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| Penguin designs should be seen beyond the bookshelf Just because the Penguin-branded products I sell are not books themselves doesn't mean they don't promote readingReading the polemic by Anthony Cummins on Penguin's continued brand evolution for the 21st century – partly developed by yours truly – last week, I nearly spilled coffee from my Man and Superman Penguin mug and fell out of my Big Sleep deckchair.On recovery, apart from wanting to correct obvious mistakes (I instigated the project, not Penguin; it started in 2002, not 2005; the stripe wasn't dropped for "variety"; the market for the designs is as wide as the original books), I also wanted to give the other side of the argument.Cummins got one thing right when he quoted the OED. These objects really are designed "to appeal to a consumer by association with a desirable lifestyle": a style of life based on ideas, language, words, wit, and reading. I have no idea whether any of the million-plus people who have bought (and used) these objects has ever read a book. Does it matter if not? What's certain is they're surrounding themselves with totems of book culture. Fetishising? Celebrating the essence of books, more like. What was it Anthony Powell said: "books do furnish a room"? Well, bookish objects can express ideas and furnish a room in the same way; sometimes, more succinctly and emphatically. What's that bookcase for if not to show off what you've read, and therefore decorate a home with your erudition? The unique opportunity presented by working with Penguin was to point people at the "unlooked for", to be witty, and to reference original work (sometimes out-of-print, such as Country Life by HE Bates). Penguin had the foresight to see this potential. So where's the sin in providing a functional object along the way as a vehicle to do this? Art Meets Matter's design objects, based not just on Penguin Books, but also Faber & Faber's archive, have not only populated many homes but also helped small, independent retailers – including booksellers – pay their bills and compete with much larger centralised buying groups.But this project was, and still is, an opportunity to re-present ideas about books, authors and individual work to a new audience via designed objects. And there is nothing new about branding objects in this way. What is unusual, in a sea of logos "stuck on stuff" and often empty "styling", is the opportunity to work with a corporation, and a brand identity, that carries with it generations of personal experience all the way from the 1930s.Penguin's classic banded design series had long since been abandoned when I was a child, but so many had been sold that I saw them everywhere I went; they were imprinted on my young, impressionable mind. As an adult, I walked past a set of Penguin spines, inherited from my partner's mother, on the way to read to my own children. They began to obsess me because I felt there was a design potential here, which wasn't just nostalgic recycling. Great word, nostalgia, by the way: often used pejoratively, but the Greek root, nóst(os), means "a return home". This was the genesis of exploring the Penguin paperback design for itself in direct relation to a functional object.Our new Penguin Bookchase board game (yes, it's all about books) is designed specifically to "play" with the idea of books. When first launched, the most asked question was "do you have to have read lots of books to play?" The answer of course is no. I wanted a game where a child could play an adult who has read everything and still win. One of the hazards in the game is dropping a book in the bath. As a result you must leave it on the Treasure Island book square to dry out. If just one child is intrigued enough to pick up the real Treasure Island as a result, hasn't the game done its job? It has for me. With a commercial hat on, I'd love to sell 10,000 copies and if each of those copies is played once only with six people for an hour that's an additional 60,000 hours of human happiness because of books. Of course, there have been challenges. While we've had emails from as far afield as a cybercafé in Dharamsala requesting titles and talking about what a particular book might mean, there remain retail buyers out there who think Evelyn Waugh is a woman and can't understand why Vile Bodies is a great, ironic gift. We've had phone calls from people who want a Jude the Obscure mug but would like to "have it in pink, please". Even so, call me old-fashioned, perhaps even naive, but I believe that anything which gets people interested in the idea of words and books is a good idea.BooksellersMarketing & PRTony Davisguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
12 books of Christmas to give your true love and others What began with Charles Dickens and A Christmas Carol has become a holiday publishing tradition. rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
