Author: Lisa (Page 3 of 6)

It’s University Press Week!

It’s University Press Week and we’re celebrating with this guest blog from Steve Yates. 

Surprise: You’re now the book editor at a major newspaper!

Today marks the beginning of University Press Week and UPM is very excited to once again participate in the AAUP blog tour. The theme for today’s posts is Surprise (which also matches the online gallery theme) and gives us a chance to talk about a venture that not only surprised us, but is also something we’re very proud of. 

The following post from Steve Yates, UPM’s Marketing Director, writes about the surprising results of a collaboration between our university press, an independent bookstore, and a daily newspaper. 

If you’ve visited a newspaper’s newsroom lately, there’s no escaping the devastation. Empty chairs, spotless, cleared desks, naked cables sprouting where monitors used to hum and keyboards once clacked—that march down rows of hollowed out cubicles feels funereal.

This is acutely haunting to me. All my nightmares have come true! At seventeen-years-old I was hired by the Springfield, Missouri, News-Leader(the largest newspaper in the Ozarks) as a sports writer and agate clerk, a part-time job that was nearly always full time except in summer.

When I came to Jackson to work at University Press of Mississippi in 1998, the only way to see my wife while we were both awake was to moonlight. I worked as a part-time copy editor while she designed and edited the business section at the Jackson, Mississippi, Clarion-Ledger.
My wife, Tammy Gebhart Yates, worked first at the News-Leader, and then at a succession of newspapers, the last a fifteen-year stint at the Clarion-Ledger. She survived several layoffs—one in which she was terminated then rehired the same morning—before being permanently let go in August 2013.

So I have mixed feelings about this surprise. Doing something for free that other, more qualified journalists once did for a living sometimes just doesn’t feel right. But then, really, before the Mississippi Books page came about at the Clarion-Ledger, nothing remotely like it had existed in the seventeen years I have been a subscriber.

Just before the Great Recession, one of our key bookselling partners, John Evans at Lemuria Books in Jackson, hatched an idea. Since I was in email contact frequently with all our Mississippi independent booksellers (and we have a lot of them) why not ask them to report a top ten bestsellers list each week? Call it, “The Mississippi Bestsellers List.” UPM could crunch the numbers and serve as the (mostly) dispassionate judge.

I was doubtful that a Gannett newspaper would go for it. And, sure enough, they didn’t back then.

Along came the Great Recession, and it seemed everybody (including my wife) was let go. In the turmoil, the newspaper’s then features editor Annie Oeth approached Evans for a meeting about something. But Evans began talking about creating The Mississippi Bestsellers List. When Oeth said yes to that, Evans said, well, okay, what about reviews by Mississippi writers writing about new books by Mississippians or about Mississippi? She said yes again.

Evans kept the good suggestions rolling, and by January of 2014, UPM publicist Clint Kimberling and I found ourselves part of a team editing and providing two full pages (and often more) of original, local content each Sunday on the Mississippi Books page, which appears both in print and online. Sunday circulation at the Clarion-Ledger, the state’s largest newspaper, considered by the capital and much of the state to be the paper of record, tops 107,000.

When working on this project, I spend most of my time recruiting writers and matching them to ideal books. I lean on the team a lot for great suggestions, too. Kimberling writes articles, reviews, and crunches the sales numbers and streamlines the events calendar.

Liz Button’s April 2015 article about the project in Bookselling This Weekdescribes our operation most succinctly.

“Along with the bestseller lists, reviews, and interviews, the Clarion-Ledger’s two- to three-page Books feature… also includes exclusive columns from indie booksellers: Lisa Newman at Lemuria writes a weekly ‘First Editions’ column on rare and collectible books and fine bindings , and Clara Martin, also of Lemuria, writes her own weekly column about children’s and young adult books.

Every week, [editors lay] everything out to create an attractive spread, which includes periodic pieces by local freelance writer Jana Hoops, who interviews many of the big-name authors who come through Mississippi bookstores on tour. ”

Now former Clarion-Ledger reporter Jim “Pathfinder” Ewing regularly adds reviews and articles as well.

The project crosses a non-profit scholarly press with an independent for-profit bookstore and an affiliate of a gigantic, publicly held media conglomerate. Yet I find myself amazed and uplifted week after week. At the table when we gather, we are ego-less. We all want great content and a better book culture in Mississippi—nothing less, and nothing more.

Here are some examples of the voices we have brought to Mississippi book lovers lately.

