Day: May 31, 2007

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No horse in this race

Here’s a neat article about how wine overtook beer in America:

Meanwhile, the American middle classes have fast become connoisseurs of everything — coffee, ’80s Japanese garage-rock bands, environmentalist toilet paper. Now, Americans who want the exclusivity that connoisseurship offers but didn’t want to seem like snobs can have it both ways. Beer’s approachability became less of a virtue. Ironically, in the ultimate about-face, craft-brew drinkers lifted the language of wine. (Tasting notes for a pale ale from the Web site BeerAdvocate: “Nose is floral, like orange blossoms, with some citric rind and soft apple.”)

As someone who refers to himself as a “gin snob” (among other examples of my snobbishness), I can see what he means.

So, are you more of a wine drinker or a beer drinker? (excluded from this question: my teetotaling family and my recovering alcoholic exes)

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Publish and perish

Here’s an article about how Perseus Books Group is closing down two of its imprints: Carroll & Graf and Thunder’s Mouth Press. The further away I get from my indie-publishing days, the less I can understand how any of them stay afloat. This passage summed up how I tried to see things back then:

“When you see the book world conglomeratizing, it can only mean less diversity of voices,” said Johnny Temple, publisher of Akashic Books, a Brooklyn-based imprint distributed by Perseus. “When I sign up a book, it matters more that I love it than that I’ve identified a good marketing niche for it. That’s the real essence of independent publishing — it’s not a deal, it’s supposed to be a labor of love.”

Then I lost the love.

I hope the founders of those presses got a decent purchase price when they joined up with Avalon Publishing (which was later acquired by Perseus), but I have a feeling that I can see where the “labor of love” part collided with the “good marketing niche” part:

“At Carroll & Graf, we bridged the gap between small, lesser-known presses and the larger houses when it comes to gay literature,” said Don Weise, a senior editor who is losing his job. “In the four years that I’ve been here, I’ve acquired more than 100 books, and no one has ever told me no, I couldn’t do that. In the book world, that’s unheard of.”

I probably would’ve moved his attribution, along with the “senior editor who is losing his job” part to the end of the paragraph, to make my point.