PUBLISHERS PAST: PHARMA PRODUCT PLACEMENT SHOCK!

One of this blog's areas of interest is in publishers past. I'm working on a book proposal PUBLISH AND BE DAMNED which will look at the actual publishers of controversial and dangerous books...and occasionally this blog will feature publishers from the past. As a trained historian, one of my interests is how nothing is that new in the world..and that is certainly true in an industry that has been around a good eight hundred years.

So today we feature John Newbery.  Sure, that name is familiar - it's this John Newbery

The Newbery Medal has been presented since 1922 by the ALA to "the most distinguished American children's book published the previous year". And why? because John Newbery is credited with being the first ever publisher of illustrated books for children. Newbery started his publishing operation in Reading, Berkshire around 1740 and soon moved to premises in St.Paul's Churchyard, which had always been a center for bookselling and publishing. He published - and perhaps wrote the first Mother Goose, the History of Goody Two Shoes and other books intended not just to instruct but to entertain children.

But like so many publishers over the ages, it wasn't so easy to make a living from that alone. He had a side business as a wholesale and retail druggist, and it was in this capacity that he met Robert James. James was a physician and inventor, author of A Medicinal Dictionary, with a History of Drugs, which featured contributions from Dr Johnson, no less, and in 1746 he hired Newbery as sales agent for his new invention that made his fortune, James' fever powder which was of course supposed to cure almost everything...The powder was infamous enough to be throughly investigated by the Royal Society in 1791.
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Horace Walpole and others extolled its virtues. But Newbery had the foresight to take his advertising for the new product a stage further, what we would deem as Product Placement (or, forgive the pun, a Powder Puff). And for all we moan about product placement in kids movies and TV shows as a modern phenomenon, we're not even close to the sheer gall of John Newbery..


One of his most successful childrens books was The History of Little Goody Two Shoes., the inspiring story of an orphan girl who only has one shoe until she meets the man of her dreams who gives her a pair...Project Gutenberg has a facsimile of Newbery's third edition of the book - there were to be many more. 

Chapter One of course sees the poor girl orphaned, with the woodcut above...and the very first sentence reads:

Care and Discontent shortened the Days of Little Margery's Father.--He was forced from his Family, and seized with a violent Fever in a Place where Dr. James's Powder was not to be had, and where he died miserably.

I defy my readers to come up with a more blatant pharma product placement than that - and indeed not only James, but Newbery himself, made his fortune from the powder, not the book. Nothing is new...

Nick W-W

TECH TRENDS - NOTES ON E-BOOKS 2

Another good post on e-books yesterday from Richard Curtis's Publishing in the 21st Century blog.

There is an assumption, which in my experience of helping publishers take their content online through the Publishing Technology online platforms pub2web and IngentaConnect, is entirely unjustified, is that it is a really simple business getting content online. And that ipso facto, authors - and e-retailers - should get much more of the cake than they were for. Things may change, but as this post nicely demonstrates, there is an enormous amount for publishers to deal with, even if they have had the foresight to StartwithXML. There are multiple different formats, a huge range of TLA's to come to terms with (try this one), and an enormous amount to be done to extract the metadata that is so critical to success online.

Some of this may become easier in time, but with formats and identifiers inevitably lagging behind technology (the industry still cannot work out whether we should use a unique ISBN for each format(, I cannot see this changing anytime soon. As many commentators have noted, most e-books right now are not very attractive renditions of print books being read on not especially attractive readers of one sort or another. There will be much more to come on this issue but I leave for now with a great cartoon from the excellent Bookslut blog from yesterday

reBlog from Joseph Esposito under: The Scholarly Kitchen

TECH TRENDS: NOTES ON E-BOOKS 1

 

I found this fascinating quote today:

While we continue to debate “p” vs. “e,” we should note a bigger shift in the publishing landscape:  from indirect or “channel” marketing to direct sales (from the publisher directly to the consumer).  Historically, “p” has been connected to indirect channel sales, but it’s increasingly clear that “e” is likely to be direct-marketed.Joseph Esposito under, The Scholarly Kitchen, Mar 2010

 

Well worth reading - short and to the point. The issue is not really about p v e, since both formats will continue in most cases and find their markets, but about fundamental changes in publishers business models that inevitably follow from these changes

 

 

