The second biggest bibliographic tragedy after the burning of Alexandria Library

I never heard this before but now that I have read it, its so tragic!

http://talkinghumanities.blogs.sas.ac.uk/2016/08/30/burning-books-the-great-fire-of-london/

In September 1666, the ‘lamentable and dismal fire’ that we now know as the Great Fire consumed most of the City of London, from Fleet Street to the edges of the Tower of London, coating what remained in inches of soot, destroying homes, churches and ancient company halls, and causing many thousands to sleep out under the late-summer stars. As many as 100,000 people were rendered homeless, more than 80 churches were razed, along with St Paul’s Cathedral, the Royal Exchange and the Guildhall. Within three days, four-fifths of the ancient city had been destroyed.The flames not only consumed buildings, but also paintings, tapestries, and evaporated thousands of gallons of wine, beer and other liquor (estimated at over £1m in value). Many thousands of books and manuscripts also joined the pyre in perhaps one of the most terrible, and perhaps neglected, losses of the Great Fire. As one chronicler of the fire notes ‘Never since the burning of the great library at Alexandria had there been such a holocaust of books’ (W G Bell, The Great Fire of London in 1666

How To Be Happy According to 20 Authors

It’s pretty safe to say that writers are strange people, eh? Kannu, I may have shared this link with you before.

http://thoughtcatalog.com/tanza-loudenback/2013/10/date-a-girl-who-writes/

but there are quite a lot of articles out there about dating writers.

http://www.chess.com/groups/forumview/20-great-things-about-dating-a-writer

then again, as with everything in life, kids, there are downsides as well

http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/12/never-date-a-writer-youll-end-up-as-material.html

http://theinboundevangelist.com/2013/06/24/41-reasons-why-you-should-not-date-or-marry-a-writer/

so it was with trepidation that I read this and wondered if I should share this with you two. But what the heck, you should know this. Writers, of any kind, are strange people. Today for lunch we will end up with a houseful of writers, two who have recently published their books and will be reading from it. It will be fun and games to check it out.

Anyway, the interesting factoid about this list was the number of authors that I have no idea about. Kurt Vonnegut was an author I knew about but have just read a book by him which blew my mind. Crazy writer. But others are new. For example, Gillian Flynn…no idea, Dennis LeHane…who?

But you would expect that writers would know about what life is all about eh? I was speaking to a friend about romantic novels. They are happy books, and I love reading them. I know people look down at them, but that’s being snobbish. Why be snobbish about romantic novels? Whenever somebody says so, I smile inside and think, your opinion is no different to all those who sneered at Shakespeare or any of the countless authors like Jane Austen when their novels first came about. So if anybody is snobbish about a particular genre, you immediately can paint that person as not a true reader. A true reader doesn’t care about these generalisations, what matters is the joy of reading. But to go back to reading, these writers do understand life and would be expected to write in their books about how to be happy.

But I am an optimistic chap, and love being happy. Which is why I will never be able to write fiction (heheheh), and since I am happy, I have to be insane if I believe in Mark Twain who said that sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.  So if you ask me which quotes resonate with me, I will point to the following:

Don’t let you happiness depend on something you may lose. -C.S. Lewis

"I don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.” -Hunter S. Thompson

Be happy kids, don’t rely on somebody else to give you happiness. You are both lovely, handsome, smart, intelligent and you will do very well in your lives, loved by all and hated by none.

Love you

Baba

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How To Be Happy According to 20 Authors

Writers have a reputation for being introspective, sensitive and passionate. Although the most prolific writers have a melancholic streak, we often forget that a writer is an observer of the human experience. Usually, writing is not born from happiness; it is nurtured by experience, struggle, survival, and inspiration.

"I don’t know what makes a writer, but it probably isn’t happiness." -William Saroyan

Below, you will find twenty quotes on happiness from some of the best authors:

Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.” -Mark Twain

“Learn to value yourself, which means: fight for your happiness.” -Ayn Rand

“The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.” -Chuck Palahniuk

Don’t let you happiness depend on something you may lose. -C.S. Lewis

"I don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.” -Hunter S. Thompson

"But who can say what’s best? That’s why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.” -Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.” -Ernest Hemingway

"And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.” -Kurt Vonnegut

"Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn’t calculate his happiness.” -Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.” -Sylvia Plath

“I must learn to be content with being happier than I deserve.” -Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

"I’d far rather be happy than right any day.”
-Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“The face you give the world tells the world how to treat you.” -Gillian Flynn