From the chaos of a newspaper’s transformations, Kimberling and I now find ourselves part of a team running a book page every Sunday, a good in the world that did not previously exist. Once (and more properly) an agate clerk, I now find myself promoted to some weird kind of editor. No one is more shocked than I.

Surprise!

Collecting Barry Hannah

“Neighborhood: An Early Fragment of Ray” by Barry Hannah. Tuscaloosa, AL: Gorgas Oak Press, 1981.
Born in Meridian, Mississippi in 1942, Barry Hannah grew up in Clinton, Mississippi. After changing his college major early on from pre­med to English, he set his sights on writing and earned his Bachelor’s at Mississippi College. While studying for his Masters of Fine Arts at the University of Arkansas, Hannah developed the surreal and dark humor he is known for in his novels and short stories. Nominated for the National Book Award for “Geronimo Rex” (1972) and also nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for “High Lonesome” (1996), Hannah gained national acclaim. Over his long career, he became a popular creative writing mentor among students, holding teaching positions at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Sewanee, the University of Alabama, and the University of Mississippi, among others.

unnamed (4)While Hannah was teaching at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, he allowed the Gorgas Oak Press of the Graduate School of Library Services of the University of Alabama to design and print the book format for an early fragment of “Ray” called “Neighborhood.” The graduate students handcrafted a striking chapbook of handmade paper, hand-pressed with custom­ made ink, featuring the original interior etchings of Jill Valentine, and exterior wrapper drawings by Bruce Dupree. The print run was limited to 65 copies. The chapbook was not issued signed and signed copies are scarce today. This copy of “Neighborhood” is signed on the title page.

unnamed (5)This fragment of “Ray” also differs from the complete version of “Ray” published by Knopf in 1980 as pages 12-­26. The publication of Gorgas Oak’s “Neighborhood” provides a rare opportunity to compare an early draft of a literary text with its final form.

 

 

Original to the Clarion-Ledger

To see more titles by Barry Hannah, click here.

Collecting Margaret Walker

how i wrote jubilee FEWROTEJUBAs a young girl, Margaret Walker Alexander listened to her grandmother’s stories. Walker decided at the age of nineteen that “she would clothe that ‘naked truth’ in all the power and beauty of fiction,” and she spent the next thirty years meticulously researching her family’s stories of slavery and the Civil War from every side. When Walker’s novel “Jubilee” was published in 1966, Harper’s Magazine asked her to submit an essay about how she wrote “Jubilee.”
FEPROPHETS-2Unexpectedly, Walker’s essay for Harper’s was rejected in 1967.

Instead, “How I Wrote Jubilee” was published in the form of a chapbook by a small press called Third World Press in 1972. Founded in 1967 by Haki R. Madhubuti, a poet and one of the leaders in the Black Arts movement, Third World Press ran alongside another important black literary press of the time, Detroit’s Broadside Press, which published Walker’s “Prophets for a New Day” and “October Journey.”
FEENG1218X-2

In 1967, Mississippi’s Willie Morris had just been appointed as the managing editor at Harper’s Magazine. In his memoir “New York Days,” Morris reflected on Harper’s very “modest” operation and their $150,000 deficit. One way to increase their circulation was to publish excerpts of the latest novels. Bitingly, it was “The Confessions of Nat Turner” by William Styron that booted Walker’s essay out of Harper’s—as noted in “How I Wrote Jubilee.” Though Styron also went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature that year, the novel received a great deal of criticism for being more sensational than historically accurate in its depiction of the slave revolt of Nat Turner. While James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison praised “Nat Turner,” much of the black community frowned upon it. Over the years, the admiration and respect for Walker’s “Jubilee” has only grown.

Small presses like Third World have stood for authors like Walker who needed a platform for their work. In publishing “How I Wrote Jubilee,” Third World Press provided a lasting and beautiful chapbook which includes Walker’s essay, a Foreword, Afterword and Discussion Questions for “Jubilee.” Third World is still owned by its founder Haki R. Madhubuti. While most black presses went out of business or were bought out by large corporations, the press maintains its independence despite challenging times.

 

Original to the Clarion-Ledger

Collecting Barry Moser

appalachia“Appalachia: The Voices of Sleeping Birds” by Cynthia Rylant, Illustrations by Barry Moser. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991.

In “Appalachia: The Voices of Sleeping Birds” by Cynthia Rylant, life is hard but it is also sweet. Rylant’s Appalachia is a land of coal miners, small churches, country dogs, dirt roads, homemade quilts, and cotton dresses. She communicates the rhythm of Appalachian life in her picture book for the young and old:

“In the summer many of the women like to can. It seems their season. They sit on kitchen chairs on back porches and they talk of their lives while they snap beans or cut up cucumbers for pickling. It is a good way for them to catch up on things and to have time together, alone, for neither the children nor the men come around much when there is canning going on.”

