Category Archives: Book culture

New book: Liberal Pilgrims

What it says on the back cover:

“Liberal Pilgrims chronicles the experiences of Unitarians and Universalists from New Bedford, Massachusetts, offering a window on the sometimes unexpected context and development of liberal religion in North America. New Bedford’s religious liberals viewed the world from diverse perspectives, using different symbols, language, and actions to express their religion as they progressed in their pilgrimages — spiritual and religious journeys that that continue to transform the American liberal religious tradition to this day. Their stories remind us of the rich and sometimes disparate origins of liberal religious practice. And their stories challenge today’s liberal pilgrims to continue to seek out new directions for liberal religion, constantly reinventing contemporary liberal religious experience.

“Some stories have never been told in detail before. There’s the story of Reverend William Jackson, the first African-American minister to declare himself a Unitarian when he addressed a meeting of the American Unitarian Association in New Bedford. There are the stories of North Unitarian Church, a church of immigrants, and Centre Church, which changed its affiliation from the Christian Connection to Unitarianism. Other stories include the story of Reverend John Murray Spear, Universalist and abolitionist, minister of an interracial church in the 1830s, who was driven out of New Bedford when he helped free a slave. There’s the story of Mary Rotch, perhaps the most original Unitarian theologian to come out of New Bedford, and a confidante of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller.

“Each of the 19 chapters tells about a different liberal religious person, community, or art work. By examining how these people and religious communities of the past lived out their religious ideals in their times, we learn more about our own liberal religion in the present day and its potential for the future.”

Yes, it’s now officially published. Yes, it contains the story of the very first African American minister to declare himself a Unitarian. Yes, it contains additional information about Unitarian and Universalist history, much of which has never before published.

And yes, it could use another round of copy editing, but I’m getting ready to move and I just don’t have enough time to go through the book again. But I promise it’s worth reading even with the typographical errors I’m sure are in it.

Go here to buy it. Cheap: $9.46 + shipping (I make no profit on the book). Cheaper still if you buy three or more.

Published (almost)

The preliminary edition of Liberal Pilgrims: Varieties of Liberal Religious Experience in New Bedford is now up on lulu.com. I call it a “preliminary edition” because I’ve never worked with lulu.com before, and I want to see a physical copy of the book before I decide it’s really OK. I’ll let you know when it’s really ready for release

The back cover copy reads: Continue reading →

Indexing

I am deep in the process of creating an index for this book project I’m working on. Who knew indexing could be so much fun? It’s just as much fun as mapping out all the links in a fairly large Web site — for after all, a book with an index is merely another kind of hypertext, using slower technology.

Binging on writing

I have spent the last few days binging on writing, trying to meet a self-imposed deadline on a big writing project. I have been writing in every spare moment (except those few spare moments when I was reading). I am going to miss my self-imposed deadline by a few days, but it has been an entirely delightful process: writing, revising, rewriting, and now proofreading and doing the final polishing. Tomorrow I get to start work on the index, something I am really looking forward to.

And what will be the final result? — a book-length project that perhaps only a dozen people will ever bother to read. Funnily enough, I have not been adversely affected by the thought of the small size of my expected readership. The dozen people who will read this book-length project will really care about the subject, and what I’ve written is reasonably well-crafted and well-structured. Above all, the process has been thoroughly enjoyable, from the initial conception right through the final revision. I guess I just like to write.

Writing project

I managed to get myself involved in a big writing project. This project has been sucking up all my free time. Some people would say that this project is a waste of my time, since hardly anyone will read it once it’s done. There are three reasons why hardly anyone will read this writing project:

(1) This writing project is a book of sermons. People don’t read sermons any more, except maybe seminarians, and of course those high school students who have to read Jonathan Edwards’s sermon about dropping spiders into a fire.

(2) Worse yet, all these sermons are about the history of Unitarians and Universalists in New Bedford. No one wants to read sermons about New Bedford Unitarians and Universalists, except a dozen or so New Bedford Unitarian Universalists.

(3) Worst of all, a potential reader will have to pay for these sermons. (Church budgets being what they are, our church can’t afford to print them in-house.) I will publish them on lulu.com and sell them at cost, but most people who read sermons are used to having churches give them away for free.

When I am feeling enthusiastic, I think maybe a dozen people might buy this book. Then I remember that these are sermons with footnotes (yes, I have gone back and footnoted everything), and then I think maybe five people will buy this book, and two of those people will be me.

So why am I doing this? Why am I spending hours and hours writing, and rewriting, and fact-checking, and footnoting, and proofreading? Because it’s fun, that’s why. Some people participate in National Novel Writing Month, and they write novels that no one will ever read. Me, I like to write non-fiction, and do footnotes and a bibliography. Everyone needs a hobby, and so what if some of us have a hobby that involves creating books that no one will ever read.

Score card

Bookstore score card for the day:
— Three bookstores in three cities (Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco).
— Three books (Chuang Tzu, Ch’ing dynasty memoir, 19th C. English novel).
— One bumpersticker reading “HOWL if you [heart] City Lights Books”.

What a great vacation.

The future of paper-based books

I finally got around to reading the July, 2008, issue of the Independent Book Publisher’s Association newsletter (Carol is a member of IBPA), and read about the Espresso Book Machine, which “starts with a PDF and 15 minutes later produces a finished bound book.” You can buy one from On Demand Books to put into your bookstore or print shop — for about $50K, which is so expensive you’re unlikely to see one in your home town next week.

But I’ll bet the price is going to come down quickly, and I’ll bet that there’s going to be an ongoing demand for paper-based books for quite some time. So here are four possible scenarios: (1) Libraries will start installing one of these next to the copy machines, allowing library patrons to produce paper-based copies of books in the public domain. (2) Bookstores will install these, and they’ll get especially heavy use at author signings, so you can get your favorite author to sign his or her out-of-print books. (3) Colleges and universities will install these, allowing their professors to assign out-of-print books to students, and allowing easier publication of dissertations. (4) A few big megachurches will install these machines, allowing them to print out the latest inspirational tome by their senior pastor, as well as the church cookbook.

So — those of you who are writers, readers, librarians, professors, and ministers — do you think there is a bright future for printing on-demand bound books on-site?

At Arisia: whither short fiction and magazines?

I had to leave Arisia around three this afternoon, because tomorrow is a work day. I attended one particularly thought-provoking panel discussion, “the Changing Face of SF/F Magazines,” on the future of future of paper-based magazines. The panelists included two publishers, one of whom publishes online and the other of whom publishes on paper, and two authors. All the panelists agreed that it’s becoming more difficult, financially speaking, to publish a magazine devoted to short fiction — costs of paper, printing, and distribution keep going up. The consensus among the panelists was that eventually we’re going to see paper-based magazines die out in favor of some sort of Internet-based printing and distribution system.

But the panelists reached no consensus as to what is going to replace paper-based magazines. You can find Web-based science fiction magazines, but they typically don’t have enough money to pay authors well (or at all). There are authors, like the writers’ cabal behind Shadow Unit, who self-publish some of their work online and solicit donations. The panelists agreed that authors now have to worry about “branding” themselves; readers don’t just buy a work of fiction, they tend to buy an author’s “brand.” But no one was willing to predict the future of fiction periodicals; and all the panelists agreed that it was going to become harder to earn a living by writing short fiction.

The discussion broadened beyond paper-based magazines, and turned to books:– paper-based books are facing the same economic realities as paper-based magazines. There was more consensus about the direction books are going in:– books are now being published in multiple formats (e-books, other downloadable files, print-on-demand, and traditional books), and that trend will continue. But the situation is still very much in flux, and no one knows quite how it’s going to turn out.

I wonder if the monks who were scribes had these kinds of conversations among themselves when Gutenberg started printing books on his printing press.

Moby-Dick marathon (again)

It’s time for the annual Moby-Dick Marathon. The marathon takes place each year on the anniversary of the date that Herman Melville shipped out of New Bedford harbor on board the whaleship Achushnet. Over some twenty-five hours, volunteers read Moby-Dick aloud in its entirety. We live right across the street from where the Marathon takes place, and Carol has spent quite a bit of time at the Marathon already, but the way my schedule worked out I had to write my sermon today. I finally went over at about ten o’clock.

It was the usual late-night Moby-Dick Marathon scene: everyone there was quiet, maybe half the people were following along in their own copy of the book, and a few people were dozing. Not exactly a hopping Saturday night scene, but exactly the kind of scene many of us book sluts wouldn’t mind seeing every Saturday night. Unfortunately, I have to get up early tomorrow morning to go to work, so I left after about half an hour.

Carol at the Moby-Dick Marathon

Carol taking pictures from the balcony at the Moby-Dick Marathon.