Printing
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Lucian Freud’s Printmaking June 05, 2023
The first time I saw Lucian Freud’s prints I was repulsed, for reasons I could not have explained. Freud’s paintings of female flesh can be difficult to look at, but these were monochrome portrait heads, etched in hard black line. Did I find them cr...
The Enlightenment as Reading Project February 15, 2023
“What is Enlightenment?” Kant’s 1784 answer to the question, that the Enlightenment “dares to know”, is famous and paradoxical. Enlightenment, he maintains, requires freedom of the press, but only an authoritarian regime can allow unchecked debate: t...
All Anyone Can Do: A Midwestern Journalist’s Retrospective February 07, 2023
The distance travelled from Elvis to Trump is a lifetime. Which, like all history, is best appreciated in retrospect, and most rewarding when gleaned from first-hand accounts - provided these are forthright and, above all, well-written. These require...
An Architect and a Builder June 24, 2022
In my library, there’s a lovely little volume called Lyric Verse: A Printer’s Choice. I’m a glutton for anthologies and commonplace books. The most delightful come not from major writers, but rather from unusually individual readers: A Tub of Gold Fi...
The Real Céline June 13, 2022
Louis-Ferdinand Céline is probably the most influential French author of the last hundred years. Guerre, which means “war,” is a novel that he wrote and virtually completed in the Thirties. Apparently he intended it to be the centerpiece of a trilogy...
Looking Back on 50 Years of Making Beautiful Books March 18, 2022
The last book that will ever bear the David R. Godine imprint is, fittingly, by David Godine himself. It’s called “Godine at Fifty: A Retrospective of Five Decades in the Life of an Independent Publisher,” and it’s a safe bet that the people who thes...
The End of the Beginning March 07, 2022
"Hitler in Radio Talk Predicts Nazi Victory"—Boston Daily Globe "American Captives Starved by Nazis"—New York Times"Washington the City Is Overcrowded, Badly Housed, Expensive, Crime-Ridden, Intolerant"—Harper’sIn April of 1945, life-altering events ...
How a Book Is Made February 21, 2022
It started as a Word document, pecked out letter by letter at a dining room table in Connecticut.Now, it is 150,000 copies of a 626-page book called “Moon Witch, Spider King,” with a luminous cover that glows with neon pinks and greens.While digital ...
Publisher Halts Anne Frank Betrayal Book Amid Questions February 07, 2022
A Dutch publisher has suspended printing of a book that suggested a Jewish notary betrayed Anne Frank, saying there were questions about the research behind it, according to an internal email seen by Reuters....
Publishing in a Protean Age August 13, 2021
In 2000 the RAND Corporation invited a group of historians—including me—to address a newly pressing question: Would digital media revolutionize society as profoundly as Gutenberg and movable type? Two decades later, John Thompson’s answer is yes, but...
Publishers' Bind November 17, 2020
Recently, I paged through a friend’s copy of a just-released bestseller in political theory. I then ordered my own copy, exactly twenty days after the book’s release. When my copy arrived, I found that it sported the same dustjacket as my friend’s, ...
Wolves and Ephemerality November 16, 2020
In July 1980, I was sent a short article from the Christian Science Monitor—a venomous left-liberal newspaper among the most influential in the States. Published in Boston, just around the corner, it once requested an in-depth interview: I declined. ...
Copies of Newton's 'Principia' Found by Sleuths November 16, 2020
A pioneering book of science theory published by Sir Isaac Newton in 1687 was long considered to be exceptionally rare; by the 20th century, only 189 first edition copies were known worldwide. But after years of sleuthing, a pair of historians tracke...
The Author in Full: Tom Wolfe November 13, 2020
I was introduced to Tom Wolfe in the late 1970s, a year or two after I had begun my journalistic career as the literary editor at National Review, by Timothy Dickinson — an Oxford man working for Lewis Lapham, then editor of Harper’s — who was (as he...
JBS Haldane: The Man Who Knew Almost Eeverything November 06, 2020
JBS Haldane – “Jack” to his family and friends – was once described as “the last man who might know all there was to be known”. His reputation was built on his work in genetics, but his expertise was extraordinarily wide-ranging. As an undergraduate ...
