Thomas Mann in Erstausgaben
Der Sammler Hans-Peter Haack hat laut NZZ einen wunderschönen Bibliographischen Atlas vorgelegt, welcher die Erstausgaben der Werke Thomas Manns illustriert vorstellt. Mit 119 Euro aber leider kein Schnäppchen.
Die Bibliothek in Harvard
Robert Darnton, bekannt nicht zuletzt durch seine Studien über das Buchwesen im 18. Jahrhundert, hat es inzwischen zum Direktor einer der besten Bibliotheken der Welt gebracht: der Universitätsbibliothek in Harvard. In der New York Review of Books schreibt er in dieser Rolle über die gegenwärtig größten Probleme der Forschungsbibliotheken. Dabei liefert er eine beeindruckende Aufzählung des aktuellen Bestands:
I can even begin happily, at least in describing the state of the university library at Harvard. True, the economic crisis hit us hard, so hard that we must do some fundamental reorganizing, but we can take measures to make a great library greater, and we can put our current difficulties into perspective by seeing them in the light of a long history. Having begun in 1638 with the 400 books in John Harvard’s library, we now have accumulated nearly 17 million volumes and 400 million manuscript and archival items scattered through 45,000 distinct collections. I could string out the statistics indefinitely. We collect in more than 350 languages and many different formats. We have 12.8 million digital files, more than 100,000 serials, nearly 10 million photographs, online records of 3.4 million zoological specimens, and endlessly rich special collections, including the largest library of Chinese works outside of China (with the exception of the Library of Congress) and more Ukrainian titles than exist in Ukraine.
Oscar Wilde als Altphilologe und Leser
Die New York Review of Books stellt in ihrer Ausgabe 17/2010 zwei interessante neue Bücher zu Oscar Wilde vor:
- Oscar Wilde: The Women of Homer (The Oscar Wilde Society)
- Thomas Wright: Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde (John Macrae/Holt)
Daniel Mendelsohn schrieb eine ausführliche Rezension. Ein Auszug:
He had, after all, shown a remarkable flair for the classics from the start. At the Portora Royal School, where he’d been sent in the autumn of 1864, just before his tenth birthday, he won the classical medal examination with his extempore translations from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (the tragedy he loved above all others) and the Carpenter Prize for his superior performance on the examination on the Greek New Testament. Later, at Trinity College, Dublin, he took a first in his freshman classical exams and went on to win the Berkeley Gold Medal for his paper on a subject that was, perhaps, not without augury: the Fragmenta comicorum graecorum, “Fragments of the Greek Comics,” the great scholarly edition by the early-nineteenth-century German philologue Augustus Meineke. (According to his friend Robert Sherard, he occasionally pawned the medal when he needed money, but managed always to redeem it, keeping it until the end of his life.)
After transferring to Magdalen College, Oxford, in the autumn of 1874, Wilde scored highest marks on his entrance exams, and finished by taking a prestigious double first in “Greats,” the relatively recent, classics-based curriculum officially known as literae humaniores.
Buchgeschichte und Aufklärung
Ab 1723 ist eine Aufsehen erregende Buchreihe erschienen: Religious Ceremonies of the World in sieben Bänden. Nicht zum ersten Mal wurde die unterschiedliche Religionspraxis zum Thema gemacht, zum ersten Mal aber in dieser hohen Qualität. Es sind nun zwei Bücher erschienen, die sich ausschließlich mit dieser Buchreihe beschäftigen:
Lynn Hunt; Margaret C. Jacob; Wijand Mijnhardt: The Book That Changed Europe. Picart and Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World (Harvard University Press)
Lynn Hunt; Margaret C. Jacob; Wijand Mijnhardt: Bernard Picart and the First Global Vision of Religion (Getty Research Institute)
Anthony Grafton schrieb eine ausführliche Rezension für die New York Review of Books (kostenpflichtig).
Buchbranche und Ebooks
Ken Auletta stellt ihrem erfreulich ausführlichen Artikel im New Yorker die Frage: “Can the iPad topple the Kindle, and save the book business?”. Er berichtet auch ausführlich über den Preis- und Machtkampf, den sich Apple, Amazon und die Verleger zum Thema Ebooks liefern. Schwerpunkt ist die amerikanische Buchbranche, aber der Artikel ist insgesamt sehr aufschlussreich.