Cynthia Rylant, a Caldecott and Newbery award-winning author, writes about where she grew up in West, Virginia. Her young life was not unfamiliar to Barry Moser, the book’s illustrator. Moser, a native of Chattanooga, Tennessee, is a printmaker, a designer, author, essayist, and teacher. He is well-known for his fully illustrated Bible published in 1999, by his own Pennyroyal Press which has designed some of the most beautiful modern limited editions of the twentieth century.

Moser’s paintings and prints have graced such classic stories and poetry as “The Adventures of Brer Rabbit,” “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” and “The Tales of Edgar Allen Poe,” but he has also worked with many modern children’s books authors.

Moser’s paintings that accompany Rylant’s text were inspired by Ben Shahn, Walker Evans, Marion Post Walcott, and Dorothea Lange. The subjects in the paintings are simple and direct. The gaze of the coal miner shows a man with few choices in life—his father and grandfather were coal miners, too. The sweetness of life is there, too, as in the opening quote from James Agee, a nod to his own family in Knoxville, Tennessee:

“The stars are wide and alive, they seem like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near. All my people are larger bodies than mine, quiet, with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds . . .”

 

Original to the Clarion-Ledger

See more of Barry Moser’s books here.

Get to know Lisa

unnamed (2)How long have you worked at Lemuria? Eight years.

What do you do at Lemuria? I look after Lemuria’s First Editions. We have two rooms of collectible books plus the first editions we have in the Dot Com building next to Banner Hall. I take care of the first editions we have, and I also take special orders for ones we do not have. I maintain Lemuria’s First Editions page on the website, and since our new website went up this year, I have slowly been adding our first editions to the website. I also write a column about book collecting for The Clarion-Ledger’s Sunday Book Page and look after our two book clubs, Atlantis and Cereus Readers.

Talk to us about what you’re reading right now. I just finished reading Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami for Lemuria’s Atlantis book club. He’s one of my favorite authors. I’m a fan of magical realism for total escape! A few others:

The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf

Love and Other Ways of Dying by Michael Paterniti

Looking at Pictures by Robert Walser

M Train by Patti Smith

A Strangeness in My Mind by Orhan Pamuk

What’s currently on your bedside table (book purgatory)?

The Early Stories of Truman Capote

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (reading for book club)

Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster (reading for book club)

Hemingway in Love by A. E. Hotchner

The Mare by Mary Gaitskill

How many books do you usually read at a time? One to five books at a time.

I know it’s difficult, but give us your current top five books. I could list my favorite books according to different stage of life. A book can mean everything to at one stage of life and then it means less in another stage until another book takes its place. But here are some of my all time favorites:

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

The Prime of Life by Simone de Beauvoir

Anything by Robert Walser

What did you do before you worked at Lemuria? I taught English as a Second Language, mostly at the university level, in the United States and in Austria. I worked about a year at Davis-Kidd booksellers in Jackson, Tennessee during college.

Why do you like working at Lemuria?  The books, new and old—for the way they smell and feel, for the beautiful craftsmanship of some of the finest and rarest books. The people—everyone comes to the bookstore looking for something different and I like helping them find it.

If we could have any living author visit the store and do a reading, who would you want to come? Alice Walker.

If you had the ability to teleport, where would you go first? A quiet tropical island.

Collecting 007

“Spectre,” the latest James Bond film starring Daniel Craig, hits US theaters November 6. “Spectre” is the 26th James Bond film. These films are based on the fourteen novels and a handful of short stories by Ian Fleming and a collection of continuation works in Fleming’s honor by Raymond Benson, Sebastian Faulks and others.

dr. no Bond-poster-1962

Back in 1962 the very first James Bond film, “Dr. No,” was released, starring Sean Connery. When Ian Fleming’s novel “Dr. No” was published in Great Britain, it set off a cycle of controversy. Reviewer Paul Johnson of the New Statesman in an essay titled, “Sex, Snobbery and Sadism,” described “Dr. No” as “all unhealthy, all thoroughly English—the sadism of a schoolboy bully, the mechanical two-dimensional sex-longings of a frustrated adolescent, and the crude, snob-cravings of a suburban adult.” Fleming was distraught and enlisted Raymond Chandler to help with a reasoned review, but the British seemed to have already made up their mind. Across the Atlantic, Fleming’s American publisher, Macmillan, took out a full-page ad in Time magazine, which did not try to deny Fleming’s bad boy image. In response to the British media, several of Fleming’s books that followed benignly portrayed 007 in rescue mode or saving the world from catastrophe.