Imprimatur Re(du)x: Coronet

Nice to welcome back an old imprint name from many years ago. The Bookseller reports that Coronet is being resurrected, having been closed in 2004. Looks to have a good new future, and has a new logo that won't come as a big surprise (see above, pictured with the new editor, Mark Booth). It's still under the aegis of Hodder, but of course the Hodder of today, a division of Hodder Headline which is a division of Hachette Livre, is a very different creature from the strongly religious Hodder and Stoughton founded in 1868. Coronet was - as many British publishers had in the post-war period - a nice way of publishing mass market paperbacks without besmirching the fine imprint of the main publisher. It did publish some good books - Ian Fleming reprints, Fay Weldon and I found some of these covers you might enjoy from the 70's.

I expect we will see something a little better for Stephen Gately

Nick W-W

(Imprimatur Rex will be a regular feature of the blog, in the belief that imprints have a life above and beyond the owners at any given time... Re(du)x is a poor attempt at a Latin pun.)

Books They Don't Want You To Read: The Texas School Board

Back in the 80's, I was publisher of Methuen Australia which as part of its list had a nice line in grade school educational books, reading especially. One new series featured very friendly looking witches on the cover. We were quickly warned by our reps on the ground that this series would not be considered by the State of Queensland because of the witches -  Queensland then was called the Deep North and was in many ways analogous to a Southern state - or even under the bizarre premiership of Joh Bjelke-Petersen closer to apartheid era South Africa. Queensland refused to allow its clocks to go forward at the same time as the rest of Australia, and infamously an airline pilot was allegedly fired for announcing

We are now landing in Brisbane. Please turn your watches back one century

We had a quandary though - with only five states who could possibly endorse and purchase a school book and a very competitive environment, it was almost impossible to turn your back on 20% of the market before you even went to press. Which brings us to Texas. A lot more states here in the US of course, but only a couple of them have major state textbook purchasing programs and probably none of them have the influence and power of Texas. There is a whole sub-industry, as one of my predecessors in another position discovered to our cost, of brokers who will encourage you to produce books specifically for Texas state adoption that then remain unsold in the Texas School Book Depository (well not this one..) and which if I recall correctly we were actually charged property taxes on since our unsold books were taking up state land.

We have here something very close to what we claim to despise in others, notably the controversy over textbooks in Japan that many claim deliberately distort elements of Japanese 20th century history. In Japan elected officials from the Ministry of Education appear to work very closely with private publishers to ensure a 'more appropriate' gloss on certain events. And in Texas we see a mandate that 'capitalism' be replaced throughout by 'free-enterprise system' and 'balance' put into discussions on civil rights, and Thomas Jefferson removed from lists of writers who inspired revolution. As with so much of what used to be called the 'Culture Wars' much of this leaves the average reader unaware of specific Conservative red-button issues and key words somewhat at a loss...but it is glosses and emphasis that really shape our view of History, not just the repetition of facts. There are certain points of view and people that this group just don't want the children of Texas to be exposed to, and that is a very dangerous thing.

So where will publishers stand on this? Interestingly, modern technology may make this less of an issue than it would have ten years ago. The ability to customize textbooks even down to classroom level may mean that American schoolchildren outside of Texas may still learn about Jefferson while back in the 80s the children of Sydney and Melbourne never did see our witch book. I will keep an eye on any statements by the major publishers on this issue and share them. I wonder though if Google will take a stand similar to that on China
Censorship is censorship...!!

Nick W-W

By way of introduction

A warm welcome to my new publishing blog, The Peripatetic Publisher. I have been planning this for a while but never quite managed to shake the idea that it is a self-indulgent exercise of interest only to me. We shall see.

You will find posts here in a number of categories that fascinate, bemuse or infuriate me, on issues in publishing past present and future. There is a category on imprints, which remain the most enduring way in which publishers announce and promote their products - and which survive all of the corporate shenanigans that make parent companies come and go - you will find these posts under the heading Imprimatur Rex: a category on Books They Don't Want You to Read - partly highlighting banned books but also looking at publishers' role as gatekeepers and occasionally as censors: a category on current issues and future trends, informed particularly by my experience of the last five years as Senior Business Consultant to Publishing Technology, the largest supplier of technology and related services for the publishing industry -you'll see these under Tech Trends. And some more personal posts from my checkered publishing past as and when they fit in -  The Ones That Got Away (and some that didn't...).

Nick W-W