Elizabeth David - How to Keep It Simple at Christmas

Johnny Grey Studios has posted an excerpt from Godine's Elizabeth David's Christmas (Foreword by Alice Waters). Here’s Elizabeth’s take on how to keep it simple at Christmas:

"If I had my way – and I shan’t – my Christmas Day eating and cooking would consist of an omelet and cold ham and a nice bottle of wine at lunchtime, and a smoked salmon sandwich with a glass of champagne on a tray in bed in the evening. This lovely, selfish, anti-gorging, un-Christmas dream of hospitality, either given or taken, must be shared by thousands of women who know it’s all Lombard Street to a China orange that they’ll spend both Christmas Eve and Christmas morning peeling, chopping, mixing, boiling, roasting, steaming. That they will eat and drink too much, that someone will say the turkey isn’t as good as last year, or discover that the rum for the pudding has been forgotten, that by the time lunch has been washed up and put away it’ll be teatime, not to say drink or dinner time, and tomorrow it’s the weekend, at it’s going to start all over again.

Well, I know that any woman who has to provide for a lot of children or a big family has no alternative. This grisly orgy of spending and cooking and anxiety has to be faced. We are so many fathoms deep in custom and tradition and sentiment over Christmas; we have gotten so far, with our obsessive present-buying and frenzied cooking, from the spirit of a simple Christian festival, that only the most determined of Scrooges can actually turn their faces to the wall and ignore the whole thing when the time comes. At the same time, there must be quite a few small families, couples without children, and people living along, who like to celebrate Christmas in a reasonably modest and civilized way: inviting over a friend or two who might otherwise be alone (well, maybe, like you and me, they’d rather be alone, but this is an eccentricity not accepted at Christmas time) – and for much small-scale Christmas meals, at least, the shopping and cooking marathons can be avoided, the host and hostess can be allowed to enjoy themselves, and the guests needn’t have guilt about the washing up.

For such a meal, I’d make the main dish something fairly straightforward and conventional, the color and festive look being supplied by something bright and beautiful as a garnish. Not inedible decorations, but something simple and unexpected such as a big bowl of crimson sweet-sour cherry sauce with a roast duck; a handsome dish of tomatoes stuffed with savory rice with a capon; a Madeira and truffle-scented sauce with a piece of plain roast beef; slice oranges with a pork roast or a ham.

The first course I’d make as painless as possible for the cook: if money were no object, lots of smoked salmon or Parma ham to precede the duck; before the beef, a French duck pate with truffles and pistachio nuts, avocado pears, or simply a lovely dish of egg or prawn mayonnaise. Or, if you’d cooked a ham or piece of gammon or pickled pork to last over the Christmas holiday, then a few finely carved slices of that, with a bowl of cubed honeydew melon or some pickled peaches – there’s no reason why English cooked ham should not make just as good a first course as the raw Parma or Bayonne ham.

As for pudding, unless you feel you absolutely have to have at least the traditional mince pies (those who only each the Christmas pudding because of the brandy or rum butter will find it equally delicious with mince pies), most people will be grateful if you skip straight to the Christmas dessert fruits. Usually one is too full to appreciate the charms of Malaga raisins, Smyrna figs, almonds, glacé apricots and sugar-plums, or you could perhaps finish up with a big bowl of mixed fresh pineapple and sliced oranges."

—

"If we were to bushwack our way back to the true source of modern American food culture, we would find that it is not Julia Child, but Elizabeth David. [Her] recipes are all charm."
— The New Yorker

Superior Person's Tuesday!

Omniphagous a. Eating everything. One of the great experimental omniphages was William Buckland, the first Professor of Geology at Oxford University. He ate hedgehog, crocodile and mole meat, and even a bluebottle fly, the taste of which he considered the most repulsive he had ever experienced. Once when lost on a dark night during a ride to London with a friend, he dismounted, scooped up a handful of earth, smelt it, and immediately declared "Uxbridge!" The Archbishop of York once proudly showed Buckland a snuff box containing the heart of Louis XIV, which the Archbishop had brought from a tomb-robber when in Paris during the revolution. Remarking "I've eaten many things, but never the heart of the king," Buckland seized the heart and swallowed it on the spot.


Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Omniphagous appears in the Third.

One Hundred Portraits - Barry Moser

One Hundred Portraits receives a nod from the Wall Street Journal:

It is the face of a put-upon man. While Herman Melville had enjoyed early success, it gave way to hard toil in obscurity and Manhattan's Custom House. Barry Moser has portrayed a man whose greatest works lie unheralded and (seemingly) forever forgotten. The woodcut, originally created for a limited edition of Melville's underrated poetry, is a chiaroscuro masterpiece, a symphony of textures—wispy filaments forming the beard, dense crosshatching for the waistcoat, a freer hand creating the untidy coat.

Perhaps the finest printmaker at work today, Mr. Moser has over the past 40 years captured countless famous countenances. 'One Hundred Portraits' (David R. Godine, 125 pages, $35) collects the best, mainly literary: from a delicately rendered Lewis Carroll lost in reverie to an appropriately dismal Theodore Dreiser and an owlish Flannery O'Connor. In his more recent works, the bravura use of visual effects has given way to a sparer style, with a strong use of shadow that adds a sense of mortality. The most fascinating textures tend to be the folds of flesh itself, as in the magnificently rumpled face of W.H. Auden. But then there are the eyes sparking the portraits to life: How magnificent is the stare of his chin-raised Fanny Burney.

