Wednesday 18 November 2009

Nice thing






The publishers don't inform me of such things. Why would you tell the writer, after all? So I find that one recent book has won a prize:

Images of such award winners cannot even begin to convey the tactile experience of holding one of these books in your hands. But they will, hopefully, give you some sense (however paltry) of what has been lost in modern-day publishing.

This year's Judges' Choice Awards went to Circle Press for its printing of Full Circle Editions' (a new publishing house founded, in part, by Harry Potter's "discoverer-in-chief") The Burning of the Books (a poem sequence by George Szirtes based on 1981 Nobel Laureate' Elias Canetti's "book destruction nightmare" Auto da Fé, illustrated in gravure by Ron King)...

I know it's not the text that has won but the book as a production. Still. Maybe they'll tell me tomorrow, or next week. The production is beautiful and Ron King's images are wonderfully brooding, apocalyptic and full of their own allusions. Ron was the onlie begetter. Ron is a marvel. See above.

*

There is also this - the film of The Accordionist, originally made for TV. An alert listener / viewer will note that the spoken text does not match the text as seen. The seen text is the correct version.



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