Over at the Publishers Weekly blog, Notes from the Bookroom, Jonathan Segura notes (”McSweeney’s Interns Give Good Note“) that, just because something is handwritten, that doesn’t mean it was written especially for you. Basically, the good, sincere folks at McSweeney’s have hit upon the brilliant ploy of using a very, very old-fashioned means of mimeo to reproduce their form letters:

Until I grab the second galley, which also, it turns out, has a note tucked into it. A nearly identical note. From Angela. Written in stodgy black ink. (A standard Bic, I’m thinking.) And the penmanship’s way different and seemingly the product of a younger hand. And I suddenly felt less bad and, sadly, less special, having received not a friendly little note, but instead the product of what I imagine to be the summer intern gulag, a chain gang of unpaid college kids scratching out note after note after note.

What’s especially brilliant is that, because of the sincerity of all things McSweeney, instead seeming simply cynical, it can also be viewed as some sort of art project, a commentary on the very nature of the publicist-reviewer relationship. Or at least a cheeky prank.

I was surprised, however, at the indignation in some of the post’s comments – how dare PW have a laugh at the expense of the sincere folks at McSweeney’s!?

Does PW review books, or the submission practices of publicists?

Lighten up, already. What are blogs for, if not a peek behind the scenes?

(Thanks, Dan’l!)

Honestly, I can’t remember how I got on this kick. I was writing about something else and stumbled across something on Amazon and away I went. Oh wait, now I remember. Has it been that long already?

Punk Rock Aerobics

Punk Rock Yoga

Pretty in Punk: 25 Punk, Rock, and Goth Knitting Projects

Punk Rock Baby

Punk Marketing

Punk Shui: Home Design for Anarchists

Punk Goes Acoustic 2

Hal Leonard Punk Rock Guitar Play-Along

Pugster Punk Rock Girl Music Star Dance Concert Italian Charm Bracelet

Exclusive Parking “For Punk Rock Stars” Parking Sign

Golf Bag in “Punk Rock”

Golf Punk Online

Malcolm Maclaren is rolling in his grave. Oh, wait, he’s not dead. And he coopted punk as a marketing ploy to sell clothes. Sigh.

“So, how was your weekend?”

“Oh, pretty good. I picked up my copy of Harry Potter.”

I think people are starting to worry that, if they get stopped for not wearing a seatbelt, they’re in for a second ticket if the cop discovers they don’t have a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in the glove box.

Book reviews probably aren’t going to have much effect on the Rowling juggernaut: if you’ve read the first six books but plan to ignore the seventh, there’s a local news team who wants to talk to you on camera. But if you’re not going to stop reading, we’re not going to stop reviewing, either.

And don’t you want to know what a professional BookPerson ™ has to say? Click here for Ilene Cooper’s review.

(No-spoiler alert: if you want spoilers, you’ll have to read someone else’s review.)

Know how government agencies always release bad news on Friday afternoons, hoping you’ll already be too distracted by thoughts of baseball, beer, and barbecue to pay attention? Well, this isn’t bad news, but watching myself on video always makes me want to fold in on myself, or at least check my e-mail until it’s over. Fortunately, Dan Kraus makes me look more better than I actually do.

(I’ve already demanded that, if there is a next time, he sweeten the applause — which defines the word “smattering” — with the old Friends laugh track. They’re not using it anymore, after all.)

But some of them are, and some of them work in publishing. From The Independent (”Author’s nude drawings too hot for US publisher,” by Tony Paterson):

One of Germany’s best-selling children’s authors is embroiled in an extraordinary transatlantic row about nudity after a US publisher refused to accept one of her books because it contained naive sketches of an art gallery with works depicting naked bodies.

The Comics Reporter (”American Publisher Passes on German Kids’ Book and Its Cartoon Nudity“) reproduces one of the offending images. (Thanks, Bookslut!)

As the father of two young boys, I can report that young boys are extremely interested in penises. We can tell them that penises do not, in fact, exist, but they do have the means of proving us wrong.

Yet another why-don’t-publishers-recognize-good-writing story (”The author and the Austen plot that exposed publishers’ pride and prejudice,” by Steven Morris, The Guardian). I’m shocked, shocked that contemporary publishers don’t want to publish something that seems as if it was written 200 years ago. Even if they didn’t recognize that it was Jane Austen, they may have realized that it was Jane Austen-like, and therefore something that had already been done.

(And they may not have recognized it because the people who open the mail are probably 22 years old. But anyway, is it truly a crime if people haven’t read Jane Austen? If so, I guess the police are coming for me – I always preferred Dickens.)