—The Editors

Red Sox star Carl Crawford will not open an antiquarian bookstore (probably)

From Carolyn Kellogg at Jacket Copy (Los Angeles Times):

On Tuesday, baseball bloggers and book lovers around Twitter enthusiastically circulated the news that newly minted Red Sox outfielder Carl Crawford was planning to open an antiquarian bookshop in the Boston area. The former Tampa Bay Ray was said to be both a rare book collector and a fan of early American writings, including William Bradford's "Of Plymouth Plantation" and "The Puritan Origins of the American Self."

Alas, this was not the case.

Crawford is very good at baseball — he just signed a $142-million contract — and was also such a good high school football player that he'd been recruited by college programs. But he's not the type to be seen "wearing a heavy fisherman's sweater and clutching a newly purchased diary of 1655 Connecticut Governor Thomas Welles," as blogger Will McDonald wrote on Royals Review, a fan-centric site dedicated to the Kansas City baseball team that is under the AP's SB Nation umbrella.

McDonald confirmed by e-mail that his post was satire.

That's not how the Harvard Bookstore saw it. Located in Cambridge, Mass. (though unaffiliated with the university, the bookstore responded to the idea that the Red Sox had just brought on a very literary player. "File this under 'amazing,' " the store tweeted, with a link to McDonald's story. "Holy cow!" added Massachusetts-based book blogger Megan Sullivan when she retweeted it.

Then the story went viral on Twitter. I was among those contaminated (I'm a Dodger fan, but I'm fond of the Red Sox too). Boston360, book journalist Sarah Weinman, author Julie Klam and publisher Norton Critical Editions were among the hundreds eager to spread the word. Sadly, the story wasn't true. Crawford is not a rare book collector, and it has not been his dream to open an antiquarian book shop.

"It was intended to be a joke," McDonald said in an e-mail, "though I wish it was true."

Strangley, at 6 p.m. Tueday, Crawford promised — or joked? — that McDonald's wish might become a reality. Responding to the flood of positive tweets to the (satiric) antiquarian bookseller announcement, the baseball star tweeted, "Yes for those asking, I am going to open a bookstore" from his verified Twitter account. "Details to come."

The Syntax of Style

The Wall Street Journal has a lovely review of Godine's Farnsworth's Classical English Rhetoric today, which Henry Hitchings describes as "a guide to the literary tropes and rhetorical forms that once made English prose so stylish and compelling."

From the review:

"'I worry incessantly that I might be too clear,' Alan Greenspan once claimed. He intended the remark to be crowd-pleasing, but it served as an acknowledgment of the necessary ambiguity of professional economics. To be clear is to leave oneself open to attack; there is safety in obscurity. In many quarters clarity is interpreted as oversimplification, and the cryptic utterance is regarded as a mark of expertise. Yet the murkiness of public discourse often results not from willful indistinctness but simply from a blithe, untutored lack of rhetorical know-how.

In Farnsworth's Classical English Rhetoric, Ward Farnsworth sets out to remedy this. A professor at the Boston University School of Law, Mr. Farnsworth has previously published The Legal Analyst, which he described as 'a collection of tools for thinking about legal questions,' and a guide to chess tactics. This book manifests his familiar pragmatism and distaste for rarefied theory; billed as 'a lively set of lessons,' it is in fact more akin to a well- curated exhibition of rhetorical accessories."

. . .

"The most immediate pleasure of this book is that it heightens one's appreciation of the craft of great writers and speakers. Mr. Farnsworth includes numerous examples from Shakespeare and Dickens, Thoreau and Emerson, Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln. He also seems keen to rehabilitate writers and speakers whose rhetorical artistry is undervalued; besides his liking for Chesterton, he shows deep admiration for the Irish statesman Henry Grattan (1746-1820), whose studied repetition of a word ('No lawyer can say so; because no lawyer could say so without forfeiting his character as a lawyer') is an instance, we are told, of conduplicatio. But more than anything Mr. Farnsworth wants to restore the reputation of rhetorical artistry per se, and the result is a handsome work of reference."

"Bad Writing," the movie

From Jacket Copy:

"What do George Saunders, Margaret Atwood, Miles Corwin, Nick Flynn, Aimee Bender, D.A. Powell, Lee Gutkind, Steve Almond and David Sedaris have in common? They all agree that Vernon Lott's poetry is pretty bad.

Don't worry, Lott asked for it. In his documentary "Bad Writing," Lott presents these well-known authors with a sample of his poetry in an attempt to suss out what, exactly, makes writing bad. He'd found his early —and yes, mostly lousy — poems in a basement, and the older-and-wiser Lott struck out across the country, visiting writers and writing professors asking them what bad writing is, exactly.

Lee Gutkind, an icon in creative nonfiction, tells him gently, "there is a sense of embarrassing sincerity about this piece." Novelist Margaret Atwood is sweetly merciless. "There's no rule that says you get steadily better," she says.

The very independently produced documentary opens at the Sunset 5 in Hollywood on Friday night, where it will show in limited engagement through Thursday. It's a must-see for any writer who's ever wondered, "Am I any good?" or even "Is my writing bad?"

Some of the places Lott goes in the film will be particularly satisfying for writers and writing students. George Saunders' writing is superb and dark, but only those who've met him realize how gentle and kind he can be to students. Watching the faces of some of the writers as they hear Lott's bad poetry is pretty funny, but Nick Flynn's the best: he keeps a neutral expression for a while, then finally breaks into laughter when the poem go from bad to worse."