Interessant auch die Passage über die Zukunft des Verleger-Autoren-Verhältnisses:
Amazon seems to believe that in the digital world it might not need publishers at all. In December, the Simon & Schuster author Stephen Covey sold Amazon the exclusive digital rights to two of his best-sellers, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” and “Principle-Centered Leadership.” The books were sold on Amazon by RosettaBooks, and Covey got more than half the net proceeds. One publisher said, “What it did for us was confirm that Amazon sees itself as much as a competitor as a retailer. They have aspirations to be a publisher.”
A close associate of Bezos puts it more starkly: “What Amazon really wanted to do was make the price of e-books so low that people would no longer buy hardcover books. Then the next shoe to drop would be to cut publishers out and go right to authors.” Last year, according to several literary agents, a senior Amazon executive asked for suggestions about whom Amazon might hire as an acquisitions editor. Its Encore program has begun to publish books by self-published authors whose work attracts good reviews on Amazon.com. And in January it offered authors who sold electronic rights directly to Amazon a royalty of seventy per cent, provided they agreed to prices of between $2.99 and $9.99. The offer, one irate publisher said, was meant “to pit authors against publishers.”
Grandinetti concedes that Amazon has tried to make more direct deals with authors: “We’re constantly looking for ways we can do something more efficiently.” He suggested that this was nothing new. “There’s a long history of booksellers in the publishing business,” he said, mentioning Barnes & Noble. Major publishers, he points out, all sell books directly to consumers on their Web sites. “It seems like they’re in our business, so it’s a strange argument to worry about this in the other direction,” he said. But publishers’ sales through their own Web sites are negligible, and though Barnes & Noble’s publishing program antagonized publishers, it did not threaten a wholesale devaluation of their products. O’Reilly believes that publishers have good reason to be anxious. “Amazon is a particularly farsighted, powerful, and ruthless competitor,” he says. “I don’t think we’ve seen a business this competitive in the tech space since Microsoft.”
“The Ultimate Reader”
Der passende Titel für eine ausführliche Besprechung der beiden neuen Bücher des Bibliomanen Alberto Manguel: The Library at Night und A Reader on Reading.
John Gross schreibt unter anderem:
Writing of this kind, it need hardly be said, is often highly personal, and there are many points at which The Library at Night might best be classified as autobiography. For it is not just about libraries in general, but also about a specific library—the one Manguel has had built to house his own books (some 30,000 of them) in the village in the Loire valley where he has made his home in recent years, after growing up in Buenos Aires, living in Europe, and then becoming a Canadian citizen. The building itself was constructed around the ruined wall of a fifteenth-century stone barn, and he gives a loving account of its taking shape. (It is easy to imagine his thrill when he found that the local masons referred to the large stones they used as majuscules— capital letters—and the smaller ones as minuscules— lower-case letters.) He ruefully recalls the problems that were involved in trying to find the best order in which to arrange the books, and is reminded of his first attempts to organize those he owned into groups and subgroups, when he was a boy of seven or eight in Buenos Aires. [...]
At almost every turn The Library at Night offers something of interest. Along with the anecdotes and the telling quotations, there are deft character sketches—of Melvil Dewey of the Dewey Decimal Classification System, for instance, or Antonio Panizzi, the political exile from Italy who became the most renowned of the British Museum’s librarians (he ended his days as Sir Anthony) and who presided over the creation of the museum’s domed Reading Room in its full Victorian glory. (Manguel doesn’t overlook less glorious aspects of the Reading Room’s history—tales of the fearsome “Museum flea” that infested it in pre-Panizzi times, or Thomas Carlyle’s complaint about the number of “people in a state of imbecility” who were granted admission: “I have been informed that there are several in that state who have been sent there by their friends to pass away the time.”)
