and this from

Ode: To my Mother

Over at Prospect magazine, John Nathan speaks to Trevor Nunn and Kevin Spacey about their collaborating on Jerome Lawrence and Robert E Lee’s 1955 play Inherit the Wind, based on the “monkey trial” of 1925, where attorney Clarence Darrow defends a teacher for breaking the Tennessee law prohibiting the preaching of evolution:

Spacey: The great thing about the theatre is that there is no ownership of a play—only custodial ownership for a period.

Nunn: I always used to say at the RSC that, whatever we do with a Shakespeare, however extreme or cautious, the play is going to be there pristine for the next group who do it.

Spacey: Great plays can survive really terrible productions. They are elastic, they can be stretched.

Nathan: But is it also the case that famous productions can overshadow later revivals? Inherit the Wind was a famous film with Spencer Tracy in 1960, yet clearly you feel it has become topical again. The protagonist has a line about freedom of speech…

Spacey: “You don’t think a thing like this is ever finished?” Yes. And certainly in the case of creationists versus Darwinists, the argument at its heart is still going on.

Nunn: A recent poll found that more than 40 per cent of Americans don’t believe in evolution. And Darwin has never even been published in an Islamic country.

Nathan: Yet your audience is likely to consist of liberal, atheistic theatre-going types who already believe in freedom of speech and evolution. Don’t you worry the production will preach to the converted?

Nunn: We aren’t doing the play so that a group of self-congratulatory liberals can attack people who are of more closed mind than they are. There’s a great deal of discussion at the moment about Darwin’s theories. Yet the majority of the world’s population either know nothing of the theory or have it banned in their societies.

Spacey: One of the reasons I wanted to do the play, apart from theatrical reasons, is because I have a huge education department and in choosing a play I think to myself, “What is going to open up our education department in terms of workshops, seminars, discussions, debates for kids?”

Catch the rest here.

Many actors are poor interviews. Not so Spacey. Watch him here on Charlie Rose, for example. Superb.

And here, incidentally, is a listing of all of the books in the Britian in Pictures series.

What, all my pretty chickens…?

This from Robin Robertson’s 2009 Forward Prize winning poem entitled ‘At Roane Head’ (dedicated to John Burnside).

A fork of barnacle geese came over, with that slow
squeak of rusty saws. The bitter sea’s complaining pull
and roll; a whicker of pigeons, lifting in the wood.

She’d had four sons, I knew that well enough,
and each one wrong. All born blind, they say,
slack-jawed and simple, web-footed,
rickety as sticks. Beautiful faces, I’m told,
though blank as air.

***

Don Paterson won this year’s Forward Prize for best collection with Rain. Paterson and Robertson, both Scots, have won three Forward Prizes each.

Rochester University

William Pickering, publisher and bookseller, was born on 2 April 1796 into, according to biographer Geoffrey Keynes "humble circumstances." Purportedly the illegitimate son of the Earl of Spencer  he was put out to be raised by a tailor and his wife. He apprenticed at the age of 14 to Quaker booksellers John and Arthur Arch, thanks possibly to his biological father. Pickering’s early publications carry the coat of arms of the Earl and a dedication to him.

In 1818 he went to work for a publishing house, and then a bookseller. In 1820 he set up as an antiquarian bookseller and published his first book: Gilbert Burnet’s Lives of Sir Matthew Hale and the Earl of Rochester. He then formed a partnership with printer Charles Corrall. Together they published the famous Diamond Classics series, so named for the type used. The printing was microscopic, but the books were a novelty and a success.Offered in a uniform binding of cloth or leather at a price the common man could afford, these are usually recognized as the first publishers’ bindings in cloth – an innovation which had a rapid and profound impact on the publishing industry. Not just a publisher of reprints, Pickering also published original work: in 1828 he became Samuel Taylor Coleridge‘s publisher, and brought out the first edition in ordinary typography of William Blake‘s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. He specialized both  in scholarly editions of classic authors, and English literature, Malthus, Boswell, Johnson, Marlowe, Shakespeare and Isaac Walton. He would publish 1,000 copies of each book; 500 in morocco and 500 in cloth boards of smooth red, magenta, puce or dark blue.

Pickering died in 1854, and, according to Keynes, left "an indelible mark upon the annals of the book trade during the first half of the nineteenth century…. [He] had done more than any other single man to raise the standard of book production in all its details, whether of subject matter, typography, or binding"

The business was carried on by his son Basil Montagu Pickering, upon whose death, in 1878, it was purchased by ‘old Mr Chatto’, of the  Chatto and Windus fame, and became Pickering and Chatto, a name which survives today.

I met recently with Cory Doctorow to talk [stay tuned for audio] about his latest book Little Brother [free download here], and the future of the book. During our conversation Cory mentioned that he was signatory to a call, led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, for rejection, or amendment at least, of a proposed settlement in a lawsuit over Google’s Book Search service. Here’s the conclusion to what Cory and the ‘Privacy Authors and Publishers’ had to say to the judge:

"Courts, libraries, and legislatures have fiercely protected the right to read without fear of being watched or reported upon. The Settlement, if approved, may enable Google Book Search to become the world’s largest public library, institutional library, book “purchasing” and ongoing access system combined. It is no understatement to say that this Settlement may create the central way that books are accessed in the future, and the only way to access certain books. Because of its potential to greatly expand book access, Google Book Search is extremely exciting.

Yet that future potential will be undermined if this Court allows Google to collect intimate, invasive and previously unavailable information on readers, aggregate that that sensitive information with information about them collected by and through other Google products, and by doing so create a real risk of disclosure of that sensitive information to prying governmental entities and private litigants. This chilling effect will hurt all authors and publishers, but especially those who write about sensitive or controversial topics. It will also hurt the public interest, as the advance of digitization would come at the cost of reader privacy. The Privacy Authors and Publishers were not adequately represented in the settlement negotiations. They would not have agreed to a Settlement so bereft of privacy protections. Without additional protections, the Settlement is not fair, reasonable or adequate to the class members or to the public. It should not be approved until sufficient privacy protections are put into place."

I’m meeting with lawyer (and Google senior copyright counsel) Bill Patry  this afternoon to discuss his new book Moral Panic and the Copyright Wars…I’ll be talking to him in his capacity not as an employee of Google, but as a citizen concerned about how the copyright debate is being conducted. Topics of conversation: the public good versus private gain, menacing metaphors, and the sanctity of privacy. Let me know if you have any pressing concerns about these issues, and I’ll try to thread them into the questioning.

The Book Garden, Montpelier, Vermont.

This from Jason Boog at Galley Cat:

The publishing world lost two pillars of academic support this week, as Stanford University shuttered a publishing program and a Columbia University professor has postponed his book review seminar.

According to a Publishers Marketplace (subscription only) report, the Stanford Publishing Course for Professionals has ended after more than 30 years of teaching publishing. Here’s more form the gloomy article: "Longtime director Holly Brady is leaving Stanford–saying she ‘expects to continue the conversation from another vantage point here in Silicon Valley’–and her staff has been dismissed."

On the other side of the country, Columbia English professor James Shapiro has put his book reviewing seminar for undergraduates on "infinite hiatus." Blaming the rapidly-eroding pay scale for book reviewers in the age of blogs, Shapiro explained in a NY Observer article: "[W]hat’s no longer there is the possibility of training a generation of book reviewers since, as you know, newspapers around the country are shedding their book reviews, or shrinking these sections."