The Woman in Black - Review

Thank you to Jessica at the Williamsburg Regional Library in Virginia for this wonderful review of Godine's The Woman in Black, a forthcoming major motion picture starring Daniel Radcliffe:

"The English accord the holidays with a sensible emotional treatment: fear and dread. There is a place for joy, cheer, goodwill, etc., but the English storytelling tradition acknowledges that horror is an appropriate state of mind for this time of year. To that end we’ll feature a week of creepy stories to celebrate the Ho-Ho-Horror of the season.

The opening pages of Susan Hill’s novel are cozy and comfortable. A happy family is gathered about the fire on Christmas Eve, the snow falling gently outside. But right at the best part of the evening, when the family members start to tell ghost stories, an aging Arthur Kipps abruptly makes his leave; the others might enjoy festive ghost stories, but Kipps finds himself reflecting on a dark secret from his past. . . . Though published in 1983, this shivery ghost story has the classic feel of a Gothic thriller. Susan Hill slowly builds suspense as she reveals clues about the desolate English manor, the twin tragedies of a child’s death and his mother’s suffering, and the vengeful rage of a spirit who cannot rest. Just when the reader thinks it is safe to breathe, Hill throws in a terrifying plot twist to ratchet up the horror. With such a deliciously malevolent storyline, it’s no surprise that we’ll be seeing the novel adapted into a 2011 film, to be directed by James Watkins and starring Daniel Radcliffe as Kipps."

Georges Perec

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London is now featuring an exhibit with photographers that work without a camera. Instead, they create images on photographic paper by casting shadows and manipulating light, or by chemically treating the surface of the paper.

One of the featured works by photographer Pierre Cordier is inspired by Georges Perec. Godine published the first English translation of Perec's masterpiece, Life: A User's Manual, over twenty years ago.

Pierre Cordier, Chemigram 31/7/01 Hommage à Georges Perec, 2001

Life: A User’s Manual tells the story of a Paris apartment building and its inhabitants. In this piece, the apartments form a 10 x 10 grid, which serves as the structure of the book’s narrative. Each is dealt with according to the moves made in the ‘knight’s tour’, a chess-based mathematical problem in which the knight must visit each square exactly once.

Superior Person's Tuesday!

Autophobia n. Not, as might be imagined, the fear of automobiles, but the morbid dread of oneself, or of being alone. Do vampires, perhaps, have autophobia? They ought to. Politicians, perhaps?

Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Autophobia appears in the Third.

Rilke in New York City

The Inner Sky is a new bilingual selection of Rainer Maria Rilke's poems and prose pieces, many of them little known and never before translated in English. These translations, by the NEA- and PEN-award-winning author and translator Damion Searls, present a significant new voice for Rilke, one more intimate than oracular. Here is Rilke, not in his usual role of channeling the gods, but looking up from a book, musing about the girls of his Czech homeland, sharing his hallucinatory dreams, and the olfactory pleasures of keeping lemons on his writing desk in winter.

. . .

We are right at the start, do you see.
As though before everything. With
a thousand and one dreams behind us and
no act.

I can imagine no knowledge holier
than this:
that you must become a beginner.
Someone who writes the first word after
a centuries-long
dash.

. . .

Searls will discuss various issues of translation and read excerpts from The Inner Sky at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York (ACFNY) (11 East 52nd St, New York, NY) on Tuesday, December 14th at 6:30pm.

"Searls wipes clean the often-foggy lens through which non-German readers of Rilke have hitherto experienced him, and the result feels like a dream in which you can understand perfectly a language you didn't think you knew. Rilke's thrilling precision and disorientations and purposefulness are all suddenly there in English."
— Jonathan Franzen

Swimmer in the Secret Sea

Thank you to the literary review site The Mookse and the Gripes for this thoughtful, beautiful review of William Kotzwinkle's Swimmer in the Secret Sea.

"I’ve had my eye on Swimmer in the Secret Sea (1975) since I read about it earlier this year and saw that it was published by Godine, one of my favorite publishers . . . This short book (just under 100 pages of generously large type and margins) was originally published in Redbook, but in the same year it was published as a paperback. I believe it is a rare thing for a magazine short story to find its way into its own cover. To remain in print through the years is also quite a feat. Off the top of my head, I can think of only one other that has similar success: Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl (and even it is actually two stories).

. . .

The book’s strength is the simple story, the seemingly simple way it is told, and the cold landscape that all at once emphasizes the book’s tragedy and its hope. The anxiety and the calm, a landscape that is both lonely and comforting, a child that never arrived but is deeply missed, tragedy and hope — or is there really any hope at all here? Such contradictions give the simplicity a full range of emotion. Another strength: the book’s ability to make the reader question any warmth he or she may be feeling."

Philanthropy: A Holiday Pie Worth Sharing

By Kit Bakke, author of Godine's Miss Alcott's Email

The older I become, the more I realize that luck and chance run our lives far more than any sort of “deserving.” Of course I’ve made tough choices and of course I’ve worked hard, but many people make tough choices and work hard and still don’t end up happy and healthy with their butts in a tub of butter, which is pretty much how I’d describe my situation.

If you start by being a white middle-class educated American with a house, a car, a fridge, an oven, and a computer with an Internet connection, you’ve exceeded the resources of 95% of your 6.8 billion fellow human beings. Put another way, if the world’s population were shrunk to a village of one hundred people, half the world’s wealth would be in the hands of six of them, mostly Americans. That’s us.

