Weekly Links: October 15th, 2022
Bestsellers aren't really bestsellers, trash books, and my computer draws the Moon
This week, I’m using Diffusion Bee to draw the Moon, based on this NASA map. Here is the Moon as Paul Klee might have painted it:
And here is Picasso’s Moon:
Surprisingly, for all his productivity and range, I am unable to find any real pictures of the Moon by Pablo Picasso, though my search is definitely warped by the presence of the Grateful Dead song “Picasso Moon” and a bunch of ghastly tribute paintings by fans. Deadheads ruin everything. On to the links!
Are Bestsellers really Bestsellers?
Jordan Pruett at Public Books investigates. I’ve heard grousing about the practices of the New York Times’s bestseller lists for ages, but never properly looked into it. As it turns out, there’s so little actual math involved in the list, the Times was able to successfully argue in a lawsuit that it’s actually editorial content, not reporting, and thus protected by the First Amendment. There’s a lot to dig into in Pruett’s article, but the gist is simple: the Times segregates its data by publishing format, which has deeply skewed which types of books make the list. As any bookseller can tell you, the absolute bestsellers in fiction are SFF, romance, and mystery/thrillers. Not incidentally, these genres are still overwhelmingly published only as paperbacks. This means that, until genre authors started getting published in hardcover in the 1980s, the hardcover fiction list was dominated by highbrow literary authors. They sold peanuts compared to the paperback pulp authors, but thanks to the Times’s sorting of the data, this wasn’t obvious to your average reader. The whole report is really worth reading.
Genius Grants
The 2022 MacArthur grants have been announced. You’re not really supposed to call them “genius grants” anymore, but the MacArthur Foundation definitely wants to you to think their fellows are all geniuses. Writing, literacy, & book-adjacent geniuses this year include:
P. Gabrielle Foreman, a literary historian specializing in African American history
Joseph Drew Lanham, ornithologist and nature writer
Robin Wall Kimmerer, ecologist and nature writer whose book Braiding Sweetgrass is absolutely adored by people I either greatly admire or deeply loathe (I haven’t read it yet)
Kiese Laymon, novelist and essayist focusing on African American life & culture
Overall, it seems like an interesting list, and I’ve added a few books (from Kimmerer and Lanham) to my TBR pile. The MacArthur Foundation sometimes makes odd choices and be kind of insufferable when marketing their not-genius geniuses, but I’m a big fan of giving talented oddballs lots of money and attention.
Fine Press Books on a Budget
LibraryThing, the open-source alternative to GoodReads, is a mess and I love it. While the rest of the online world lays out the runway for Web3 and strapping LED screens to our eyeballs so that Mark Zuckerberg can sell our eye-movement patterns to advertisers, the good luddites at LT are still going about their internet business like it’s 1999. They have honest-to-god message boards, untouched by coders since the second Bush administration, and among them one of my favorites is the Fine Press Forum. It’s an especially good place if you adore handmade fine press books, but can’t actually buy them without risking your marriage. (Obviously, I’m talking about a friend of a friend here.)
Fortunately, user dlphcoracl has put together a thread for Book Collecting on a Budget, condensing years of fine press wisdom into a brief, useful list of places to look for luxury books below their usual luxury prices. I am perusing it heavily.
New Galileo Text Just Dropped
A few months ago, a famous Galileo manuscript held by the University of Michigan was revealed as a counterfeit. I even covered it here. But even as the archives taketh away, they also giveth: Matteo Cosci, historian at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, has uncovered a new article by Galileo written under a pseudonym. Medievalists.net has a good, clear recap of the long, complicated story:
Starting in the late 1970s, in order to explain the reasons behind this letter, scholars hypothesised that the accompanying letter was proof that Galileo had actually written a controversial treatise, Considerazioni Astronomiche di Alimberto Mauri. This treatise was known to have been written under pseudonym, and since its publication in 1606 it had been attributed by some to Galileo himself. For one, Fortunio Liceti — Galileo’s colleague at the University of Padua — referred to Aliberto Mauri as someone who “pretended” to be an astronomer though he might rather have been an expert mathematician.
The treatise in question was a rather scandalous attack on Aristotelian astronomy, hence the pseudonym Alimberto Mauri. The way Galileo accidentally let the mask slip is wonderfully petty: in a trove of notes kept at Florence’s Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Galileo complains about criticism of his recently published work. Cosci, being a good historian, tracked down those criticisms and noticed that none of them mentioned Galileo by name—they were all targeting Alimberto Mauri. This is why you always check your sources!
The Trash Library
That’s not a judgment by me, but a statement of fact: the library of the Ankara garbage collection service is composed entirely of books that have been thrown away. Garbage collectors started keeping the books, and before long they had enough books (more than 6,000) to fill an abandoned brick factory, which they converted into a library. You can get the full story here, at CNN. For my part, I’ve never thrown a book away in the trash, but I try my best to make sure I never buy any books that I would want to throw away in the first place. I am unable to find any word on what kind of books the people of Ankara throw away, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up.
That’s it for this week. I really will have a short thing up later this weekend, I promise!
Happy reading! Here’s another ukiyo-e moon, by pseudo-Hiroshige: