For The Guardian, Ellie Violet Bramley writes about judging books by their covers. The pandemic has intensified the recent shift towards books being promoted on social media and their covers being treated, as The Bookseller creative editor Danny Arter puts it “almost like an accessory.”
Vanessa Friedman looks at back issues of the short-lived Bay Area magazine Rags, which was the first publication to pinpoint, in 1970, the arrival of street style as “a discrete fashion sector.” Waverly Press has recently reissued the complete run of Rags in a box set comprising thirteen issues. What’s clear from flipping through this edition, Friedman writes, is that magazines “serve to capture a moment not just in time, but also in shifting identity—are, in fact, perhaps better conceived to capture that elusive thing, the shift itself, than any other medium.”
In an internal email, Jonathan Karp, the president and CEO of Simon & Schuster, has declined to fulfil the demands of a petition by the company’s employees to cancel Mike Pence’s book deal and to sever ties with its distribution client Post Hill Press, which is publishing a book by one of the officers who shot Breonna Taylor.
The New York Times Union is advocating for the right to “retroactively correct the bylines of transgender journalists who change their names.” According to an email from NewsGuild, the paper’s management responded that “retroactively correcting deadnames would be ‘fraught.’”
With Emory University’s Center for Digital Scholarship, Post45 has launched a data collective to peer review and house postwar literary data on an open-access website.
Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss has backed out of a bid to buy Tribune Publishing, the company that owns the New York Daily News and the Chicago Tribune, among other newspapers across the country. Wyss’s proposal was expected to beat an offer by hedge fund Alden Global Capital. “The development casts further doubt on whether journalists at Tribune newspapers can avoid a takeover by the hedge fund, which has a reputation for deep cost-cutting,” the Washington Post reports.