Being aware of our luck, my husband and I have become increasingly involved in the philosophy and practice of philanthropy. The language of giving is interesting — it used to be called “charity” and now it’s often called “social investment.” Like so much else in our society, philanthropy has become increasingly organized, results-driven, studied, monitored and, one hopes, more creative, collaborative, and effective.

Charitable giving in the US runs a little over $300 billion annually. This includes corporate, foundation, and individual gifts to all sorts of national and international nonprofits including churches, schools, social service organizations, and environmental and arts institutions. Corporate giving is about 5% of all gifts, foundation giving about 20%, and individual giving makes up 75% of all charitable donations. So next time you think you are small potatoes compared to the Gates Foundation, think again. You are part of, by far, the biggest slice.

Food banks, shelters, and community clinics have been inundated with service needs over the last two years, and in many areas that need continues unabated. Donations dropped in 2009 (the second least-charitable year since 1956), and although they appear to be picking up for 2010, it hasn’t been enough to meet the increased need. More bad news is on the way as states are slashing their human services and Medicaid budgets for 2011. Preventive and bridge services are often the first to be jettisoned, which only adds to the long-run economic, social, and human costs. For some reason, we’d rather house the mentally ill in jails (most colleges are cheaper) and care for them in expensive emergency rooms than provide them with less expensive supportive housing, counseling, and appropriate treatment.

Donors nowadays aren’t shy about questioning the effectiveness of the organizations they give to. Being part of a successful result is a bigger draw than being guilt-tripped. Gone are the days when a donor would trust United Way or the American Cancer Society to spend their charitable dollars with no follow-up reporting. There is now a flurry of research going on to help nonprofit organizations figure out how to measure and communicate the results of their work. For instance, a health care clinic for low-income people can’t just report the number of patients they saw; they need to provide information on what they did for those patients and whether or not those patients got better.

The Center on Philanthropy of Indiana University is an excellent resource for trends in research on philanthropy. There are even data showing that people who volunteer and donate to nonprofits are happier and healthier than those who don’t. Talk about win-win!

Another excellent resource is Charity Navigator. They have recently upgraded their rating system to include three areas: financial health (Is the organization financially stable and how much of its budget goes to overhead vs. direct service?); accountability (Does the organization engage in ethical practices, have good governance structures, and is it accountable to its constituents and target populations?); and outcomes (Can the organization demonstrate positive change in the lives of the people they serve?).

I am a member of the Washington Women’s Foundation, which gives away about $500,000 annually to nonprofits in five areas: the arts, the environment, education, human services, and health. We have three criteria for our grant review process in addition to Charity Navigator’s important list. We want to fund projects and organizations that are responding to urgent and critical needs, that incorporate new approaches to ongoing problems, and that are working on bold new ventures.

Which slice of the (guaranteed calorie-free) philanthropy pie do you like?

Happy holidays to ALL 6.8 billion of us!

Eddie Chuculate on Iowa Public Radio

Iowa City writer Eddie Chuculate discussed his new Black Sparrow collection of short stories, Cheyenne Madonna, on Iowa Public Radio's recent Native American literature program. Check out the interview here.

"Chuculate presents a profound disconnect between the mythology of Indian art and the present-day reality of Indian artists, who rarely get to be artists without the cultural qualifier. He also lays bare the effects of wide-spread multi-generational addiction without making excuses for the way his characters treat each other. There are no saints in here, and no demons, either. Cheyenne Madonna is a fantastic debut."
— Jennifer Levin at The Santa Fe New Mexican

"Chuculate writes forthright prose in a somber key, examining without judgment the lives of Native American characters like Old Bull, a Cheyenne who, in 'Galveston Bay, 1826,' the collection's one stand-alone story, ventures out to see the ocean for the first time, only to get savaged by a hurricane. Memory and will converge here to powerful effect."
— Publishers Weekly

Opening night at the Grolier

Here are photos from the recent opening night of the David R. Godine, Publisher exhibit at The Grolier Club in New York City. The exhibit runs until January 7, 2011 in the second floor gallery.

David with Bill Henderson, the publisher of Pushcart Press, editor of "Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses" annual anthology, and, last but not least, Godine author of the forthcoming All My Dogs: A Life.

Superior Person's Tuesday!

Zzxjianw n. A Maori drum. The recommended use is in Scrabble. The technique is to save up, at all costs, the letters Z, X, J, O, and W (or a blank that can be used in place of any you don't manage to acquire); to wait for a dangling AN on which you can build; and then to strike. The satisfaction to be derived from this single act altogether outweighs whatever chagrin you might otherwise experience through losing the game, as you assuredly will – even that experienced through losing six games in succession, if need be, before you can effect your coup.

Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Zzxjianw appears in the First.

Meet Barry Moser!

You may remember the interview and post on Moser's One Hundred Portraits last week. Now meet the man himself:

Wanda Coleman by Norn Cutson

NYC illustrator Norn Cutson debuted a very cool piece on Black Sparrow's own Wanda Coleman:

Barry Moser on WAMC

Barry Moser was recently on WAMC's The Roundtable with Joe Donahue. Listen to the interview here.

Moser is considered one of the most important book artists of our time. Godine just published One Hundred Portraits: Artists, Architects, Writers, Composers and Friends, Moser's latest book, which includes wood and relief engravings of personalities as varied as Charles Dickens, Daniel Webster, Stephen Crane, Dante Alighieri, Frédéric Chopin, Nelson Algren, Jean Cocteau, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Rembrandt van Rijn, Ben Shahn, Jim Harrison, Flannery O'Connor, William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Walt Whitman, William Blake, Eric Carle, Kaye Gibbons, Virginia Hamilton, Nancy Willard, Patricia MacLachlan, Jack Coughlin, Jane Yolen, Joyce Carol Oates, and many others.