Truth or Fiction by Jennifer Johnston Penelope Lively spends three days in Ireland with a whiskey-loving writer and his ménageA middle-aged English journalist, Caroline Wallace, is dispatched to Dublin by her literary editor to interview 90-year-old Desmond Fitzmaurice, in order to revive interest in this forgotten Irish writer. So far, so straighforward. First we are introduced to Caroline, partner for 10 years to a man who had never suggested marriage. He suddenly does so while emerging from the bathroom, and she is furious: "Don't you realise, you bloody prick, we could have had kids." She flounces off to Dublin, in tears, and finds herself caught up in the shenanigans of a bunch of "eccentric Irish people".This is the epithet she hurls at them, by the end – along with "lying toads". Passions run high after a few days spent with Desmond and his women: current wife Anna and ex-wife Pamela, whom he meets in the local pub on Thursdays for a cosy session. I think this novel is about old age and the capricious nature of memory, but the title is deliberate, and there is a teasing suggestion that Desmond's vaunted memories, which he is in the process of taping, are essentially imaginative. Caroline certainly thinks so. I was one jump ahead of her when my reaction to his tale of how he shot a Shakespeare-quoting Nazi on the day that "hostilities ceased" was one of irritated incredulity, and was glad to have her agree: "That was, of course, fiction." Or was it? This is where the teasing nature of the ambiguity becomes tiresome rather than tantalising. I wanted to know, one way or the other. But then Desmond is exasperating, and intended to be seen as thus. He is congenitally selfish, having apparently required both actress wives to subordinate their careers to his demands; and when, towards the end, Anna has a fall, he ignores her cries, goes to bed, sends next day for the by now maddened Caroline, and declines to visit the hospital.Caroline becomes more and more fed up with her mission and with this bunch of oldies as the days progress, and she has the reader's sympathy. But these are Jennifer Johnston characters – one has met their like before – and there may also be a spot of tongue-in-cheek satirising of the visiting Brit unable to fathom the wayward Irish. Certainly she cannot cope with Desmond, who is able to switch from beguiling charm to bumbling elderly incompetence at the drop of a glass of whiskey – he is on his third of the first day by page 50. She sees him as whisking old age on and off like an actor changing costume. And then there is Pamela, also partial to a drink, caustic, witty, clearly a lot more fun than resident Anna, referred to by her husband as the banatee – Gaelic for woman of the house.Desmond is obsessed with his mother; his brooding memories are filled with her singing nursery rhymes to him. He is driven to and from his pub meetings with Pamela by his old batman, whom he calls Phaeton. Actually, I don't think you have to be a prosaic visiting Brit to have your teeth set on edge by that sort of whimsy. Though we are not meant to like Desmond, far from it – merely perhaps to acknowledge him as a card, to be entertained, to feel a frisson of sympathy. He is pretty game, for 90.I pass, I'm afraid. I had had enough of him, by the end, and was on the plane back to London with Caroline. Truth or Fiction is short – a novella rather than a novel. Johnston can pack much into a brief space; her hallmark, as a writer, is stylish economy. That gift is plentifully evident in this book: succinct dialogue, neat establishment of the main characters. But here, telling brevity seems to teeter on the edge of sparsity, leaving me wondering if a short story had somehow got longer, or a novel had failed to match up to its promise. I could have done with more underpinning, some respite from the helter-skelter progress of the three days Caroline spends in Ireland. That said, there is artful writing here, even if by the end one fails to be charmed by Desmond and his circle, and is confused about questions of truth or fiction – much like the unfortunate Caroline, whose own first-person testimony serves as introduction and coda: "I should try to write about what had happened . . . just for myself."Penelope Lively's Family Album is published by Fig Tree.FictionPenelope Livelyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Lucy Mangan: Read it and weep 'If 100 books a year is already my limit, that means that I will be lucky to get through another 3,000 before I die'For the last couple of years, I have been keeping a list of the books I read each year. It excludes all re-reads, any tome skim-read purely for work purposes and any book started but not finished, whether through bad luck, mistake or rabid dislike. (You've got to have rules, people, otherwise it's biblio-anarchy out there.)It started when I discovered Miss Read's series of books telling the (very small) adventures of fine English folk in a variety of fine English villages. Each was a delightful read, a crisp palate-cleanser between meatier courses, but one wasn't instantly readily distinguishable from the other, so I needed to keep a record in order to be sure I had consumed the entire, splendidly astringent oeuvre and not accidentally ingest the same thing twice.It is quite illuminating to look back on a year's reading. In 2008, I read 125 books; this year, just over 100. I think the drop is due mainly to the fact that I was writing my own book for much