dr. no US editionFrom Fleming’s first book “Casino Royale” in 1953, Fleming had always expressed an opinion about the design of his books and “Dr. No” was no different. Pat Marriott was the artist for “Dr. No” and he had also designed “Diamonds Are Forever.” Fleming had originally envisioned Honeychile on the cover standing on a Venus elegans dr noshell. For the final cover, Marriott revealed Honeychile as a silhouette on the beach. These British editions are the true first edition of Fleming’s novels and also more intimate for the input that he gave on the design.

The world of 007 is a rich one to explore—through the books of Ian Fleming, his life story, and finally through the thrill of the movie theater.

 

Here is a trailer for the new James Bond movie, “Spectre”, in theaters now.

 

Original to the Clarion-Ledger Book Page

Collecting John Grisham Limited Editions

firm movie grishamBy 1993, John Grisham’s name had become synonymous with the legal thriller and he had published four of his most popular books: “A Time to Kill” (1989); “The Firm” (1991); “The Pelican Brief” (1992); and “The Client” (1993). This same year Doubleday bought the rights from Wynwood press to reissue “A Time to Kill” in hardback. Meanwhile, “The Firm” and “The Pelican Brief” were box office hits in the movie theater, expanding Grisham’s fan base even further.

time to kill by john grishamThe true first edition of “A Time to Kill,” the Wynwood Press edition, was difficult to find signed, and Grisham’s other early books were becoming too expensive or difficult for collectors to find. In 1993 Doubleday began publishing Grisham’s books in limited edition for collectors. It was a prime time to lay the foundations for collecting the author’s work, but Doubleday had to make up for lost time and released “A Time to Kill,” “The Firm,” “The Pelican Brief,” and “The Client” in limited editions of 350 or 300 copies all in that same year.

A signed limited edition of “A Time to Kill” was very appealing because it could be bought for $250 on the release date as opposed to a signed Wynwood edition which would sell in fine condition for around $1,500 in 1993. For those who hold a limited edition of “A Time to Kill,” its value has increased to around $2,000 today.

john grisham limitedEvery year since “The Client,” Doubleday has issued a limited edition of each of John Grisham’s novels. The legal thrillers are leather-bound, signed and numbered, have decorated end papers, gold stamping, a ribbon marker and are housed in a slipcase. The nonlegal thrillers like “Ford County,” “Skipping Christmas” and “A Painted House” are issued cloth bound and as a group are not always uniform in size as the legal thrillers are. An entire limited edition collection in fine condition—from “A Time to Kill” to the latest book—is valued at around $15,000.

Written by Lisa Newman, A version of this column was published in The Clarion-Ledger’s Sunday Mississippi Books page.

Click here to see all of John Grisham’s books.

Click here to pre-order the latest limited edition, Rogue Lawyer. 

Collecting the Blues

Fans of the blues can take their love one step further by collecting books on the subject. From beautiful coffee table picture books to long-reading books, there’s something for every blues lover.

blues from the deltaTo start at the very roots of the blues, “Slave Songs of the United States” published in 1867 by William Francis Allen is the foundation for a serious blues collector—but incredibly rare. Other works on African American song like “Negro Workaday Songs” were also published in the 1920s from small university presses. Moving into the mid to late 20th century there are several titles which can still be found in first edition, but perhaps even more importantly, they are still in print in paperback: country blues“The Country Blues” by Samuel B. Charters (1959) documents country bluesmen like Robert Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson; “Blues People” by Amiri Baraka (1963) written under the name Leroi Jones was the first modern blues book written by an African American; and “Blues from the Delta” written by Mississippian William Ferris (1978) includes full documentation of a Clarksdale House Party with Wallace “Pine Top” Johnson.

southern soul bluesMusic scholars and field workers have been documenting the blues for many years but recently some exceptional books have been released based on this research. William Ferris published “Give My Poor Heart Ease” (2009) which documents the blues in the Mississippi Delta in the 1960s and ’70s, and George Mitchell released “Mississippi Hill Country Blues 1967” (2013) with a showing and signing at the Mississippi Museum of Art. Another gem is Birney Imes’ “Juke Joint” (1990) which was released in a signed limited edition in slipcase with a Foreword by Richard Ford. The variety of blues covered in modern scholarship today is admirable, from “Southern Soul Blues” by David Whiteis (2014), which includes chapters on Ms. Jody and our own Bobby Rush, to a new classic from the late and great American collector of folk music Alan Lomax—“The Southern Journey of Alan Lomax,” (2012) with newly published photos and an essay by Tom Piazza.

give my poor heart easeBlues books are not the easiest type of book to collect because they do not have a wide readership and publishers print in small batches. Not only is it hard to get a first edition, if you wait too long, the book may already be out of print. If your blues collection is filled with first editions all the better, but just having these wonderful books in any form is a treasure for your home library.

