Harry Potter Lexicon to finally see the light of day

January 12, 2008 will be a faithful day for all champions of fair use in copyright law. This is the day RDR Books of Muskegon, MI will publish The Lexicon: An Unauthorized Guide to Harry Potter Fiction and Related Materials, by Steve Vander Ark ($24.95, paperback, ISBN 978-1-57143-174-5). RDR has been embroiled in a lawsuit over intellectual property rights with author J.K. Rowling and Warner Bros. Entertainment since October 2007. The Lexicon is an encyclopedic reference work that covers all seven novels in the Harry Potter series, and is based on a web site that was heavily used by Rowling and her publishers concerning all manner of things from the fictitious world of Harry Potter – http://www.hp-lexicon.org/

The decision by Judge Robert P. Patterson, Jr. to allow the book to press, with some minor changes and stipulations, is a triumph for the doctrine of fair use. It’s clear that over-zealous copyright holders can reek havoc on well-meaning chroniclers, as is the case outlined eloquently in the book Bound by Law? Tales from the Public Domain, a comic book primer on fair use doctrine for documentary filmmakers, by Keith Aoki, James Boyle, and Jennifer Jenkins. RDR also enlisted the lawyers at Stanford Law School's Fair Use Project to testify in their favor. The Patterson ruling will most certainly help authors of similar books in the future.

Brookings Institution Press chimes in creatively to help guide a new Obama administration and congress

Brookings is taking its place as a creative nerve center in Washington, with several important books coming out by key authors on issues of critical importance to the new leaders in Washington. Acting in Time on Energy Policy, edited by Kelly Sims Gallagher of the Harvard Kennedy School, comes out in May 2009. Gallagher gathers together her colleagues from the Kennedy School and they tackle important issues that pertain to energy policy – climate change, oil and security - and explain why acting in time, and not waiting until politics demands action, would make a huge positive difference. Obama made energy policy a cornerstone of his Presidential campaign, so this book will be a welcome addition to the ongoing debate about energy.

Plug-In Vehicles: What Role for Washington is edited by David B. Sandalow, an experienced expert on energy policy at Brookings, and comes out in February 2009. With the big three automakers scrambling for a bailout from lawmakers in Washington, the contributors to this timely volume discuss what can and should be done to advance the role of plug-in electric vehicles. It would seem that this book could be very influential, especially since it gathers experts from government, business, and academia. The other thing is that Obama comes from Illinois, a state with a powerful coal lobby. Obama talked about investing in clean coal technology in his Presidential campaign, and while it’s not clear just what clean coal involves beyond the flashy advertisements, it would seem that electric cars are the wave of the future, riding a wave of replacing electricity for oil products in the future.

Legislating the War on Terror: An Agenda for Reform is edited by Benjamin Wittes of Brookings, and will be published in July 09, at a critical time for new leaders in Washington: -- it is being published in cooperation with Hoover Institution and Georgetown Center on National Security and the Law. This book shows that the US desperately needs a new legal framework to fight terrorists. In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the many controversial laws that were enacted as a reaction to that event under Bush, it’s clear that an entirely new statutory law is needed to govern this fight. Contributors to this essential book look to balance the need for security with the rule of law and constitutional rights of freedom. Restoring the Writ of Habeas Corpus for accused terrorists would be a good start. There are a whole host of issues discussed here, from improving interrogation laws to immigration to modernizing the Foreign Intelligence Act. Congress will have its hands full trying to sort out these challenging dilemmas as it tries to set new ground rules for the war on terrorists, and this thoughtful book should be a big help to them.

Finally, there is an eloquent book called Repairing Paradise: The Restoration of Nature in America’s National Parks, coming out in July 09 by William R Lowry, a prolific author and professor of political science at Washington University in St Louis. This book is a departure for Brookings because Lowry writes a highly personal and persuasive account about reversing the mistakes of the last eight years to preserve four National Parks: -- Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Everglades, and the Grand Canyon. Lowry has spent considerable time in these iconic American parks, in addition to making concrete and sensible policy recommendations for the good of nature and animals there, he also is a master prose stylist and makes a poetic case to restore the natural health and glory to some of the world’s most wondrous places.

Wire and Tower

Chicago fashioned itself over time and became a distinctive place as a result of its own unique history and various natural and unnatural forces at play. The city has a history deeply ingrained in its rebirth as a mighty industrial metropolis after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Rudyard Kipling came to Chicago and hated it … it was like taking a bite of raw wild onion and cringing. Eager for American experiences, Kipling the world-wise traveler, only saw greed and avarice there, from his 1891 book, American Notes:

“I know thy cunning and thy greed,Thy hard high lust and wilful deed,And all thy glory loves to tell of specious gifts material.”

I have struck a city—a real city—and they call it Chicago.
The other places do not count. San Francisco was a pleasure-resort as well as a city, and Salt Lake was a phenomenon.
This place is the first American city I have encountered. It holds rather more than a million of people with bodies, and stands on the same sort of soil as Calcutta. Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages.