"And yet I am happy. Yes, happy. I swear. I swear that I am happy…What does it matter that I am a bit cheap, a bit foul, and that no one appreciates all the remarkable things about me—my fantasy, my erudition, my literary gift…I am happy that I can gaze at myself, for any man is absorbing—yes, really absorbing! … I am happy—yes, happy!” -Vladimir Nabokov

"Happiness consists in realising it is all a great strange dream.” -Jack Kerouac, The Lonesome Traveller

"Nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy.” -Virginia Woolf, Orlando

"Happiness doesn’t lie in conspicuous consumption and the relentless amassing of useless crap. Happiness lies in the person sitting beside you and your ability to talk to them. Happiness is clear-headed human interaction and empathy. Happiness is home." -Dennis LeHane

"Don’t wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you’ve got to make yourself." -Alice Walker

"I think by the time you’re grown you’re as happy as you’re goin to be. You’ll have good times and bad times, but in the end you’ll be about as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy. I’ve knowed people that just never did get the hang of it." -Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

"People who believe they’ll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, learn it doesn’t work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you."-Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

Book Review: The Panama Hat Trail

In my experience, travel books have a built in advantage, the reader is already pre-disposed towards the destination so even crap books get a bit of a bye. But even adjusting for that factor and the fact that I am an idiot, sometimes a book comes along which is a sheer pleasure to read.

this book by Tom Miller, first published in 1986, takes you through a journey behind the Panama Hat which is made in Ecuador. He has a fascinating way of describing the country, the Indians, the regular moans about coffee, the issues with the traffic and bus travel, he describes the hat, Gosh, he describes the hat process. The man ends up in the depths of the forest to pluck the particular straw and then moves through entire supply chain from those depths of the forest down the history, geography, religion, culture, anthropology, economics of Ecuador to the showrooms in New York where these Panama Hats, now revalued hugely from the original price of literally cents to the farmers of the straw to the hundreds of dollars that a purchaser of a Montecristo Fini hat will pay. Some of these straw hats are so finely woven that they can hold water.

Amazing book. I learnt so much about the country. Like India, it also lost huge swathes of territory and does stupid nationalistic things like map controls (you cant show the land that Ecuador lost in the war with Peru). And I now have to go check out the bookstores in Quito, found out there are two there which stock English language books besides the usual fiction pap. And the man has a sense of deprecating humour which is lovely and refreshing. Loved it.

And it doesn't talk about Galapagos at all. So as a very respected member of the travel book species, it comes very highly recommended. One of the best books that I have read. So much that I recommended it to my son, whose response was a gratifying “ummm, ok”

She cares not a turd':

Generally I absolutely hate people scribbling on books. They need to be pristine kids. The very idea of writing all over it is a bit foreign to me. It's like defacing them. 

But then defacement for somebody may be fascinating for somebody else. Here's a nice little investigative article on some scribbles on an old old book. 

And yes I do give a turd if you deface our books! 

Love

Baba

'She cares not a turd': Notes on a 16th century Squabble - Medieval manuscripts blog
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2014/01/she-cares-not-a-turd-notes-on-a-16th-century-squabble.html

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While we were preparing the catalogue entry for Harley MS 7334, one of our most recent uploads to Digitised Manuscripts, we came across a very curious marginal note, and would like to solicit your ideas about it.

Decorated initial ‘W’(han) at the beginning of the Canterbury Tales, England (London or East Anglia, c. 1410), Harley MS 7734, f. 1r

But first a bit of background.  This manuscript is a relatively early copy of Chaucer’s famous Canterbury Tales, and was created c. 1410 in England, probably in East Anglia.  The scribe who penned it was responsible for other manuscripts containing the Canterbury Tales (such as Corpus Christi College, Oxford, MS 198, for example), leading some scholars to propose that it was a production of a commercial scriptorium specialising in such texts.  Harley MS 7334 has a rather complicated ownership history, and passed through a number of different hands during the tumultuous 15th and 16th centuries.  The task of untangling its provenance is both aided - and complicated - by the profusion of notes, signatures, and inscriptions that can be found throughout the manuscript, many of which were added by later hands.

Another bookstore bites the dust–this time in SAfrica

Thanks to John for this link. What a sad state of affairs.

South Africa may have produced two Nobel laureates in literature but a famous bookshop in Johannesburg is nevertheless about to close, a victim of the country's poor reading culture.

The Boekehuis, whose Afrikaans name means "book house", is in an old four-bedroom house a stone's throw from the city's two main universities.

Its waxed parquet floors, moulded ceilings, garden and coffee shop became the book-lover's refuge. The shop's literary events where readers could interact with writers were especially popular.

"This is like a house, not only a bookshop. People come here to buy books, but not only. They come for the ambiance, to have a nice time. And especially for the talks," says shop manager Corina van der Spoel.

Boekehuis which opened in 2000 has been widely portrayed as independent, but it is in fact owned by Media24, the country's largest media company.

The giant multimedia group, which owns most of the country's magazines and major newspaper titles, announced in December that the Boekehuis would be closing its doors at the end of January.

Leading figures such as award-winning author Andre Brink, photographer David Goldblatt and internationally acclaimed painter William Kentridge were among those who signed a petition to try to get Media24 to change its mind.

But their arguments have failed to sway the executives at Media24: the store has recorded annual losses of around a million rand ($120,000).

"Various possible solutions, such as finding a buyer for it, were pursued without success," the company explained in a statement.

"No interested buyers could be found."

National figures on readership — and literacy — help explain the problem.

"Only about one percent of the population buy books," says Elitha van der Sandt, head of the South African Book Development Council (SABDC).

And although the country can boast Nobel prize-winning authors such as Nadine Gordimer (1991) and J.M. Coetzee (2003), their works are mostly read abroad.

Professionals and researchers give several reasons for the nation's lack of a reading culture: one problem is the price of books.

The cheapest start at 120 rands ($14, 11 euros) — a high price in a country where most of the 50 million people earn around 2,000 to 3,000 rands a month.

"While a few books sell very well, most books will sell only a thousand or so copies," says Beth le Roux of the University of Pretoria, a specialist in the publishing industry.

"This means that publishers have small print runs, which also keeps the costs (and the prices) high." A sales tax rate of 14 percent and transport costs for imported books only add to the problem, she adds.

"To make it onto the bestseller list, you only need to sell a few thousand copies of a book here."

Le Roux estimates the book industry's turnover at 3.5 billion rands ($420 million, 320 million euro): but two thirds of that are made up of school and university textbooks.

Another 20 percent comes from religious books, which does not leave much of a niche for general literature.

A more fundamental problem however, is illiteracy.

In South Africa 18 percent of adults over the age of 15 are unable to read, and many of those who can read still struggle.

These depressing statistics are a legacy of the apartheid system, which gave lower quality schooling to the non-white population.

But even among white South Africans, the reading culture is limited.

Many of them are descendants of Protestants who have no tradition of diverse reading beyond the Bible.

Or as one bookseller quipped: "It wasn't just the intellectuals who left Europe!"

Stationery shops in the countryside sell a few romance novels, biographies of European royalty, thrillers and sports books. And there is no shortage of religious bookshops.

South Africa's main cities offer a few bookshops selling a broader range of literature: mostly branches of Exclusive Books, the largest chain in South Africa.

Increasingly however, many book enthusiasts are turning to the Internet to get what they need, even if for years, the Boekehuis was seen as an exception to that trend, partly because of the literary events it hosted.

Just a few kilometers down the road meanwhile, the local branch of Exclusive Books is also struggling. The chain, which belongs to a rival media group, just reduced the floor space of its biggest shop.

Doing Business in India

I seem to have forgotten about this till I was reminded during a discussion on books and book writing and stuff. Here’s the book that I contributed couple of chapters to this book edited by one of my friends, Pawan Budhwar.

The blurb says:

In response to the increasing interest in the growth and developments in the Indian economy, and the dynamic nature of the rapidly changing Indian business environment, this textbook is designed to provide a comprehensive guide to doing business in the Indian context.

Written by academic experts in their respective fields, this book is divided into three parts: the Indian business context, conducting business in India, and India and the world. Key information is presented on a wide range of topics, including:

• Both the shortcomings and opportunities associated with the Indian business environment
• The economic development model in India
• Critical skills for negotiation and incentives for foreign investors, including case studies of Italian companies that have entered the Indian market in different ways
• Business culture in India, including particular customs and etiquette

In addition to the pedagogical features, each chapter contains a set of key issues, and there is also a list of useful websites covering a wide range of business needs. This book introduces students to business in India, and will be also be of use to investors, organisations and managers who are already doing business, or intend to start one, in India.

I write about “living in India” and “Indian Multinational Abroad, tracking global footprints”. It is aimed at management students, can be used as a textbook and can be a primer for people who are, well, interested in doing business in India : )

Economic performance of the Arabic book translation industry in Arab countries

One of the quotes that caught my eye while reading the Arab Human Development Report back in 2003 was:

• Spain translates in one year the number of books that have been translated into Arabic in the past 1000 years and
• For every one million Arabs only one book is translated into Arabic each year

While the latter is difficult to compare and contrast, but then the first one is particularly poignant. The Arab world being what it is, getting them out of the rut of ignorance and misery is important. As before, education is a vital component in getting these people out of their current state and for what, they need books. And if the books haven't been translated into Arabic, then you have an issue. See here for a good step in fixing this issue.

Then I saw this paper (the abstract is at the bottom). Pretty good detailed research with some good recommendations. There are serious points to be raised here which the Abstract talks about so I am not going to belabour the point. I quote some important bits that the abstract missed out:

Next Page Foundation conducted the first readership survey in five Arab countries (Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Tunisia) in 2005. The main conclusions of this survey can be summarised as follows:

• With the exception of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, a share larger than expected of the literates in the other countries surveyed does not read.
• Among those who read the share of infrequent (up to 30 minutes per day) and low readers (31-60 minutes per day) makes up the majority.
• Reading is something children learn at school; there is almost no reading support by family members.
• Reading is stopped at ages 15-19; it is closely linked to leaving school or other institutions of education.
• Most who decrease or stop reading do not return to reading at all.
• School does not initiate reading for life but limits this to school only; deficits must be seen in school manuals and in the absence of young adult literature.
• Arabic is the preferred language of reading.
• More books in this language on topics of interest would make a considerable part of readers read more.
• There is a high religious-mindedness in terms of content and topics of reading.
• Interests professed for certain topics do not necessarily translate into the reading of such topics. (From Next Page Foundation Home Page: www.npage.org).

And these Arab Countries can be considered to be the top of the list of Arab countries. If this is the level at the top, then you can well imagine the situation lower down the list. But the authors missed out on the biggest factor (the religious establishment) and was very light on the second biggest factor (the government sector). The first bit relates to the second last aspect in the previous list. If most if not all what you read is religious pap, then knowledge generation will be challenging. After all, blind faith sits very uneasily with ever questioning knowledge generation. And the religious establishment is extremely tight in all these countries.

To let the common man be educated and questioning will directly hit them. Secondly, none of these countries are exactly free. Their method of control of their population is to keep them ignorant or in the bit of the somnolent daze. An example is their tight control over the media. If your media isn't free, how on earth do you expect your book publication and translation industry to be free and break its bounds? You cannot simultaneously have a free and open reading society while your political system, your educational and your religious establishment is under chains.

That said, the recommendations that the authors give can only do good. I quote:

The first such role is that of improving the quality and availability of the generalised inputs that publishing companies draw on, such as educated human resources (qualified translators and other specialized personal), physical and technological infrastructure (hardware and software for information communication technology) and capital.

Second, government should encourage upgrading and innovation with the aid of rules, regulations, and incentives. Through regulations, tax policies, the enforcement of IPR, antitrust laws, and many other measures, governments influence the climate in which publishing companies compete. That influence should be used to encourage investment, innovations, and other determinants of economic performance.

Third, government should leverage its investment in skills, research capabilities and infrastructure to facilitate the process by which all local clusters form and develop. Such investment feeds whole groups of firms and industries. Thinking in terms of clusters rather than industries also encourages publishing companies to work closely with suppliers and customers.

Fourth, and perhaps most subtly, government leaders should challenge local companies and people in their regions to raise their sights and strive for greater competitiveness. The ability of government to signal the future fosters economic upgrading.

Policies affecting production factor conditions:

• Improve the documentation of Arabic translation needs. This can be achieved by creating a regional Internet-based database that would constitute an information base on what has been translated, what is being translated, and what will be translated from foreign languages into Arabic.
• Design and implement translation support programs on a sustainable basis. This would create and maintain a critical mass of translators and publishing companies. The supply side of the translation industry would be strengthened.
• Invest in human resources by building a strong basic education system for all citizens, thus eradicating illiteracy; by setting high educational standards; by supporting institutions that develop specialised skills (such as specialised professional translators); and last, but not least, by creating incentives for company investment in training.
• Support science and technology by creating incentives for private research and development (for example, in the area of electronic publishing, e-commerce, machine translation software development, and so forth) and for promoting wide dissemination of basic scientific knowledge in areas that affect the development of the Arabic translation industry.
• Invest in physical infrastructure; the special needs of the Arabic translation industry should also be taken into consideration.
• Create some sort of accreditation body for translators to control for good quality and to lessen the costs of asymmetric information in the Arabic translation industry.

Policies affecting demand conditions:

• Support readership surveys. This would help to identify the real needs of the reading public, as well as to monitor whether reading promotion policies in general and translation support programs in particular have a measurable impact, especially on young people.
• Stimulate early demand for translated books in Arabic; for instance, for public schools, universities, and public administration.
• Act as a sophisticated buyer in purchasing (ask for high quality of translated books).
• Promote translation quality assessment programs. To enhance demand for translated books, programs for translation quality control are needed.

Policies affecting related and supporting industries:

• Facilitate cluster development along the lines of the value chain of the book industry.
• Promote training programs among professional of the Arabic translation industry in the fields of marketing and distribution.
• Improve distribution outlets.
• Promote the role of nongovernmental professional publishing and translation associations in disseminating knowledge and mobilising resources, thus creating positive externalities in the Arabic translation industry.

Policies affecting strategy, structure and rivalry:

• Promote local competition by deregulating the structure of industry and strictly enforcing antitrust policy and IPRs.
• Expand interregional and international trade and investment by opening book markets, promoting exports, and attracting appropriate foreign investment in those markets.

My only objection is, these recommendations are effectively asking for a complete rejig of how their societies work. If one doesnt do that, then it would be like providing a pan of makeup to a person suffering skin cancer.

Knowledge has always been at the heart of economic growth and development. It is disseminated chiefly through the different stages of education, R&D, the mass media and the translation industry. In Arab countries there has been a widespread impression that there is a low level of translation activities, which in turn has led to a low output of the translation industry in those countries. This paper addresses this issue; its overall objectives are: (1) to describe the economic performance of the Arabic book translation industry in Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Syria; (2) to understand empirically the economic performance of that industry, the focus here being on qualitatively analysing the major determinants (positive and negative factors) affecting the growth process of that industry; and (3) to provide policy makers and business leaders in the Arab region with theoretically sound and evidence-based advice on the issues analysed in the project.
To provide an empirical base for answering those questions, both published data and fresh new data have been used. For the latter purpose, a questionnaire-based survey was conducted in the year 2005 among 190 experts, covering firm representatives and experts in industry and government. The Porter (Diamond) model has been used as a theoretical background. The empirical results were incorporated in five national case studies. This paper synthesises the results of the national reports, giving a comparative account of the performance of the Arabic book translation industry in the five Arab countries.
The overall results suggest that the Arabic book translation industry in these Arab countries has not yet achieved the level of development of other developing and developed countries. Underperformance of the Arabic book translation industry is attributable to (among other factors) severe coordination failures. This is a state of affairs in which the inability of the different agents (translators, book publishers, suppliers, customers, and supporting organisations, state, and so forth) to coordinate their behaviour (choices) leads to suboptimal outcomes. Since the economic performance of the translation industry often involves complementary investments whose return depends on other investments being made by other agents, coordination is crucial. Obviously, neither market forces nor the state have undertaken this coordination activity sufficiently. The Arabic book translation industry seems to suffer from both market failure and government failure.
In light of these results the Arabic book translation industry offers great economic potential that should be mobilised systematically in the future. This paper discusses how this can be achieved, based on a well-designed and implemented process of upgrading and innovation in companies, industries, and clusters related to translation activities. Public policy, properly understood and adequately implemented, can play an important role in this process.

Keywords: Economics of translation; Arabic translation; Arab World; translation industry; Morocco; Egypt; Saudi Arabia; Lebanon; Syria

Ah!, my dream world trip

To go around the world checking out these book stores (never you mind the small issue of actual storage at home...) would be an absolutely dream trip.

Especially this one.

 

There is a bookstore like this near Leicester Square, it is just brilliant, full of nooks and crannies, full of second hand books. Next time I get a chance, will go there and poke around, smell the wonderful smell of books and forget all about time till the chap comes and pokes me to go home.

Ah! so many books and so little time.

Technorati Tags: biblophilia,books

A critique of Edward Said's Orientalism

Edward Said personifies the quote, "an author retains the singular honour of being a crashing bore long after he is dead". That book of his made my hair hurt, incomprehensible and intractable to say the least. But in certain circles, it is considered next to the Bible and Quran...

Here are couple of reviews of the book

Technorati Tags: Palestine,Middle East,Bibliophilia,Book Reviews

Mule / Homar library

Now getting a donkey to carry a library? Homar Library!!!! :) How amusing! :)

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Mule library

Bibliomulas are mules toting mini-libraries to remote communities in Venezuela in an effort to encourage reading. Sometimes, the mules also carry projectors and laptop computers. A BBC News reporter recently took a trip with the Bibliomulas through the foothills of the Andes. From the BBC News:

Mulelibrary Anyone who was not out working the fields - tending the celery that is the main crop here - was waiting for our arrival. The 23 children at the little school were very excited.

"Bibilomu-u-u-u-las," they shouted as the bags of books were unstrapped. They dived in eagerly, keen to grab the best titles and within minutes were being read to by Christina and Juana, two of the project leaders.