Last year I wrote a piece for the Reader magazine about ebooks, which explained to the relatively conservative and technophobic readership what they are, and how to go about reading them. The world of ebooks is changing fast, but they have been around much longer than most people realise–since 1971, in fact. That was the year that Michael S. Hart, who died on September 6th, aged 64, published the first ebook (the Declaration of Independence) to his Project Gutenberg. There are now 36,000 ebooks on the site, all of them free to download, and available in various formats. Hart was not well known, but his legacy is a revolution in the way we edit, publish, and distribute books. He saw the potential for electronic reading, and the widespread dissemination of literature and knowledge, at a time when computers lived in large, air-conditioned, and sealed facilities, and when handheld computing devices existed only in science fiction. An early obituary is here. Hart’s Wikipedia page is here.
Category Archives: Books
Cheap Oil and the Hunting of Whales
Andrew Nikiforuk has a piece over at the British Columbia-based web magazine The Tyee about whaling and the oil industry, reviewing a book about Moby Dick by energy banker, Robert Wagner Jr. Wagner’s reading of the novel in the context of the modern oil industry and its unwillingness to countenance alternatives offers an interesting perspective on our reliance on cheap oil, and the lengths to which we are prepared to go to defend it. As I’ve noted before, the hunting of whales in the Arctic, before Moby Dick was written, also has parallels with the oil industry in the twenty-first century. By about 1820, as the whales began to be ‘fished out’ in the Greenland sea, whalers moved on to the Davis Strait, to the West of Greenland, which, coincidentally, is where modern oil companies are preparing to drill for oil as their desperation for new reserves increases. The Davis Strait proved lucrative for a while, but a lot more dangerous, and even that, in the end, was fished out:
A couple of years ago Robert Wagner Jr., a well-known Houston energy banker, read the famous novel Moby Dick by Herman Melville, a former whaler. It’s a rambling and gritty tale about the 19th whaling industry and America’s first energy boom.
The narrative, which richly details the nature of an economic obsession, squarely harpooned Wagner, a good friend of the late energy critic, Matthew Simmons. “I was blown away by the synergies and the comparisons of whaling with the oil and gas industry, ” says Wagner.
For more than 40 years the 69-year-old banker financed Texas oil deals and had a front row seat to the world’s most volatile commodity while working for the likes of Bear Stearns and Arthur Andersen.
And so the maniacal pursuit of a white whale to illuminate North American homes haunted Wagner. It also reminded him how every age irrevocably passes into another whether people are prepared for change or not.
“The rampant obsessive exploration, production and consumption of hydrocarbons that saturates our society today can be read much like the situation for the men on the Pequod,” notes Wagner. The world of “There she blows” and “Give it to him” actually led, if not descended to “Drill, baby, drill.”
Moby Map
I love the Internet. I really do. People are out there doing imaginative things, and coming up with wonderful stuff like Moby Map, an interactive map based on Moby Dick, which “compiles over 350 geographic locations from the novel (with a few mysteries still unsolved!) into an interactive flash based Google map of the world. Also included is the plotted course of the Pequod, accompanied by descriptions from throughout the novel and icons showing historic whaling grounds.” Brilliant.
Hat-tip to Power Moby Dick.
Following the Detectives: Real Locations in Crime Fiction
Crime stories and fictional detectives are often identified by their locations: Morse and Oxford; Holmes and London; Rebus and Edinburgh; Marlowe and Los Angeles; Warshawski and Chicago. So the idea of a book exploring the cities and wider locations used in crime fiction is an interesting one. The editor of Following the Detectives, a book which does just that, is Maxim Jakubowski, a well known anthologist, editor, crime fiction aficionado, and former owner of the late lamented Murder One book shop on Charing Cross Road in London. The book’s 11 contributors, besides Jakubowski himself, include many well known names in contemporary crime fiction and crime fiction criticism, such as John Harvey, who writes about his own Nottingham-based detective, Charlie Resnick, J. Kingston Pierce, of The Rap Sheet, and Sarah Weinman, critic at the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times.