The sense of place can be overwhelming, and if you’re not prepared for its extreme conditions, or if you have never encountered it’s like before, Chicago can be like a slap in the face. Some things never change. The city grew up quickly out of the lakeside wilderness and became larger than life, a microcosm of the New World, America in all its guts and glory. Wave upon wave of immigrants made their way to Chicago and formed it into a mass of humanity and blood. The people made the town tick, as the poet Carl Sandburg so eloquently stated, "The people yes. The people will live on. The learning and blundering people will live on."

The landscape, Calcutta-like, is uncompromising and harsh, the four seasons reeking havoc with wind and rain, snow and ice, intense heat and humidity, subzero temperatures, and spectacular thunder and lightening storms. With a certain fearlessness and innovation, the people molded Chicago into a kind of urban jungle, a place of high and low culture, again recalling Calcutta, and used their 19th century innovations to transform the landscape into the international city we know today.

The water tanks that dot the urban terrain of commercial and factory buildings in Chicago hawk back to a different time and place. They were built to last, made from the finest clear-cut redwood and cypress boards. No imperfections were allowed, and each board was 18 feet straight and 2 ½ inches thick. As long as the tanks have water in them they will never rot.

-- Alternative introduction to Water Tanks of Chicago: A Vanishing Urban Legacy, by Larry W Green -- http://www.wickerparkpress.com/WToC.html


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Georgia to publish a different kind of bird book

Spirits of the Air: Birds and American Indians in the South is what you might well call “a passionate read.” Wonderfully illustrated in color, author Shepard Krech III, a professor of anthropology at Brown University, is a lifelong birder and naturalist. One reviewer has called this book “superbly researched and splendidly illustrated tour of Southeastern Indian ethno-ornithology.” – Raymond D. Fogelson, University of Chicago. Krech is the author of the previous book, The Ecological Indian (Norton, 1999), and here he explores bird mythology, and he examines the complex and immutable influences of birds on Native American culture and their unique worldview. It moves beyond mere identification and habitat to really seek out the many cultural connections between birds and native peoples.

Birds were clearly important as spiritual beings, and many natives’ donned feathers and plumage, and sought to evoke avian powers in their ceremonies and dances. Bird imagery is adorned on pottery, cravings, and jewelry. Birds also played a central role in ritual healing practices, folklore, religion, and even warfare. The winged creatures of the air clearly had a remarkable and lasting impact on Native American life in the South, and probably elsewhere, and what is being called the whole Indian-bird dynamic. It takes a distinguished ecological ethno-historian like Professor Krech to put it all together for readers in one dynamite package.

Chicago Neon Signs reviewed in Midwest Book Review

Chicago Neon Signs
Dan Zamudio
Wicker Park PressPO Box 5318, River Forest, IL 60305-5318, ISBN 9780978967628, $24.95, www.wickerparkpress.com

Once a ubiquitous feature of Chicago's landscape, the neon sign is gradually disappearing because of the deleterious impact of Illinois winters. The result of the harsh climate and the entropy of neglect, the neon signs of neighborhood businesses are decaying, fading, rusting, and manifesting empty spaces where colorful glass tubes used to be. Chicago librarian and artist Dan Zamudio photographed many of Chicago's neon signs with a camera called 'Diana', which is made of plastic (including the lens) and thus produces as slightly blurred focus that creates beautiful and memorably surreal images. In "Chicago Neon Signs", Zamudio has compiled sixty of these black-and-white photographic images that will prove to be enduring monuments to this once great commercial advertising art form to be found in every Chicago neighborhood but which is now, year by year and decade by decade, disappearing from the scene. "Chicago Neon Signs" is an original compilation which is highly recommended for personal, professional, community, and academic library Photography reference collections -- and would serve as an excellent template for similar photographic studies with respect to other American cities.

At Maxwell Street: Chicago’s Historic Marketplace Recalled in Words and Photographs

Tom Palazzolo approached me in late 2007 with the idea of turning his 1983 cinema
verité documentary, At Maxwell Street, into a book. We had just published Water Tanks of Chicago: A Vanishing Urban Legacy, by Larry W Green, and that book was striking a chord with people who had never noticed these aging wooden behemoths in their midst. Tom, like Larry, was a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In fact, I had taken Tom’s filmmaking class during the summer of 1977 at SAIC, so we had known each other for 30 years. One of Tom’s most remarkable films is called Caligari’s Cure
(http://www.facets.org/asticat?function=buyitem&catname=facets&catnum=/207), and I actually had a bit part in that movie.

Tom’s concept for the book was to approach his friends and acquaintances and get them to write about their experiences of the old Maxwell Street marketplace. He got veteran arts journalist Jack Helbig to write the introduction, and Lori Grove of the Maxwell Street Foundation, and coauthor of Chicago's Maxwell Street (IL) (Images of America) to write the foreword. The other contributors are the eminent painter Robert Guinan, the Sun-Times critic Bill Stamets, local merchant and wonderful prose stylist Lionel Bottari, poet John Platt, local artist Linda Platt, and an oral history from old-timer Leland “Sugar” Cain, Jr. A DVD of Tom’s original movie accompanies the book, along with a slide show of extra images with harmonica and guitar music, labeled Maxwell Street Blues by local musicians Little Jukela and Willie Poor Boy, recorded at Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap in Hyde Park.

For those who are not familiar with it, Maxwell Street is an avenue that runs E/W two blocks south of Roosevelt Road (12th St) and is intersected by the Dan Ryan expressway leading into downtown Chicago. The open-air marketplace started there around the turn of the 20th century, and was active up until 2000, even though it was undergoing painful urban renewal in the last 10 years of its existence. It is now under the auspices of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and is called University Village. The city kept moving the marketplace, and it got smaller and more insignificant with each displacement. I’m not sure exactly where it’s located now, but it was in the news this past week because the city was considering raising the vendor fees for selling at the marketplace, and people thought that would spell its ultimate demise.

The market on Maxwell Street was a unique and colorful place, where shoppers could get just about anything extremely cheaply. It was a photographer’s paradise, and this is where Tom and his wife Marcia cut their teeth as artists in the mid 1960s. The book also includes amazing photographs by Tom’s friend and fellow SAIC classmate, the painter Bernard Beckman. He has a keen interest in blues and gospel music, and there are many poignant photos in the book from Beckman of the street performers at Maxwell Street. The book as delayed because we kept adding and changing things right up to the last minute, even while the book was at press. We wanted the best book possible, and now that it’s finally published we feel like we accomplished putting together a great book.

Bob Sirott of WGN AM 720 radio called this book, “quite a nice little keepsake.” http://wgnradio.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=46757&Itemid=557 – I had a call yesterday from the painter Robert Guinan who loved the book, and lamented that there were no surviving pictures of Johnny Young, a pioneering blues artist who made Maxwell Street his main hangout, and who Guinan profiles in the book. Guinan told me he thought a book of this kind on Maxwell Street was long overdue. There are some good promotional things coming up for this book, an event at the Oak Park (IL) Public Library at 7 pm on December 18 where Tom and his wife Marcia will sign books and they will show the movie. Tom will appear on Ray Hanania’s Radio Chicagoland show WJJG AM 1530 on December 5 at 8:30 am. And, this is big, Tom will be live on WGN TV (channel 9 in Chicago, and nationally syndicated on cable TV) on the Midday News program on December 18 around 12:20 pm, where they will interview Tom about the book and show snippets from the movie.

Is the book business recession proof?

Alan Greenspan is in the news once again, his grizzled face increasingly haggard as he looks on with shock and awe at the tanking international economy. A recent cover image on the New Yorker magazine shows Wall Street traders bleeding from their eyeballs as the Angel of Death and Destruction holds up a broadsheet with the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeting straight down to Hell. There is finger pointing on both sides of the political aisle, as the fallout from irrational exuberance affects everyone. The upcoming presidential election offers two starkly different approaches to resuscitating the damaged economy, and columnist and Princeton professor Paul Krugman, this year's Nobel Memorial Prize Winner for Economics, tells us that the pain is only just beginning . . .

The book business, on the other hand, remains as quietly quirky as ever. In tough economic times, as publishers both large and small tighten their belts and rein in their advances to unknown authors who are not yet established with the reading public, one thing becomes abundantly clear: Commission reps, those feisty independent sales people who ply their trade in different territories throughout North America and beyond, offer incredibly good value for all publishers. Commission selling is fixed-cost. Commission reps pay their own expenses, including transportation, taxes, and insurance, and they only get paid when orders ship into their designated territory. Selling on commission is a time-honored practice, and if you take a look at the history of this noble profession you will see that it goes all the way back to eighteenth-century Europe as well as the North American colonies, where an intricate network of booksellers and travelers was established.

Independent reps bring more than good economics to the big table. Besides being resilient, cost effective, and an integral part of the operations of the book industry, independents can and often do freely speak their minds to good effect. This is an added value, and the self-directed rep can offer valuable advice to help publishers succeed in the marketplace. It's simple. If the publisher succeeds, the rep does, too. NAIPR reps are a talented bunch of folks, and in some cases have more than five decades of experience to draw upon. Because independent reps carry a mixed bag of publishers and go into a variety of accounts, this means they are flexible and can adapt to many situations. The durability of the relationship between publisher and independent rep counts for a lot as well: over time the rep develops into an expert on his publishers’ backlists, and the specific disciplines they publish. Booksellers rely on this breadth of knowledge in making their buying decisions. Everyone wins when you employ an independent rep.
So the answer to the question in the title of this piece is: YES! Publishers and booksellers can make good things and strong sales happen with a little help from their friends at NAIPR.