And So It Goes

Now in the Publishing Business

I am now officially in the publishing business, courtesy of Amazon and the Amazon Kindle. I'm calling the venture "Jinrikisha Press".

It turns out that the Amazon Kindle Store allows self-publication of books: just format the text, upload it and the cover image,  and set a price, and (after a delay while they look over things) your book is ready for instant download to be read on a Kindle device (the large version, which is only available in the U.S., and the small version, which works internationally). If you don't own a Kindle or don't want to pony up the money for one, you can read e-books from Amazon through the free Kindle Reader for the iPhone  or for the PC (no Mac version yet).

And, thanks to things like Project Gutenberg, many old books about Japan which are now in the public domain text are now available in full (more or less).

Putting two and two together, some entrepreneurial (but lazy) types have grabbed those texts and have uploaded them to the Kindle Store and put them up for sale. Unfortunately, most of these have been lazy cut-and-paste jobs, leaving in the numerous scanning errors, line breaks at the end of each line, undigested-by-ASCII characters, and even the original headers from the copied source (one particularly lazy job I noticed even left in the (now non-functional) search box from the Internet Archive page).

Well, I can do better. I've taken some of those old books about Japan that I found interesting, copy-edited (yes, actual copy-editing) and formatted them properly, added some footnotes in a few places, and uploaded them to the Amazon Kindle Store. I've done this with four so far, and they've (finally) just gone "live".

I did a fairly straightforward clean-up and republication on those, but those are really test cases for the REAL book, one which I started work on before all the others and am still working on. This one is going to be a full-blown annotated version: I've got 214 historical footnotes so far on that book, and will probably add several more, at least, not to mention the background introduction and biography which I still have to write. More later when I'm closer to completion.

So far, the titles are in two categories. The first imprint, which I'm calling "Western Narratives of Old Japan", are travel books and memoirs by Westerners responding to Japan. So far, I have:

• Jinrikisha Days in Japan by Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore (1904), a fairly detailed -- and, on traditional Japanese culture, still relevant -- travel book by an American woman who was the first female trustee for the National Geographic Society and the person who came up with the idea of planting cherry trees in Washington, D.C.
• A Diplomatist's Wife in Japan, Volume 1 and Volume 2, by Mrs. Hugh Fraser (1899). Aka Mary Crawford Fraser (yes, she published under her married name), the American wife of British diplomat Hugh Fraser, recording their four years (1889-1894) in Japan as he negotiated the end of the "unequal treaties" Japan had been chafing under since 1859.

The second imprint I'm calling "Western Tales of Old Japan", and are fictional -- usually highly romanticized -- stories based in Japan but written by Westerners. The first title is:

• The Stolen Emperor by Mary Crawford Fraser (1904), which is a historical romance set in 13th-century Japan. Think Sir Walter Scott with kimonos.

I have some other titles in mind, but sometimes it's like looking for gold among the dross, as there is a fairly huge number of candidates to sift through. As I find more, I'll edit those, too, and add them to the collection. Someday, if I have enough of these collected, I may venture into regular printed editions.

Reading Lists

Recently, I was browsing through Google, trying to find a picture of the cover of a long-out-of-print book I have a copy of, when I came across the only webpage that had such a picture. Fine, but what stopped me in my tracks was the main URL: whatihaveread.net. Buh?

That is the URL for What I have read since 1974, and it is exactly -- if unimaginatively -- exactly as described. One Eric Leuliette of the Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder has kept track, since 1st grade, of every book he's ever read. He says in his FAQ that his mother started doing so because his school asked parents to keep track for a reading program, and he took over starting in the 5th grade. He's up to 2124 titles now, all numbered, with lots of data massaging.

While I, personally, have gone as far as cataloging the books I own* and attempt to shelve them in Dewey Decimal System order, this is WAY past the red line in obsessiveness in data collection. I mean, "Average length of book"? (224.85 pages.) " Average time spent to read a book"? (5.4 days.) Bar charts of pages read per year since 1974? (Peaks in 1982, 1983, and 1994.) And, of course, each of the 2124 books gets its own page, like the longest book he's read, #1365 (Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, 1432 pages completed on August 2, 1988). And I know it's the longest because, of course, there's a chart recording this data, too.