Following the Detectives is a smart, modern take on the reference book, informed by the breezy informality of the Web, but playing to all the tactile advantages of a physical book in an age of ePub, and iBooks. Production values are high: heavy paper, with an embossed card cover, lots of photos and illustrations, useful double-page maps, further reading, trivia boxes, and notes on other crime writers connected with a given place. The book feels and looks great.
The content is well done too. Twenty-one locations–15 cities and six regions–are featured in the main chapters, from Los Angeles, and San Francisco, to Iceland, Paris, Sweden, Nottingham, and Shropshire. All are represented by at least one fictional detective. The colours are bright, the style is consistently light and easy, and I can see this going down well as a Christmas or birthday gift.
In his introduction, Jakubowski explains that the idea was to create a book that was neither a travel guide, nor a detailed reference book, but one that had something of both. Size and weight rule out taking this with you on a walking tour of San Francisco, Edinburgh, Oxford, or Ystad–there are walking tours in all those places anyway–but Following the Detectives is a good place to start thinking about it. Better than that, though, it introduces writers, and characters, locating them in their respective cities in ways that help them make more sense to outsiders. For example, Michael Carlson’s chapter on George V. Higgins, Robert. B. Parker, and Boston, brings local knowledge that non-Bostonians may never grasp on their own, such as the significance of long-term sporting failure on the collective psyche of a city’s inhabitants; an explanation, he speculates, for a Bostonian sense of proportion in comparison with New Yorkers.
I’d recommend this book as a gift for a crime fiction fan, but I have some reservations that go beyond the book itself and speak to the environment in which it is published. As I have said, this is a beautiful book: heavy, as well made as a ‘paperback’ can be, smartly designed, and written. But I can’t help feeling, with a heavy heart, that what it really needs to be is not a book, but a website, or perhaps an iPad app. Ten years ago, when I was making a modest living writing and editing large-scale reference books, I would come across something on the Web that warranted a link in the references of an entry. Now I think it is the other way around: the Web is the first place I’d go for information at this level. While reading Following the Detectives I wanted links to click and internal threads to follow, I wanted more detail on writers who were name checked. More than that, I wanted it to have the potential to grow over time, to become something truly inclusive, encyclopaedic, something to follow. Although each chapter includes lists of useful websites, typing out web addresses exactly as they are written is a real drag. For example, imagine typing out these, rather than clicking them:
http://www.frommers.com/destinations/florida/0222010007.html
http://visitreykjavik.is/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-13/28_read-1131
I suspect that anyone who does take the time to type those wouldn’t go back to the book for quite a while.
If physical books are going to survive at all in the long run, they need to offer something that isn’t available online, or on rich media devices like the iPad. This book offers a physical, tactile experience that the Web can’t match, and the focus on real locations is well conceived, and beautifully presented. What strikes me though, is that we interrogate, rather than read, books like these, and that we do so for the content, and for the connections between ideas, rather than how they feel. Books have a resistance that works in their favour in some cases: the big, simple maps in this book are particularly good as a tool for envisaging the geography, of, say, Edinburgh in Rankin’s Rebus novels. But for making and following links, for referencing connected but external sources, and for speed, the Web does it better.
Buy Following the Detectives from the publisher New Holland. Use the discount code Routledge to get 20% off.
Reasons For Self-Publishing: Lessons from History
… Owing to my having been my own publisher and thereby displeasing all London bookseller/proprieters of reviews I am to be most severely handled in the Quarterly, Westminster, Monthly Lit. Gazette &c–but how Edin. will treat me I do not know. You will, however, be glad to learn that I have the consolation that I have 7,000 subscribers amounting to no less than £7,000!–My first object in being my own publisher was to get the book up so as to be a credit to the nation and all concerned, my 2nd object was to give it to the public cheaper, and to show thereby how the booksellers impose on both the authors and the public–and lastly that I might keep the property in my own hands.
–From a letter by Sir John Ross to William Scoresby, 28th April 1835. Quoted in Tom and Cordelia Stamp, William Scoresby, Arctic Scientist (1976).