of the year (about getting married – The Reluctant Bride, out in May; excuse the plug, but it is my first. Plug, not book), but I do worry that I'm slowing down. If 100 a year is already my limit, that means that I will be lucky to get through another 3,000 before I die. And Wolf Hall's going to account for at least 350 of those. It's a worry.Speaking of Wolf Hall, I notice only when I look at the last few years of reading collected together how historical fiction – a genre previously entirely absent from my shelves – has taken root. There are books aimed at children, such as Meg Rosoff's The Bride's Farewell, Jane Eagland's Wildthorn and Mary Hooper's Newes From The Dead, through to Forever Amber, Katherine, a hefty helping of Philippa Gregory and (this year's Miss Read) the prolific Norah Lofts and on to the aforementioned Wolf Hall, which I started just before midnight on 31 January and which will therefore count under the Rigid & Inflexible Rules Of The List as a 2009 book. This says something about my changing tastes and a lot about my unchanging methods of dealing with the frothing madness of New Year parties.Why have I suddenly started to embrace the genre, though? I think it is probably because they offer me a great two-for-one deal. Yes, they offer all the usual pleasures of reading. But I think I am also consuming them as practical guidebooks. What lingers in my mind when I put them away is not the lavishly romantic plots or vividly rendered characters – it's the descriptions of how to make poultices, thresh wheat, construct door hinges, do clever things with animal fat that I retain. I am basically teaching myself survival skills in a way that doesn't involve leaving the house and living in the woods with very farsighted but unhygienic communities. I'm storing knowledge nuts for a post-apolcalyptic winter.Other than that, I can discern very few patterns. Every year I seem mostly to skip about. It's good to know that I can survive a move from Philip Roth to Julia Roberts Confidential: The Unauthorised Biography without a stress fracture of the brain, but I think I should at least try to get through more of the fibrous former instead of giving in any more frequently to the lure of the latter pap.Or should I? Because what is most frightening is that beyond these few poultice-and-lard-based facts, I can remember almost nothing about any of the books I have read other than whether or not I enjoyed them. They seem to have slipped through me leaving not a trace behind. So perhaps there is no such thing as improving literature after a certain age. Perhaps the list is destined to become not a record for later reflection but simply an aide-memoire. That is not a happy thought with which to greet the dawn of 2010. I hope I forget I had it soon.FictionLucy Manganguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The truth about my 'junket' in paradise Lionel Shriver on the trip she was commissioned to write about by a newspaper – which then villified her as a 'junket author'In 2007, the Sunday Times Âsuggested that if I ever needed to go somewhere to research a novel, I might combine the trip with an assignment for its travel section. The protagonist in my new novel, So Much For That, dreams of escaping the hassle and expense of New York for a cheap, serene haven in the developing world. Pemba sounded perfect – an island off the coast of east Africa whose air is permeated by the aroma of cloves. But to end my book in Pemba, I would have to go there. I rang the Sunday Times.Why would Pemba make a good travel piece, asked the editor. It draws very few tourists, I said. So it's a great place to escape the bane of travelling: other people. Sold.The newspaper covered my Âexpenses, as it does for any travel writer. Pemba's only resort, Fundu Lagoon (pictured), allowed a free stay, as it does for any travel writer. I filed my article. Fortunately, Pemba also proved ideal for my last chapter. For reasons of consistency – all locations in the book exist in real life – I cite Fundu Lagoon in the novel. I also thank the resort in my acknowledgement, merely to show good manners.Where's the scandal? Bizarrely, the Sunday Times itself insinuated last weekend that we sleazebag novelists are now auctioning off product placement in our books. Described as being "in the mood for a holiday", I must have traded a setting in my novel for a freebie in the sun.I'm never in the mood for Âholidays, having also published in the same paper a long essay on why I detest them. Pemba was work. Fundu never offered me anything in Âexchange for a Âmention in my novel. The headline "Junket ÂAuthor Plugs ÂParadise" impugns all travel writers, any of whom could be tagged a "junket author".But then, "Business Expenses Covered by Employer" wouldn't sell papers. The article surely aims to sow envy and bitterness in its readership. "What an outrage!" spits the subtext. "Sundowners! Lemon-grass oil massages! Here's somebody whose work is sometimes pleasant!" For such articles to find an eager audience, I worry that much of the British public must be seethingly miserable in their jobs.Sunday TimesNewspapers & magazinesLionel Shriverguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |