Booksquare

This is a how to article. It’s about the Gap. Long before there was a store by that name, the Gap slipped into the vernacular, worming its way onto TV. Picture this: in the year 1966, news comes from three sources including Walter Cronkite. TV news is sedate, stentorian, ominous. There was a Missile Gap […]

The Year of Living Dangerously? 2005 can lay no such claim in the halls of the publishing kings. In the book world this was more along the lines of The Year Jose Canseco became Our Greatest Living Writer. Jose, I tip my cap to you and hope that Google engineers will capture your oeuvre now […]

I read somewhere that the holidays were encroaching. That was probably The Wall Street Journal. Encroaching on what? When confronted with conundrums I turn to the Earl. He’s an aspiring writer whose literary career is wobbly at best. For instance, he lost his cool and was dragged across the floor of a train station clinging […]

Maybe it’s me or maybe it’s the transit strike, but a wave of news releases from the Big Apple this morning suggest that everyone may be auditioning for A Fine Madness. I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge during the last transit strike and discovered two things: objects along the East River are further away than […]

Jane Friedman is a smart executive. She runs Harper-Collins, one of the trade houses large enough to represent the book industry as a whole. HC is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp conglomerate, with all the drama and trauma that implies. Ms. Friedman made the comment last summer that she envisions a time when authors are […]

Only one thing happened to the publishing business in 2005. Google went public. Lots of pin action in the stock. All the broker dealers will have big bonuses in their Christmas stocking. Sure, two Googlebots left the farm and moved to Elko Nevada, a scandal that hasn’t garnered enough attention. But in terms of market […]