I have to admit, though, browsing through list going forward through time gives an interesting glimpse into Leuliette's development as a reader ("Hmm, he starts reading Young Adult books THERE. Oh, and I see the run of an obsession with Star Trek books in high school for awhile. Hmm, now the political biographies start. Oh look, a run of John McPhee books.").

I do wonder if he got anything out of Title #1664 in November 1994, though.

*The reason I was looking for the cover image in the first place, so I could insert it into my book catalog database, a program called Booxter, which takes the ISBN or UPC bar code info -- you can use your webcam or hook up your camcorder to function as a bar-code scanner -- and sucks up cataloging information from a variety of online library catalogs and booksellers to create its records. Normally, it downloads cover images, but older. obscure, or out-of-print books require a little human intervention.

Vincent Schiavelli

ROME -- Vincent Schiavelli, the droopy-eyed character actor who appeared in scores of movies, including "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Ghost," died Monday at his home in Sicily. He was 57.

He died of lung cancer, said Salvatore Glorioso, mayor of Polizzi Generosa, the Sicilian village where Schiavelli resided.
        - Associate Press obituary by Marta Falconi, from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Tuesday, December 27, 2005

Well, this is bad news. I've admired his work in countless movies (I remember Buckaroo Banzai in particular, and the "Humbug" episode of The X Files).  But it's also slightly weird, in that I was just discovering another side to the guy.

If you're reading this within a few days of my posting it, you should see to your left, in my list of books I'm reading, Vincent Schiavelli's book Many Beautiful Things: Stories and Recipes from Polizzi Generosa. I've put it aside for the moment -- actually, I left it by the bed and keep forgetting to put it in my bag when I leave for work each day -- but it's a lovely -- and hunger-inducing -- book about Schiavelli's encounter with his Sicilian roots in Polizzi Generosa, the town in Sicily where, according the obituary, he died. Which seems fitting, since his love for the town shines through in the book.

It's a pity, because Schiavelli's book made me want to visit Sicily and Polizzi Generosa, meet the people, maybe get a shave and a haircut (one of his cousins is a barber in town), visit one of the town's bakeries and try the pastries, and hey, maybe run into Vincent hanging around at the local cafe and have un caffè with him as we watch the world go by.

Sorry, Vincent.

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Four Thousand Back Issues

Today, I arrived home and found waiting for me a package from Amazon, something I'd ordered back in June when it was first announced for which I had been eagerly awaiting: The Complete New Yorker.

And they're being quite literal: it's an 8-disc set (computer DVDs) that contains every issue -- 80 years since 1925 -- of The New Yorker magazine, scanned in and indexed. The index and reading app alone takes up 600+ megabytes, and is very well designed, making reading easy.

So much of American journalistic and literary history is wrapped up in these pages it's astonishing: it's hard to name some literary or journalistic heavy hitter of the last 75 years who isn't represented in these pages. Truman Capote's In Cold Blood was first published here. John Hershey's Hiroshima was first published here, taking up the entire issue. Seymour Hersh's revelations about Abu Ghraib were first published here. Short stories by the likes of John Updike, James Thurber, Woody Allen, and J. D. Salinger (some never reprinted -- libraries that hold back issues containing uncollected Salinger stories protect them from zealous collectors).

I love the New Yorker. I subscribe (and sometimes get my issues faster than people in California, god knows why) and read it every week. This set helps explain why: lots of authors I've enjoyed -- inside and outside of the pages of the New Yorker -- have work here: Calvin Trillin, John McPhee, Susan Orlean, Garrison Keillor, Atul Gawande, Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Gopnik, and so on and so on: my chance to catch up with their stuff that I've missed (Calvin Trillin's old "U.S. Journal" articles, the ones that haven't been reprinted in book form, for instance) or dip into famous authors I haven't read yet (Robert Benchley, Rachel Carson, Brendan Gill, Joseph Mitchell (okay, I did read Joe Gould's Secret), Janet Malcolm, Philip Roth, John O'Hara, Susan Sontag, Alexander Wolcott, Dorothy Parker, and, of course, E. B. White (he did more than write Charlotte's Web, you know).

Lord, this is will keep me busy for a long time.