And while I’m cribbing from Galleycat, I love this stuff:

You know those ecstatic, generally untrustworthy quotes on the back of books–no, not the ones from respected journals like Booklist, but the ones from authors whose connection to the praised author is usually unclear but worth Googling? Well, Blurbings LLC is about to put a price on the process, even if the value to the author is debatable (”He Blurbed, She Blurbed,” by Rachel Donadio, New York Times):

At least one writer was so affronted by the idea of blurbs for cash that he complained to the Authors Guild. But the more jaundiced might say that asking one unknown writer to endorse another unknown writer hardly helps to make one of those writers known.

And if you’re worried that blurbs may be insincere, how would you feel if you learned that the author’s title-page signature was a complete fake (”Wanted: people to sign books for lazy authors,” by Ed Pilkington, The Guardian)?

One smart publisher seems to have devised a way of easing the pain for the millionaire bestseller writer: they have posted an advert on the listing site, Craigslist, inviting a team of part-time workers to fake the signatures and get paid in cash for the privilege.

Check out the Craigslist ad here.

Update: In The Independent, John Walsh explores “the weird world of book signings“:

It’s not clear when the humble autograph – that early trace element of the cult of celebrity – went up-market to become the signed first edition; I suspect it was the early 1970s, when literary festivals were becoming popular and Edward Heath signed so many copies of his book Sailing, bookish types sneeringly wondered how much a rare unsigned copy might fetch.

Last year while Keir was away fighting forest fires in the wilds of Montana, I was battling a faulty compact disc player.

You may recall that I won the scuffle with the CD player when I introduced it to my hammer. But I lost the war. I bought an iPod that same day.

My fellow joggers are no longer treated to my scowling mug on the trail. There are no more blips, skips or hiccups in my exer-listening. Instead, I gasp, grin and laugh out loud. I especially laugh at Slam by Nick Hornby.

The more I listen to this brutally honest and funny teenager’s story of fatherhood and the philosophy of sk8ing,  the more I laugh. Other folks on the jogging trail give me funny looks which makes me speed up to get away from them.

I’m taking stock of how audiobooks have made improvements in my life. Once I demolished the CD player, I know my blood pressure went down and I got a good upper body workout in the process. Now that I listen to my books on an iPod, I’m walking farther and faster to get away from walkers who think I’m deranged for jogging while jovial.

Audiobooks—burning calories, protecting my social sanity, and improving my mind. A biblio-trifecta. Woot.

Galleycat links to a Slate piece (”Everyone Will Be Lonely Eight Months from Now,” by Seth Stevenson), whose exploration of “the weird science of stock photography” mentions a different kind of book-jacket trend: the ubiquity of Jennifer Anderson.

Of course, it is possible for an image to become too popular. A few years ago, a model/actress living in Portland did a one-day photo shoot on the campus of Reed College. She frolicked around the grounds and inside a classroom, wearing a purplish hat she’d borrowed from the wardrobe coordinator. The photos taken that day have subsequently appeared in ads for both Gateway and Dell; on the Web sites for a Canadian media planning company, a British science museum, the BBC, Microsoft Finland, Greyhound bus lines, etc.; and on the covers of countless books. She has come to be known as Everywhere Girl, and, yes, she has a blog.

Make sure you follow this link to get the full effect.

In New York (”A Warming Trend“), Christopher Bonanos noticed a sweet new book-jacket trend:

I love this stuff, although I usually find out about it second-hand: most of the books that I review have plain paper covers. Seen a good trend lately? Let me know!

And, whether you’re hunting for trends or just like to look at interesting book jackets, take a look at The Book Design Review.

On Galleycat, Ron Hogan expresses his surprise that the Wall Street Journal’s Jeffrey Trachtenberg (”Amazon Shows Its Clout“) didn’t mention an important detail about David Wroblewski’s The Story of Edgar Sawtelle–that it

happens to be to Hamlet what Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres was to King Lear.

Good point, and one worth mentioning. Furthermore, Trachtenberg didn’t mention this summer’s other Hamlet homage, Lin Enger’s Undiscovered Country. (Booklist reviewers Ian Chipman and Jennifer Mattson, needless to say, have got it covered–Mattson makes the Smiley connection, too.)

Hogan also wonders whether there’s more Hamlet the offing:

Today, I’m just wondering if there’s another writer in, say, Montana tinkering with a similar idea who’s going to walk into a bookstore and then look for a wall to bang his forehead against.

There’s been a bit of discussion lately about writers whose publishers pressure them to write a new book each and every year (”Top writers feel heat from publishers’ presses,” by David Mehegan, Boston Globe). And, no doubt about it, the author-as-brand-name is a growing trend. In some instances, it feels like we’re seeing a new book each and every month.

But, in the Guardian’s theblogbooks (”The Great American Pause“), John Freeman reminds us that Americans, despite the widely predicted imminent death of our attention spans, still have a soft spot for books whose gestation periods are in the double digits: Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, Edward P. Jones’s The Known World, Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire, and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.

Of course, once Marilynne Robinson’s publisher learns about James Patterson, he’s going to demand that she step up her productivity–to one book per decade at least.

Trying to catch up on my reading. In an examination of David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague and Michael Chabon’s Maps and Legends, Michael Saler declares that the War between the States (of fiction, that is, literary and genrefied), is over. Almost over. Well, the end is in sight. (”The rise of fan fiction and comic book culture,” The Times Literary Supplement):

Genre films and books are no longer a minority interest. They top the bestseller lists and popularity polls: we are all geeks now. The establishment’s disdain for genre, and the populists’ suspicion of experimental techniques, are largely things of the past. Generations weaned on cultures “high” and “low” have become the producers and arbiters of the arts, enabled by the expansion of the internet since the early 1990s.

In the Guardian, sf writer Charles Stross (Halting State, 2007) tells general fiction to get with the program, already (”Tomorrow’s everyday,” by Damian G. Walter):

“I think that if there’s one key insight science can bring to fiction,” he says, “it’s that fiction - the study of the human condition - needs to broaden its definition of the human condition. Because the human condition isn’t immutable and doomed to remain uniform forever. If it was, we’d still be living in caves rather than worrying about global climate change. To the extent that writers of mainstream literary fiction focus on the interior landscape exclusively, they’re wilfully ignoring processes and events that have a major impact on our lives. And I think that’s an unforgivably short-sighted position to take.”

I agree with Stross that fiction can’t afford to be solipsistic–that mainstream, “literary,” or whatever-you-want-to-call-it fiction should engage with the issues of the day, whether political, scientific, cultural, or some combination of the three. But this goes against what many budding writers are taught. In writing workshops, teachers will caution against topical references that will “date” the material. And young writers are especially liable to be trying to create the timeless work that will ensure their immortality. A common assumption, I think, is that the human condition is timeless, and that writing about human beings will never age. The irony is that writing about humans who aren’t engaged with the modern world ends up having a trapped-in-amber quality that is more antique than ageless.

It’s not easy for writers to engage the ever-changing world without putting a sell-by date on the writing, but it’s not impossible. Focus on the big issues, avoid brand names, keep the characters real–and above all, don’t be too literal–and it should all work out.

For those of you interested in judging books by their front covers, PRINT Magazine chronicles a trend with legs (”One Leg Leads to Another,” by Steven Heller).

(Thanks, Dan!)

And, just in time for Father’s Day . . . Harper Entertainment is betting that it’s not just young boys who are interested in retro, clip-arty activity books–their fathers may be, too:

This one, however, makes me kind of sad, and not only because my poor book-loving father never taught me how to flush a radiator: