Stop Sopa
Best Wishes for a Happy and Prosperous New Year !! from Carole, Ib and the entire Bunker Hill Publishing staff (L to R – Top Row- Izzy (Accounting), Avery (Sales) and Stella (Copyediting) Middle Row – Ella (Production) Addie (Design), Rylie (Marketing) and Sophie (Editorial) Bottom Row – Brinley (Strategic Planning)
Publishing is now afflicted with a variety of systems entirely inimical to books and the welfare of readers. Rick Santelli may have started the Tea Party with a viral rant though you might be forgiven for expecting much less of this one. It won’t be televised and won’t alter the political landscape but, for what it’s worth though here is one for the road!
#OccupyDartmouth is perhaps the true Vox Clamantis in Deserto to which we should all listen. #OccupyDartmouth is about to go into its seventh week and everything about it has an air of genteel, if deliberately dilapidated, civility. The signs on the grass are polite and their Tweets are sparse and give no account of their daily experience or routine.
Not only are we falling prey to these idiot devices, an apt (no pun intended) description I came across in an article last week, but we are subjecting our kids to them as well.
If writing becomes nothing but a vehicle for making money and publishing is found wanting in its ability to make that money then publishing becomes a circular firing squad and the community dies. If on the other hand judgment is exercised at all levels and content and meaning come before market and money then we will live in a richer world once again.
Independent thinking, independent understanding, original thought, and personal new horizons paradoxically may well be receding like a final outgoing tide maybe never to return. Or have we reached the tipping point here and further critical thought will encourage a serious backlash against what in the end will have been a colossal distraction? Time to reboot?
The call of #occupyWallStreet is infectious and irresistible, as has been, and is, the message of the #ArabSpring, the #indignados, the #acampados, the #tentcities
It is unfortunate that art is often considered okay for kids to spend time on but as we age we are supposed to pursue more serious occupations.
I really had been missing that good feeling one gets when one reaches out, giving and caring about those less fortunate. The basic message of this book was just that, a little boy buys a coat for a classmate who needs one in order to be able to play outside at recess.
My desk is a Mnemonic Device in and of itself. But that is lost on those whose idea of a desk is a platform for a computer. Ok, so only I can use it as others merely see this
I was half way through one of two recent Atlantic Monthly articles by the interesting Jonathan Knee when I realized I wasn’t getting the message. Jeff Jarvis’ blog piece on BuzzMachine had led me there.
Life is a puzzlement and like the King, I could sing (if I had the looks and voice of Yul Brynner!) There are times I almost think/I am not sure of what I absolutely know.
Fixit time, like the rain doesn’t seem to go away. Ellen Sousa’s magnum opus The Green Garden is about to go to the printer but we are waiting on William Cullina for his promised introduction and, talking of the Fixit of all Fixits he is busy fixing the last trimmings for a new garden at the Coastal Maine Botanical Garden.
Spring and autumn, Spring List and Fall List, Publishers have two seasons not four. Summer and winter are, in a way, seasonal interludes between the other two. Yes books are published every month but the vast majority fall into these two periods.
Follow your dream. If you don’t, there are consequences, “especially if they’re dictated by the gods,” said author Willem Lange. Lange will read from his new work, A Dream of Dragons, illustrated by Vermont artist and Caldecott medalist Mary Azarian on Thursday, June 9 at Everyone’s Books on Elliot Street.
Brief digital discomfiture with designers and editors under pressure can make one nostalgic for the days of Wraps and Inserts, for those salad days when paste-ups were cumbersome piles of paper hiding that long extinct being The Paste-up Artist
Moving parts is one thing but bricks and mortar are another. Two bookshops are closing in Harvard Square including the once amazing Curious George Store. If it wasn’t true before there must be as many bookshops in Brattleboro, Vermont as in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The Green Garden and its cover: Grace won over Green. It is going to be a classic look. I liked the original but perhaps more for the conceit than the result so all’s well, author’s happy, one less moving part to worry about.
Publishing has a thousand moving parts and far more than the day moveable type was invented (1040 AD by Bi Sheng in China) which makes it difficult at times to keep one’s eye on the Big Picture.
Never mind the best-seller lists or Oprahs Book Club. The story that Willem Lange tells in his new book, A Dream of Dragons, helped him win the heart of his wife, Ida, five decades ago when he gave her the tale to read.
Ib Bellew has been asked to speak at The New England Publishing Conference on March 25 – 26, 2011 hosted by IPNE. Ib will be talking about “On the Cutting Edge: Trends in Book Publishing”. Here is a bit from his planned talk. “We are all publishers now. What to do? The Gatekeepers have fled [...]
We are excited and proud to present the three titles we have coming out this spring, for all three of them are exemplary books that well illustrate our goal of publishing high-quality, deeply engaging material.
My mother was a lover of poetry and gave me several collections of chestnuts – one of which, “Best-Loved Poems of the American People,” I cherish today, though it’s disintegrating – full of variously amusing, provocative, and inspiring poems.
Call me old-fashioned, but we at Bunker Hill Publishing are what used to be known as a “trade publisher,” a term hardly used today but current a decade or so ago.
If those folks can be convinced that a few small sacrifices are worth the benefits of having wolves return to the ecosystems they once thrived within, then the battle will be mostly won.
Reading has become a personal affair, a private communion with the between consumer and book. So used are we to this that we no longer think of the book as a technology, much less an engine for the voice.
Our first publication was Disney Looking at Painting, after which any title has been a doddle to produce! Reconciling high Brit culture with the demotic of Disney was a gas. Overall, it turned out quite well, with 110,000 copies in print.
In my opinion, a, e-book on an e-reader is like eating canned vegetables: lacking in nutrients. Well, maybe notexactly, but all of these e-reader/e-book gizmos excite me just as much as tinned legumes do, and I have avoided consuming them most of my life.
The beauty of Italy has always particularly enchanted me. I have plenty of company, of course; Italy has been a focus for travelers and pilgrims for move than a thousand years.
We are happy to present our Fall Catalog 2010. Please take a moment to look at the wonderful books that will be released during October and November 2010. Click here to download the pdf.
After a number of years working with freelance marketing and public relations firms, Bunker Hill Publishing has decided to move the service in-house
Once inside you can’t stop, you begin to read but you also enjoy being taken on a visual ride that spikes your curiosity to keep turning the pages.