In addition, Ann Patchett, the recipient of the 2002 Pen Faulkner Award and Great Britain's prestigious Orange Award, contributes a splendid essay about Moser's portraits and the subject of portraiture in general.

Superior Person's Tuesday!

Yirn v. To whine, to pout, or show petulance by facial grimaces. Pronounced the same as yearn. "My husband is an idealist; he's always yirning for something."

Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Yirn appears in the First.

The Godine 40th anniversary limited edition poster is in!

It's really a thing of beauty:

This limited edition poster has been designed with painstaking care by longtime friend of the house, author, and illustrator Glenna Lang. Its image depicts our little house's "cottage industry" beginnings, a time when, as David Godine writes, "The narrow, personal world of trade publishing was still run by opinionated individuals, whose names were often eponymous with their companies, and who more or less published what they liked and did their crying in private;" when "It was still possible to dream of becoming a general trade publisher whose list would cover a variety of subjects and whose books could be produced to high standards, and to do it all with a minimum of fuss and compromise."

It was hand-silkscreened in eight colors on fine acid-free paper by master printer Luther Davis at Axelle Editions in Brooklyn, NY. This is a limited edition of 250 prints, each signed and numbered by the artist.

The print would make an excellent holiday gift and at $50 is truly a great bargain. Purchases can be made through our website.

What's Daniel Radcliffe going to do next?

Radcliffe stars in the motion picture release of The Woman in Black, due out in 2011:
"The 21-year-old took a 10-day break from 'Woman in Black' to promote 'Deathly Hallows - Part 1,' but he'll soon be headed back to the set for another four weeks of filming. Based on a 1983 thriller by Susan Hill, the supernatural thriller follows Arthur Kipps (Radcliffe) as a lawyer who travels to sort out a recently deceased client's affairs, encountering dark secrets and haunting presences when he arrives. Radcliffe told us he's been loving the production, which is just a fraction of the size of a 'Potter' film. 'It's faster," he said. "I'm loving it. It's very, very exciting.'"

Stills from the film were just released:


Godine is proud to publish the US edition of The Woman in Black!

Holiday Email Promotion!

It's about that time . . . Season's greetings everyone! To celebrate, David R. Godine, Publisher will be sending out a holiday email promotion on Monday, 11/22, (just before the Black Friday madness) to our subscription list.

We will be offering an amazing 30% off some incredible titles—books featured on the big and small screen, food writing, and, of course, children's books.



By joining our subscription list, throughout the year you will get special discounts on backlist books (and new titles sometimes); updates from authors, information about author readings, lectures by David, and other fun events. We promise to not share your information with anyone and to never crowd your inbox.

From the Griffin Museum

Godine and friends (Michael Russem, Steve Stinehour, and Paul Parisi) at his well-attended lecture on photo books last night at the Griffin Museum in Winchester, MA.

A recap of Godine at the Grolier Club in NYC

The blog of the Graphic Arts Collection at Princeton University offers a lovely post on David Godine's opening night event for the exhibition of his books at The Grolier Club in New York City:

"'It began in a barn with one press and three smart people,' said the fine press publisher David Godine last night at the opening of an exhibition of his books held at the Grolier Club in New York City. While still in his early twenties, Godine rented an abandoned cow barn in Brookline, Massachusetts, for the price of one book a year. 1968 and 1969 were spent fitting it out with the basics—electricity, heat, and plumbing—before he, Lance Hidy, and Martha Rockwell could begin production.

David R. Godine Inc. had three basic guidelines: to offer a wide selection of books of editorial and textual importance; to produce books that delighted the eye and did not offend the purse; and to maintain the highest production standards.

One of their most ambitious early projects was Specimen Days by Walt Whitman (1819-1892). Because of the large edition size, the book was set at Stinehour Press and printed by Meriden Press. 'We would be the architects, but not necessarily the builders,' writes Godine. A three-page rave review in the New York Times Sunday Book Review assured the book’s success. 'The next day Richard Abel called from Oregon to order five hundred copies. We had never shipped more than three copies of anything to anyone in our history.' (GAX Oversize 2007-0365Q)

I am one of the fortunate few who walked away last night with a copy of the keepsake Godine wrote and printed for the occasion: 'David Godine: the Letterpress Years: Offprint from Matrix 29.'"

Superior Person's Tuesday!

Xenoglossia n. The supposed ability to communicate with others in a language which you do not know. (A term from the world of so-called "psychic research.") The impracticability of this concept is soon exposed if you attempt to talk with your teenager using some of the terms that you have heard him use in conversation with his friends. This will, however, at least afford him considerable entertainment, and you will be pressed, with much sniggering, to "say that again" — something that he will never otherwise say to you.



Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Xenoglossia appears in the Third.

Kim Smith on Romantic Gardens

"Richly illuminated with drawings, watercolors, and engravings, Godine has joined with the Morgan Library and Museum and the Foundation for Landscape Studies to produce this sweeping and superbly researched survey of the development of the Romantic movement in landscape design in Europe and America. This beautiful and beautifully written scholarly, yet accessible, book will become a highly valued resource for landscape designers, architects, landscape architects, historians and students of the Romantic movement. And, as do all Godine books, Romantic Gardens makes for a treasured and thoughtful gift. The book was written to accompany the exhibition Romantic Gardens: Nature, Art, and Landscape Design held at the Morgan Library and Museum during the summer of 2010. The authors Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, Elizabeth Eustis, and John Bidwell co-curated the exhibit.