 

Originally published in the Clarion-Ledger

Cereus Readers Book Club Resumes in September

Night-blooming Cereus Flower at Eudora Welty's House August 28, 2013We call ourselves the Cereus Readers in honor of Jackson writer Eudora Welty and her friends who gathered for the annual blooming of the night-blooming cereus flower and called themselves “The Night-Blooming Cereus Club.” In this same spirit of friendship and fellowship, this book club was launched.

The goal of the Cereus Readers is to introduce readers to the writing of Eudora Welty–her short stories, essays, and novels–and then to read books and authors she enjoyed herself or were influenced by her. We have been reading the work of Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Ross Macdonald, Raymond Chandler, Katherine Anne Porter, and others.

We typically meet the fourth Thursday of every month, but we change the date as necessary. No previous reading of Eudora Welty required.

For more information and to subscribe to our e-mail list, please send an e-mail to: lisa@lemuriabooks.com.


life to come by e m forsterThis fall we’ll be reading E. M. Forster.

We will be reading these texts, available at Lemuria:

The Life to Come: And Other Short Stories by E. M. Forster

Eudora Welty’s review of The Life to Come which is found in The Eye of the Story by Eudora Welty.

Thursday, September 17

We’ll talk about the life of E. M. Forster and his friendship with and influence on Eudora Welty.

Thursday, October 22 

The Life to Come: And Other Stories 

Thursday, November 19

The Life to Come: And Other Stories

The Great Migration

The Great Migration by Jacob Lawrence. New York: Harper Collins / The Museum of Modern Art & The Phillips Collection, 1993. 
jacob lawrenceJacob Lawrence was not your typical painter. He often spent months at a branch of the New York Public Library, taking notes from journals and books and other documents before he would began work on a formal painting project. Lawrence wanted his art to teach history to his people. In describing his research efforts for The Great Migration, Lawrence remarked:

“Having no Negro history makes the Negro people feel inferior to the rest of the world . . . I didn’t do it just as a historical thing, but because these things tie up with the Negro today.”

Jacob Lawrence’s family was a family of migration. His mother and father had left the South for New Jersey where Jacob was born in 1917. Jacob ended up in Harlem at the age of 13. His mother and art teachers saw his talent at a young age, and eventually his talent earned him a position in the WPA program which provided the first artistic opportunities for many black artists like him. After Lawrence’s position at the WPA ended, he applied for a grant from the Julius Rosenwald Fund (of Sears & Roebuck) and cited his unusual research needs as a painter in the application. He asked for six months of research time before he began painting the Great Migration series.

The Great Migration consisted of 60 small tempera paintings depicting the mass migration of African Americans from the South to the North after World War I. The paintings were accompanied by captions which showed the influence of modern media: the rise of graphic illustration in mechanically produced magazines and photo books. The photo book with accompanying text was a popular genre following the Great Depression.
12 million black voices FEMany New Deal programs were designed to document rural America through oral-history projects and photography series.
Well-known photo books from this era include: Erskine Caldwell’s and Margaret Bourke-White’s “You Have Seen Their Faces” (1937); Dorothea Lange’s and Paul Taylor’s “American Exodus” (1939); “12 Million Black Voices” by Richard Wright (1941); and James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” (1941).

Lawrence chose this same format—he only altered the format with his striking paintings. In 1941, the enlarged photographs from “12 Million Black Voices” with text by Richard Wright were chosen to accompany Lawrence’s Great Migration panels on a 15-city tour.
jacob lawrenceIn 1993, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Phillips Art Collection released a signed limited edition book of 100 copies of The Great Migration with all 60 panels and captions.
In 2015, MoMA and Phillips released a new book, “Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series,” following a 2014 exhibition celebrating the artist’s life and work.

Written by Lisa Newman,  A version of this column was published in The Clarion-Ledger’s Sunday Mississippi Books page.

Page 3 of 6

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén