Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church
USCCB Publishing

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

4. De-coding Da Vinci
Amy Welborn. Our Sunday Visitor

5. De-coding Mary Magdalene
Amy Welborn. Our Sunday Visitor

6. Encounters with Merton
Henri J.M. Nouwen. Crossroad

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

8. Good News about Sex & Marriage
Christopher West. Servant Books

9. A Pocket Guide to Catholic Apologetics
Patrick Madrid. Our Sunday Visitor

10. 101 Questions & Answers on The Da Vinci Code and the Catholic Tradition
Paulist Press