“Publishing: The Revolutionary Future”
Jason Epstein analysiert in seinem Artikel für die aktuelle New York of Review of Books (Nr. 4), welche Auswirkungen der digitale Wandel auf die Buchbranche haben wird:
The transition within the book publishing industry from physical inventory stored in a warehouse and trucked to retailers to digital files stored in cyberspace and delivered almost anywhere on earth as quickly and cheaply as e-mail is now underway and irreversible. This historic shift will radically transform worldwide book publishing, the cultures it affects and on which it depends. Meanwhile, for quite different reasons, the genteel book business that I joined more than a half-century ago is already on edge, suffering from a gambler’s unbreakable addiction to risky, seasonal best sellers, many of which don’t recoup their costs, and the simultaneous deterioration of backlist, the vital annuity on which book publishers had in better days relied for year-to-year stability through bad times and good. The crisis of confidence reflects these intersecting shocks, an overspecialized marketplace dominated by high-risk ephemera and a technological shift orders of magnitude greater than the momentous evolution from monkish scriptoria to movable type launched in Gutenberg’s German city of Mainz six centuries ago. [...]
The resistance today by publishers to the onrushing digital future does not arise from fear of disruptive literacy, but from the understandable fear of their own obsolescence and the complexity of the digital transformation that awaits them, one in which much of their traditional infrastructure and perhaps they too will be redundant. Karl Marx wrote of the revolutions of 1848 in his Communist Manifesto that all that is solid melts into air. His vision of a workers’ paradise was of course wrong by 180 degrees, the triumph of wish over experience. What melted soon solidified as industrial capitalism, a paradise for some at the expense of the many. But Marx’s potent image fits the publishing industry today as its capital-intensive infrastructure—presses, warehouses stacked with fully returnable physical inventory, its retail market constrained by costly real estate—faces dissolution within a vast cloud in which all the world’s books will eventually reside as digital files to be downloaded instantly title by title wherever on earth connectivity exists, and printed and bound on demand at point of sale one copy at a time by the Espresso Book Machine[1] as library-quality paperbacks, or transmitted to electronic reading devices including Kindles, Sony Readers, and their multiuse successors, among them most recently Apple’s iPad. The unprecedented ability of this technology to offer a vast new multilingual marketplace a practically limitless choice of titles will displace the Gutenberg system with or without the cooperation of its current executives. [...]
Seiner plausiblen Prognose nach wird kein Stein auf dem anderen bleiben. Epstein betont die Chancen dieser Entwicklung, anstatt in eine kulturpessimistische Tirade zu verfallen.
Ich sehe die Ebook-Technologie als willkommene Ergänzung zum “klassischen” Buch. Für viele Anwendungsfälle werden Ebooks ihre Vorläufer auf Papier ablösen: Nachschlagewerke, Fachbücher, Gebrauchsliteratur. Die iTunes-Generation wird ihre Harry Potters und Grishams ohne Berührungsängste am Display lesen.
Das gedruckte Buch wird weiterhin eine wichtige Rolle spielen. Wie auch in der Vergangenheit werden die Kulturpessimisten nicht Recht behalten, die mit erhobenem Zeigefinger altklug und neudumm gegen neue Technologien predigen.
“Wie man ein Buch liest“
Mit dieser Einführung in das Lesen von “Great Books” ist Mortimer Adler Mitte des letzten Jahrhunderts ein Bestseller gelungen. Ist nun auf Deutsch wieder erhältlich und Literaturkritik.de hat es rezensiert.
Der neue Kindler
Roman Bucheli hat sich für die NZZ die Neuauflage von Kindlers Literaturlexikon angesehen. Er bewertet das Großprojekt in seiner Rezension als eine “verlegerische, editorische und wissenschaftliche Grosstat”.
Montaigne über Bücher
[Der Umgang mit Büchern] weicht mir auf meiner ganzen Lebensbahn nicht von der Seite und steht mir allenthalben zu Diensten. Er tröstet mich im Alter und in der Einsamkeit. Er entlastet mich von der Bürde des öden Müßiggangs und hält mir zu jeder Stunde unerwünschte Gesellschaft vom Leib. Er stumpft die stechenden Schmerzen, falls sie nicht übermächtig sind. Um einen lästigen Gedanken loszuwerden, brauche ich bloß zu den Büchern zu greifen – sie befreien mich davon, indem sie mich sogleich voll in Anspruch nehmen. [...]
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