Containing the whole Science of Government (from Little Dorritt by Charles Dickens)

The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart. It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong without the express authority of the Circumlocution Office. If another Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified in saving the parliament until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence, on the part of the Circumlocution Office.

This glorious establishment had been early in the field, when the one sublime principle involving the difficult art of governing a country, was first distinctly revealed to statesmen. It had been foremost to study that bright revelation and to carry its shining influence through the whole of the official proceedings. Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving—HOW NOT TO DO IT.

Through this delicate perception, through the tact with which it invariably seized it, and through the genius with which it always acted on it, the Circumlocution Office had risen to overtop all the public departments; and the public condition had risen to be—what it was.

It is true that How not to do it was the great study and object of all public departments and professional politicians all round the Circumlocution Office. It is true that every new premier and every new government, coming in because they had upheld a certain thing as necessary to be done, were no sooner come in than they applied their utmost faculties to discovering How not to do it. It is true that from the moment when a general election was over, every returned man who had been raving on hustings because it hadn’t been done, and who had been asking the friends of the honourable gentleman in the opposite interest on pain of impeachment to tell him why it hadn’t been done, and who had been asserting that it must be done, and who had been pledging himself that it should be done, began to devise, How it was not to be done. It is true that the debates of both Houses of Parliament the whole session through, uniformly tended to the protracted deliberation, How not to do it. It is true that the royal speech at the opening of such session virtually said, My lords and gentlemen, you have a considerable stroke of work to do, and you will please to retire to your respective chambers, and discuss, How not to do it. It is true that the royal speech, at the close of such session, virtually said, My lords and gentlemen, you have through several laborious months been considering with great loyalty and patriotism, How not to do it, and you have found out; and with the blessing of Providence upon the harvest (natural, not political), I now dismiss you. All this is true, but the Circumlocution Office went beyond it.

“No man ever steps in the same river twice,” said the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. Today he might say “No man ever writes the same text twice.” Nicholas Carr, writing in the Wall Street Journal, contends that digital word processing “is ushering in an era of perpetual revision and updating, for better and for worse…Once digitized, a page of words loses its fixity. It can change every time it’s refreshed on a screen.”

For better:  “It makes it easy for writers to correct errors and update facts. Guidebooks will no longer send travelers to restaurants that have closed or to once charming inns that have turned into fleabags. The instructions in manuals will always be accurate. Reference books need never go out of date.

Even literary authors will be tempted to keep their works fresh. Historians and biographers will be able to revise their narratives to account for recent events or newly discovered documents. Polemicists will be able to bolster their arguments with new evidence. Novelists will be able to scrub away the little anachronisms that can make even a recently published story feel dated.”

For worse: “The ability to alter the contents of a book will be easy to abuse. School boards may come to exert even greater influence over what students read. They’ll be able to edit textbooks that don’t fit with local biases. Authoritarian governments will be able to tweak books to suit their political interests. And the edits can ripple backward. Because e-readers connect to the Internet, the works they contain can be revised remotely, just as software programs are updated today.”

It was not long ago that when we thought of books we thought of immutability, fixity, indelibility.  Now we’re going to have think about them another way.

Books That Are Never Done Being Written

Richard Curtis

The latest statistics tell us more kids are reading e-books.  But the progress bar has not advanced nearly as far as prognosticators expected or manufacturers hoped.  A Bowker executive, addressing a recent Digital Book World conference, reported on findings culled from a survey of about 1,000 teens and some 2,000 parents and caregivers of young children.  Among older kids, 19% have tried e-books but only 6% read them witn any regularity. As for younger ones, only 25% of parents even own an e-book reader.  Among children 7 to 12 only 13% read on e-readers and 11% on tablets.

Is that a bad thing?  Not necessarily.  Though more and more adults are adopting digital reading habits, they are encouraging their kids to read print books and in fact promoting something akin to Luddism, such as sending them to schools where no digital devices are to be found (see High-Tech Kids in No-Tech Schools).  At bedtime they will put their Nook or Kindle down and go into their child’s bedroom to read a print-book bedtime story. So  when it comes to e-books it’s a matter of Do as I say, not as I do. And though picture book apps, including stories that “tell” themselves without parents present, are great fun, they just don’t seem to have the same appeal as the warm body and familiar voice of mommy or daddy.