Drawn from the Morgan’s holdings of manuscripts, drawings, and rare books, from the collections of the authors Rogers and Eustis, and from collections across the nation, Romantic Gardens: Nature, Art, and Landscape Design features approximately one hundred and fifty texts, outstanding works of art, plan drawings, and photographs providing an overview of ideas championed by the Romantics and also actualized by them in private estates and public parks in Europe and the United States. Notable are the plan drawing and early photographs of Olmstead and Vaux’s winning Entry No. 33 of Central Park, a J.W. Winder photograph of Adolphe Strauch’s Spring Grove Cemetery, located in Cincinnati, Ohio, and several Frederic Edwin Church landscape vistas in oil, including a view of Olana, Church’s estate overlooking the Hudson River."

Read the rest of the review on Kim Smith's site.

Godine at the Griffin Museum!

Our fearless leader, David R. Godine, will speak at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA on Wednesday, November 17th from 7-8:30pm.

Godine will discuss the photo books he has published, starting with Arnold Newman, moving to the work of Southworth and Hawes in The Spirit of Fact, then to the contemporary photographs of George Tice, Sally Mann, Olivia Parker, and Nick Nixon, etc. He will also explain how he has used photographs to elucidate certain themes, such as Stryker's role in the FSA in The Likes of Us or the role and place of postcards in Prairie Fires & Paper Moons and As We Were or of marine photos in On the Wind.


We hope that you can join us!

Ni Hao is Chinese for Hello

By Kit Bakke, author of Godine's Miss Alcott's Email

I’ve just returned from three weeks in China and am bursting with reactions, memories, advice, and mostly, encouragement. Go! That’s the first piece of advice — don’t hesitate to travel to China on your own. The days of being unable to manage China as an independent traveler are long gone. English is used in the subways of the large cities. Hotels are full of helpful, young staff people with college degrees in English literature. Drivers and guides-for-the-day (again, twenty-somethings with English lit degrees) are plentiful, cheerful, and affordable. Menus have pictures. ATMs are plentiful in the big cities.

I traveled with my husband and another couple. We did our homework ahead of time and made all our hotel and flight reservations in advance. Overall, we spent four days each in Beijing and Shanghai, then two or three days each in Hangzhou, Kunming, Lijiang, and Shangri-La.
Yes, Shangri-La — a small but growing town at the 10,500 foot level in the Himalayas on the far southwestern edge of Yunnan province, near Tibet and Burma. It’s an ethnic Tibetan community whose village fathers were savvy enough to change their name to draw the tourist trade. Today it’s a fascinating mix of subsistence farms (mostly barley and turnips), no plumbing, arranged marriages, hundreds of prayer flags, free-ranging livestock on the outskirts, and, in town, there’s an airport, broad, new (mostly empty) boulevards, new schools, electric plants, hotels, and car dealerships.

China faces enormous challenges, and its government is doing some things right and some things wrong. As in any country, there’s a disconnect between the politics and the people. China may have a totalitarian government, but it also has 1.3 billion people with a 5,000 year history who now, for the first time, have access to electricity and education.

The country is far too large for generalities. It would be like saying you know America because you’ve seen New York and Disney World. But here are a couple of quickies: We saw many Buddhist temples, all in daily use. We saw many statues of Mao. We visited artists and painters who are pushing boundaries with modern depictions of China’s worst environmental and human rights abuses. We ate terrific food every single day. They really do dance and do tai chi in the public parks. The air quality in Beijing is abysmal — the sun was always reddish and I doubt anyone ever saw the moon. We had guides in Yunnan point out “the most polluted lake in China” and various paintings and sculptures “damaged in the Cultural Revolution.” Shanghai is a global city with every high-end European retailer present and accounted for. You can’t drink the tap water anywhere. All of China is one time zone. Handpainted Chinese calligraphy is ethereally beautiful.

Besides the usual guidebooks, I read several excellent books to prepare for the trip. Nien Cheng’s gripping Life and Death in Shanghai, Anchee Min’s more literary but less informative Red Azalea, Peter Hessler’s wonderfully paradoxical River Town, and John Pomfret’s insightful Chinese Lessons were the best. All but Hessler’s book center on the Cultural Revolution and what it did to those who survived and those who did not.

Here’s a picture of part of the Forbidden Palace in Beijing at about 3 pm. See what I mean about the air pollution?
And here’s Jade Dragon Snow Mountain from Lijiang. So quiet and beautiful!

Superior Person's Tuesday!

Wamble n. A rumbling or similar disturbance of the stomach. A comforting word, which deserves to be more used. "Was that my wamble or yours?"

Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Wamble appears in the Second.

One more round of praise for The Lonely Phone Booth . . .

This time none other than The New York Times Book Review chimes in:

"'The Lonely Phone Booth,' the first children's book by Peter Ackerman, a screenwriter and playwright, takes a more intimate look at a slice of life in a New York City neighborhood. In a happenstance befitting this warm, quirky story, it turns out that the author and I reside in the same building just a few blocks from the real phone booth, at 100th Street and West End Avenue, that inspired his book. Scene-stealing illustrations by Max Dalton convey the story's nostalgic sensibility. His saturated colors and cartoonish faces suggest Miroslav Sasek's 1960 tribute "This Is New York," and other books in that series . . . a [cozy] story celebrating the fabric of a neighborhood, that intangible quality New Yorkers treasure."