I’d write more, but I think the best response was written by Grumpy Old Bookman (”Notes from a long weekend“):

Ho hum. This is, frankly, very boring. The last time someone did this, I wrote about it at excessive length, giving, in a footnote, full details of several other occasions on which exactly the same thing was done with the same results.

This time I think I’m going to ignore it.

If you follow the link to his earlier post, he does indeed go on at some length, entertainingly (and, of course, grumpily), about why the story doesn’t matter — and why it says more about newspapers’ need for recyclable stories:

Well, we could go on all day about this. But let me say that my sympathies are entirely with the agents and publishers whose time was wasted in this futile exercise. Secondly, I want to make it clear that the experiment does tell us some useful and interesting things about publishing, but not the things that the Sunday Times reporters seem to think it does.

One last thought: if we had a time-travel machine and took a handwritten manuscript of, oh, say, The Road, to Jane Austen’s publisher, would we expect him to recognize the book’s timeless qualities and rush it into print? Or to reject it as being an odd thing not quite right for the tastes of the times? We still read Austen because her books are a part of literary history, not because it speaks to our psyches better than contemporary fiction does.

The hurricane of Harry Potter stories, far from bewitching me, has me feeling beat. So I’m seeking the shelter of a hilarious parody (found on Galleycat), Welcome Back Potter.

There is some irony in the fact that there’s not much crossover between the core audiences of this mashup’s targets — those of us who saw Kotter on TV are aware of Potter, of course, but how many 12-year-olds have heard of Vinnie Barbarino? But, thanks to the magic of reruns, I suppose anything’s possible.

(A likely story: I made my stage debut in a Welcome Back, Kotter parody, as a fifth-grader, playing Vinnie Starbarino.)

Why was I reading Richard Eoin Nash’s blog just now? For probably the same reason he was reading my blog: we’re both quoted in the same article (”Harriet Klausner: the publishing industry’s secret weapon?” by Simon Owens, Bloggasm):

"This is an exhilarating outer space opera that never slows down especially during the latter quarter of the action-packed story line," the book review states. "That climax is one of the longest most exciting cat and mouse chase scenes in recent years."

The review is of Ragamuffin, a speculative fiction novel by Tobias Buckell published by Tor Books. The writer of the review is Harriet Klausner, Amazon’s most prolific customer reviewer.

Klausner has written over 12,000 reviews since she first started posting them in 2000. That’s an average of more than four books a day, seven days a week.

I guess I’m not Harriet Klausner, after all.

Over at Soft Skull Press, Richard Eoin Nash offers some context on the politics of Tintin, in the form of an excerpt from the book, Tintin and the Secret of Literature. (It was first published in the UK by Granta; Soft Skull will offer the U.S. edition.) When the book was  written, Tintin in the Congo had apparently not yet been translated to English. It looks like a very interesting book. The excerpt acknowledges Tintin’s right-wing origins but then cites a swing to the left:

But almost as soon as this right-wing tendency gets going it becomes shadowed by a left-wing counter-tendency. In Tintin in America, which he published in book form in 1932, Herge bitingly satirises capitalist mass-production and American racism (the English translation has been softened: what the small-town bank clerk really tells the police who turn up after a heist is: ‘We immediately lynched seven Negroes’ - not ‘hoboes’ - ‘but the culprit got away.’). In The Blue Lotus Tintin snaps the cane with which an American oil magnate has been beating a Chinese rickshaw driver, exclaiming ‘Brute! Your conduct is disgraceful, Sir!’

In my memory, the visual racial stereotypes continued unabated — but, of course, those were different times.

That does it. I’m going to dig up my old box of Tintins and read them with a gimlet eye.

There’s one news paper whose book-review remodel is getting good reviews: the Raleigh-Durham-Cary-Chapel Hill News & Observer. Granted, the plaudits are being printed in the paper itself. But they seem to come from regular BookPeople ™. From the News & Observer (”Book review pages get a review,” by Ted Vaden):

Those were some of the comments that new literary editor Marcy Smith and I received from readers upon the debut of the books pages under her editorship. The positive responses were gratifying and perhaps a relief to editors here who had earlier heard fears about the changes. In May, former books editor Peder Zane wrote a farewell column that set off an alarm in the Triangle reader community. A number of distinguished authors wrote to The N&O to ask that literary coverage not be diminished.

That won’t be the case, says Smith. She plans to broaden the books pages to appeal to a larger range of readers by reviewing more kinds of books. To that end, she has lined up a dozen writers to do regular columns on “niche” genres: among others, children’s and young adult books, food, poetry, race, women’s issues, science fiction and mysteries.

Previously, Smith said, the books pages were more of a “books-based approach. This is more of a reader-based approach. It will be the big important books, but a wider range, all of the books people are reading.”

She added, “I think that’s what readers want, and if I’m wrong I’d like them to tell me so.”