Schools and libraries do not seem to be tripping over themselves to promote e-reading either. One good reason is that the children’s print business is one of the few sectors of the publishing industry that are thriving, so there is a strong financial incentive for publishers to maintain the p-book status quo.

But children form their own opinions about e-books and many reject them for very practical reasons. Because mobile phones are the device of choice for teens, the small screen size and short battery life are deterrents to e-reading.  The price of e-readers is prohibitive for many kids, who get along fine with borrowing books from the library or from each other.  And speaking of borrowing, DRM restrictions on sharing e-books is another dampening factor for teens, just as it is for adults.

For years we have expressed skepticism that, due to their high distraction quotient, screens are the best medium for young readers (see The Medium is the Screen, the Message is Distraction), and (with the exception of autistic children), there has been little recent evidence to the contrary.   In a recent New York Times article, K, J. Dell’Antonia reported an observation by Lisa Guernsey of the New America Foundation’s Early Education Initiative that “when we read with a child on an e-reader, we may actually impede our child’s ability to learn.”

“Children sitting with a parent while an e-reader reads to them, Dell’Antonia writes, “understand significantly less of what’s read than those hearing a parent read. Researchers at Temple University, where the study was done, noted that parents reading books aloud regularly asked children questions about the book: ‘What do you think will happen next?’ Parents sitting with the child while a device read to them (like a LeapPad or some iPad apps) didn’t ask these questions, or relate images or incidents in the book to the child’s real life. Instead, their conversation was focused on how to use the device: ‘Careful! Push here. Hold it this way.’” (Details in Why Books Are Better than e-Books for Children)

Does that mean that the next generation will reject e-books?  Not likely.  But as research develops about the reading habits and learning and retention of children using e-books, we may see a greater balance between electronic and printed books than the e-fatuation that has us in its grips today. If we don’t – well, see Digital Distractions Producing a Nation of Morons?

Richard Curtis

47North, Amazon’s science fiction imprint, has just released Dave Duncan’s extraordinary new novel Against the Light in paperback, audio and e-book, with a promotional giveaway of the e-book for Prime members.

In Against the Light  the Hierarchy, high priests of the religious order the Light, has installed King Ethan as the monarchical figurehead, ruling both the magical kingdom of Albi and its predominant religion. Scattered throughout the land, worshippers in the old ways of the Earth Mother are persecuted as heretics. And when young missionary student Rollo Woodbridge returns home to Albi, he is immediately arrested for heresy and treason, setting off a chain of events that plunges the land into utter chaos.

The Hierarchy has more treacherous motives, however, and when Rollo is rescued from jail, his family’s home is destroyed—but Rollo and his siblings are left alive. While Rollo tries diplomacy to end the religious and political conflict, his brother and sister swear vengeance. With the hours to deliverance counting down and their lives hanging in the balance, they must decide whether to stay and fight or leave Albi forever in the suspenseful, action-packed Against the Light.

If you like Against the Light as much as we think you are going to, you’ll find lots more Dave Duncan fiction on his author page on the E-Reads website.

Recent sighting of Garamond

Planning to visit New York in January?  Forget Times Square, the Statue of Liberty and Broadway musicals.  Here’s your chance to see a limited run of The Matrix.

But this one doesn’t star Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne and Carrie-Anne Moss. No, it features Claude Garamond, John Baskerville, Giambattista Bodoni, William Caslon and Eric Gill. You’ve heard those names before, but you can’t look them up on IMDB.

You can find them in a book, though.  Just take an old volume off your shelf and turn to the end papers. There you may well see one of those names.  Don’t have books any more? Okay, go to the Fonts dropdown list on your word processor.  You’ll find many of those names there.  Give up?

They were  type designers. They created metal forms called punches, shaped like the  elegant letters to which the designers gave their names. By pressing the form into a copper slab, the punch – a reverse image of each letter – produced a mold.  Into that mold lead was poured, creating one letter of Garamond or Bodoni or Baskerville type.

That copper slab was known as – a matrix.

Now for that visit to New York.  From today through February 4th you can see an amazing exhibit of punches, matrices (plural of matrix), and related typographical exhibits at the Grolier Club, 47 East 60th Street in Manhattan. Check here for information and read details in this New York Times feature by David W. Dunlap, Types With Plenty of Character.

These exquisite artifacts, writes Dunlap, “offer a reminder, in the ethereal era of bitmapping, that type was once the tangible province of engravers and metal casters who labored in unforgiving but enduring media.”

Richard Curtis

Livraria Lello, Porto, Portugal

Thia bookstore in Porto, Portugal has been described in celestial terms.  Pay a virtual visit and see why.

Sean Dodson, in a survey of bookshops in Europe, writes: “The divine Livraria Lello in Porto has been selling books in the most salubrious of settings since 1881. Featuring a staircase to heaven and beautifully intricate wooden panels and columns (see for yourself with these gorgeous 360-degree views), stained glass ceilings and books – lots of lovely books.”

For a full description of the wonders of this enchanting store, click here.

Courtesy of the Guardian Unlimited

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Just when you achieved competence in Klingon and Na’vi you’re going to have immerse yourself in Dothraki.  At least if you want to fully enjoy the HBO production of The Game of Thrones.  Otherwise, how are you going to be able to say “The stallion that mounts the world has no need for iron chairs!’

Why you would utter that phrase in any genuine language let alone an artificial one is quite outside the reach of this posting.  The translation will be found in Athhilezar? Watch Your Fantasy World Language, Amy Chozick’s fascinating New York Times article about “conlangers,” a bizarre human subspecies whose unique area of competence is the invention of artificial languages. Though you might imagine that a convention of conlangers would scarcely fill the walk-in closet of a condo, in fact the Language Creation Society is a thriving little professional guild.  One of its members, the same fellow who invented Dothraki, is working on Barsoomian for the forthcoming John Carter film. [Actually it's Paul Frommer - see Comments]

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Here’s a piece we ran when Avatar came out.

Chay’ Na’vi Dajatlh HollI’Daq?

When you start dating someone you will naturally want to know if he or she uses drugs.  It’s less likely you’ll want to know if he or she uses semicolons – unless you believe that the answer will lead to marriage. We can’t recall if it started that way for Virginia and Leonard Woolf or Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but we know from a recent wedding announcement in New York Times that that’s how it started for Jennifer Miller and Jason Feifer.

“Both were blasting through the often less-than-literate listings of online dating sites,” writes Andrew L. Yarrow, “when Mr. Feifer’s e-mail message on OKCupid.com caught Ms. Miller’s eye for reasons less romantic than grammatical. ‘He used a semicolon correctly; that was reason enough to get a drink with him,’ the 31-year-old author of Inheriting the Holy Land recalled.”

The rest is history, as you will see if you care to read details of their wedding announcement.

So, if you’re entering into a relationship and suspect your love object is scrutinizing your emails for solecisms, you might want to refresh your understanding of this subtle point of grammar.

Melissa Donovan in WritingForward.com has this to say about it:

#The semicolon establishes a close connection between two sentences or independent clauses.
#A semicolon can replace conjunctions and or but.
Semicolons indicate a stronger separation than a comma but weaker than a period.
#A semicolon is often used in lists to separate items when some of the items in listed subsets require commas.
#The semicolon is always followed by a lower case letter with proper nouns being the only exception (proper nouns are always capitalized).
#Semicolon use can be applied to separate two clauses or sentences that are saying the same thing in different ways.
#As with other punctuation marks that denote the end of a clause or sentence, there is no space between the semicolon and the word preceding it; there should be a single space after the semicolon.

Example:
#I love music; however, I haven’t played my own guitar in several years.
#I’m fascinated by names and their meanings; Melissa means honey bee.
#There’s nothing like the gentle drum of water hitting against the window pane; I love the rain.

So, lovers, remember this: when you email your beloved, pay heed to those semicolons; they could save your relationship.

Richard Curtis