The Lonely Phone Booth is of course available on our website.

A lovely review for The Lonely Phone Booth

Through the Looking Glass Children's Book Reviews has posted a wonderful review of Godine's The Lonely Phone Booth:

"This delightfully unique picture book will not only entertain readers of all ages, but it was also serve as a reminder that there are some things that should not be replaced by new technology. There are some things that belong in our communities and that deserve to be saved and used.

Peter Ackerman’s winning text is wonderfully complimented by Max Dalton’s retro style artwork. The art not only tells a splendid story in and of itself, but it also celebrates the colorful and diverse people who live in New York City."

Peter will be in the Boston area next weekend. Please be sure to catch his local events if you're in our neck of the woods!

Superior Person's Tuesday!

Hesternopothia n. A pathological yearning for the good old days. You know—when World War II was in full swing, your children got diphtheria, and dentists used slow drills and no anaesthetic.
Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Hesternopothia appears in the Second.

First Person Rural

Thank you to Rick Roche, a reference librarian at Thomas Ford Memorial Library in IL, for the very nice, thoughtful review of Godine's First Person Rural:

"First Person Rural has been in the Thomas Ford Memorial Library book collection for 32 years. I have passed it over in weeding several times, keeping it because it is a nonfiction classic and because it has gone out just enough. Forgotten by most, a few people remember it along with other back-to-the-farm books popular in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Living the Good Life by Helen and Scott Nearing and The Firefox Book and its sequels. These books explained how to build houses and barns, sow crops, harvest, raise livestock, and lead sane earth-friendly lives. By republishing articles that Perrin wrote for Vermont Life, Country Journal, and The New Yorker, First Person Rural added to this literature. Perrin told from experience how to build fences, buy a pickup truck, and make sugar from lower grades of maple syrup. In a lightly self-effacing manner, he often started by revealling all his mistakes and what he had to do to correct them. Then he told how to do it right.

While few of his urban and suburban readers would ever farm, they joyfully read Perrin's accounts. Why? I think he charmed them with his self-confidence. He was sure they would be interested - and they were. He also wrote clearly and personally. Nonfiction writers could learn much by examining his simple style.

It is over thirty or forty years since Perrin wrote these essays and some things have obviously changed about pickup trucks, taking firewood across state lines, the market prices for maple syrup, and the tenor of life in Vermont. I found some of these obvious changes added to my interest in his experiences. First Person Rural is old enough to now be history but still relevant as a handbook for living."

Please look for the upcoming paperback reprint release of First Person Rural in November 2010; the title is now in its third printing.

Teleportal Book Readings?

From MOBYLIVES:

"Literary readings are fleeting things. Ten, fifteen, twenty people gather, they hear someone read too-fast or too-softly from a book, and then everyone disperses. In New York there are too many readings and we are always missing something interesting; in other parts of the country, the opportunities to see an author read are few and far between. It takes a great deal of time, money, and resources to arrange for a literary event, and typically they draw an audience numbered in the tens. In order to reach larger audiences (and create a literary record) some bookstores, like San Francisco’s Booksmith, have begun to livestream and archive their readings. Likewise, Google’s “author@Google” series offers some interesting author readings to an internet audience. Still, while it’s nice to have these readings saved from their ephemeral fate, these video readings tend to be rather dull…

Mallory Rice, the new books editor at NYLON, recently introduced us to Teleportal Readings, a new virtual reading series that is seeking to make an internet-based reading something you actually enjoy sitting through."

What are your thoughts on literary readings and their possible digital evolution?

The Woman in Black - A Top Ghost Story

Kate Mosse, writing for The Guardian (UK), has selected Susan Hill's The Woman in Black as one of her top ten ghost stories:

"For my money, the greatest of the contemporary ghost writers. Hill creates believable period characters, she creates a hermetic world that yet speaks of wider superstitions and histories, and creates plots with tension, pace and jeopardy without ever becoming heavy-handed. This is a story of vengeance, of an old curse from an embittered woman, all centred on the brooding Eel Marsh House, gloomy and isolated and cut off from the mainland at high tide. As the tension of premonition and disaster builds and builds, the ghostly screams of an accident long ago will haunt the reader's imagination long after the last page has been turned. Perfect."

Godine is proud to publish the US edition.

Christa Wolf Wins Thomas Mann Literature Prize

Christa Wolf, author of Godine's In the Flesh, and "one of the former East Germany's most famous authors, won the prestigious Thomas Mann Prize for literature honoring her life's work.

The 81-year-old received the prize worth 25,000 euros ($35,090) for her work, 'which investigates the struggles, hopes and mistakes of her time in a critical and self-critical way, with deep moral seriousness and powerful narratives,' the jury said in a statement.

Peter Guelke, an author and musicologist who spoke at the award ceremony, said Wolf was 'an author whose words meant -- and continue to mean -- a lot in both East and West Germany.'

Wolf shot to fame with the publication of 'Der geteilte Himmel' ('Divided Heaven') in 1963 -- a novel which investigates the issues and problems faced by the Germans living under Communist rule on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain."

Superior Person's Tuesday!

Necromorphous a. Feigning death to deter an aggressor. This would explain a lot about the behavior of counter staff in government departments.


Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Necromorphous appears in the Second.

The US and Literature in Translation

IKE writes:

"The US has never been a hotbed for literature in translation. Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, the organization that awards the Nobel Prize in Literature, created a bit of a brouhaha in 2008 when he said, Europe is still the center of the literary world, and he suggested that American writers were too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture. He added: The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.

