publishing:
       
Image taken from Hans Ulrich Obrist’s interview with Walther Konig. | 032c #21. All the books that arrive stay first on big tables. I come in very early in the morning, when no one else is here yet, look at everything and decide where it is going: if it will be offered in a certain department, if it’s a standing order that needs to be sent somewhere, how to enter it bibliographically, if an additional text needs to be prepared for it, which branch gets it, etc. – we have all these big compartments. And that is essential for me, because my whole memory of titles comes from having held each and every book in my hands. Lists of titles or other systems don’t help me remember anything. But if I have actually physically handled a book, then it sticks permanently in my head. Now, as you can imagine, every day we receive mountains of books, so this process can take hours. But keeping it this way is very important to me, and it’s something I learned from Mayer too. If we got a new book about Kirchner for instance, he didn’t explain who Kirchner was, but what literature existed about him, what had been published by or about Kirchner in past years. It’s a genius method to record books in one’s bibliographic memory. - Walther Konig

Image taken from Hans Ulrich Obrist’s interview with Walther Konig. | 032c #21.

All the books that arrive stay first on big tables. I come in very early in the morning, when no one else is here yet, look at everything and decide where it is going: if it will be offered in a certain department, if it’s a standing order that needs to be sent somewhere, how to enter it bibliographically, if an additional text needs to be prepared for it, which branch gets it, etc. – we have all these big compartments. And that is essential for me, because my whole memory of titles comes from having held each and every book in my hands. Lists of titles or other systems don’t help me remember anything. But if I have actually physically handled a book, then it sticks permanently in my head. Now, as you can imagine, every day we receive mountains of books, so this process can take hours. But keeping it this way is very important to me, and it’s something I learned from Mayer too. If we got a new book about Kirchner for instance, he didn’t explain who Kirchner was, but what literature existed about him, what had been published by or about Kirchner in past years. It’s a genius method to record books in one’s bibliographic memory. - Walther Konig


LA Review of Books | The Death of the Book [April 2011]

Pity the book.  It’s dead again.  Last I checked, Googling “death of the book” produced 11.8 million matches.  The day before it was 11.6 milion.  It’s getting unseemly.  Books were once such handsome things.  Suddenly they seem clunky,  heavy, almost fleshy in their gross materiality.  Their pages grow brittle.  Their ink fades.  Their spines collapse.  They are so pitiful, they might as well be human.

The emphasis shifts with each telling, but every writer, editor, publisher, bookseller, and half-attentive reader knows the fundamental story.  After centuries of steady climbing, book sales leveled off towards the end of  the 1900s.  Basic literacy began to plummet.  As if television and Reaganomics were not danger enough, some egghead lunatics went and  built a web—a web!—out of nothing but electrons.  It proved a sneaky and seductive monster.  Straight to our offices and living rooms, the web delivered chicken recipes, weather forecasts, pornography, the cutest kitten videos the world had ever seen.  But while we were distracted by these glittering gifts, the internet conspired to snare our friend the book, to smother it.

The alarm at first built gradually.  In 1999, Robert Darnton, writing in The New York Review of Books, consoled his readers that, all the grim prophecies notwithstanding, “the electronic age did not drive the printed word into extinction.”  The book seemed safe enough for a few years, in more danger from the avarice of the carbon-based conglomerates that ate up all the publishers, than from anything in silicon.  Safe until the fall of 2007, when lady Amazon released her hounds. Within a month of the Kindle’s debut, the New Yorker was writing of the “Twilight of the Books.”  (Cue soundtrack: all minor keys, moody cello.)  The London Times worried that “the slow death of the book may be with us.”

[Text: Ben Ehrenreich]

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