Everything in Publishing
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Saturday, September 19th, 2009
I admit, my views about our society’s future are probably on the fringe, as far as futurist daydreaming goes: right now, I'm reading Accelerando on my g1 and contemplating converting my own meager library into a paperless one. To me, digitizing is about becoming more mobile in a world that grows increasingly complex, data-rich, and decentralized. The only way we’re going to benefit from the tremendous amount of information out there is by automating our processes—that is, transcending the human limits of our input by allowing distributed networks to expand our consciousness. It all sounds Kurzweil-crazy, I know, but in the end we are just spiritual machines.
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Wednesday, May 21st, 2008
Despite Derleth’s fears, however, horror fiction became popular in the seventies with the success of novels like William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971) and Stephen King’s Carrie (1974). Derleth’s estate fell into the hands of his children, April and Walden Derleth. Though the details of the dispute have never been made public, Derleth’s estate appointed a fan named James Turner (who had no editorial experience), as editor-in-chief of Arkham House following Derleth’s death. Donald Wandrei, who had been involved in Arkham House since his return from World War II as its managing editor, left the company after Turner’s appointment.
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Wednesday, May 21st, 2008
Five days after Lovecraft’s death, August Derleth’s colleague, Donald Wandrei, wrote to his fellow writer to inform him of the author’s passing. Derleth wrote back, insisting to Wandrei that they work together to publish Lovecraft’s work. After Charles Scribner’s Sons refused to publish the collection of stories Wandrei and Derleth put together, the two borrowed a name of one of the fictional New England locales in Lovecraft’s stories and formed Arkham House to publish the manuscript themselves.
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Wednesday, May 21st, 2008
Across from Lueders Road in St. Aloysius Cemetery, Sauk City, Wisconsin, is the grave of August Derleth, founding editor-publisher of Arkham House. On the other side of that road is Arkham House itself, the place where Derleth devoted the last thirty-two years of his life ushering macabre writers out of the obscurity of the pulps and into the hardcovers of an entirely new niche in genre fiction.
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Friday, April 4th, 2008
In his 2008 book, Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age, Jeff Gomez augers that the future of electronic publishing depends on whether publishers are prepared to meet the demands of a new generation of readers he calls "Generation Download." This generation, he argues, "is the first generation to come of age not knowing anything but an existence with the web."