There are some small signs that things are beginning to change. Open Letter—the University of Rochester’s publishing house—runs a website called Three Percent that is devoted to books in translation. In May, Amazon.com announced AmazonCrossing as a means of bringing more World Literature to America’s bookshelves. They also just announced that they would underwrite the Best Translated Book Award 2011. [. . .] If we want U.S. publishers to translate foreign works, we need to support their efforts by buying their books. Next time you’re in the mood for something from across the pond, take a look at the offerings from Archipelago Books, Dalkey Archive Press, Other Press, New Directions, David Godine or take a peek at Three Percent to see what they recommend. They all do a good job of making the effort to bring foreign works to our attention."

An Interview with Richard Howard

A great interview with Richard Howard, translator of Godine's Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire, has been posted on FSG's Work in Progress:

"I met with Richard Howard on a bright October morning in his apartment near Washington Square Park. He welcomed me as he always does, standing on the threshold, one foot in, one foot out, watching me walk down the corridor with a smile on his face. We kissed hello à la française. On that Saturday morning, he wore a striped shirt of subtle shades of blue and elegant black trousers. His round glasses, of which he owns an astonishing collection (same model, in a Pantone-like array of colors) were deep blue, matching the darkest of his shirt’s stripes. His socks, light blue, matched the other shade. The walls in Richard Howard’s home are lined with books, from floor to ceiling, dimming the place with an opaque silence. Behind me, as I sat on the sofa, battered editions of Cioran, Gide, Baudelaire in the original—authors whose works Richard Howard translated or taught."

Superior Person's Tuesday

Mattoid a. Mentally unbalanced with regard solely to a specific subject. "Wayne and Clark are so sensible in every way; but get them talking about Judy Garland . . . "

Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Mattoid appears in the Third.

Boston Book Festival - Sat, October 16th

Tomorrow's second annual Boston Book Festival is bound to be bigger and better than ever (and is still FREE). Of course, David R. Godine, Publisher will have a table right on Dartmouth St in Copley Square. Please do stop by to say hello and also browse our titles which will be available for sale, along with fantastic The Lonely Phone Booth stickers.

A truly exciting schedule is planned for the day, including a keynote at Trinity Sanctuary with Joyce Carol Oates. We'll see you there!

Superior Person's Tuesday

Varlet n. Low, menial scoundrel. One of a number of words of medieval origin, all indicative of unsavory status. Presumably the relatively large number of such words in existence is a reflection of the relatively high incidence of unsavoriness during the Middle Ages. Others that spring to mind are lackey (obsequious and servile hanger-on); knave (low-class rogue); and caitiff (base, despicable person). Note that knaves are always scurvy, i.e., thoroughly nasty, as is the appearance of one suffering from scurvy, one of the symptoms of which is scurf, or flaking skin, one of the instances of which is dandruff. Scurvy is a good descriptive for varlets, too, but not for lackeys. Vassals are also lowly creatures, but not as necessarily disreputable as varlets, lackeys, knaves, and caitiffs.




Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Varlet appears in the Third.

Desert @ Bookslut

from a letter exchange at Bookslut on the Nobel Prize:

“So, Ben, it’s beautiful. The book. The desert roars at the center of it; the desert, itself seems to have a pulpy heartbeat, a scorching cold presence in the text. I could feel the desert in the substance of the book that I was carrying around. I stopped many times to reread a sentence, a punishing sentence — where some element of human brutality or stark nature was displayed, flayed, for me, the reader. [. . .]  the translation of Desert strikes me as spectacular. I could piece the French sentences back together from the English sentences, and I could hear the music of Le Clézio's prose. It made me ache for the North African desert, which I’ve only seen one time, ache for its vacant, open, barren spaces.”

Superior Person's Tuesday

Umbrageous a. Shady or shaded; quick to take offense, irritable.  A nice double meaning. “You’re so umbrageous, Leigh. . .”

Funny — funny how? Funny like a clown? I amuse you?
I make you laugh,? I'm here to %$&@ amuse you?

Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Umbrageous appears in the Third.

Wanted: Production & New Media Marketing Associate

David R. Godine, Publisher, seeks a driven, independent, creative bibliophile for the position of Production Assistant & New Media Marketing Associate. This is a full-time, entry-level, salaried position, with benefits, located in downtown Boston.

Job Description

Production Responsibilities — Applicant would work directly under the supervision of the Vice President of Production in coordinating the day-to-day tasks of book production, including but not limited to: requesting estimates from printers; proofreading covers and jackets; assembling files for transfer to press; circulating proof and collating changes or recording approval; staying in contact with vendors; and entering metadata into our book distributor databases. Applicant would also play a key role in Godine’s entry into the e-book market.
New Media Marketing Responsibilities — In conjunction with the Marketing and Publicity Director, applicant would be required to: write and copyedit posts for the Godine blog, including those from authors; post regularly to Facebook and Twitter; update the GoodReads account; and coordinate the direct-to-customer email newsletter. Applicant would also edit and update the Godine website.

Requirements

Applicants are required to have a bachelors degree or higher. Must have some experience in the publishing industry and be highly proficient, as well as professional, with new media such as Blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. Knowledge of or experience in e-book production is highly desirable. Experience with Quark and Photoshop is preferred.

Please send your resume and cover letter by email to info@godine.com with the subject line “Production & Marketing Position;”

Or, send them by post to:

Vice President of Production
David R. Godine, Publisher
re: Production & Marketing Position
9 Hamilton Place
Boston, MA 02108

NO PHONE CALLS (please)