Editorial Inspirations

Even in history, commas have shown how they can affect the future of people.Czarina Maria Fyodorovna saved the life of a man by transposing a comma in a warrant signed by her husband, Alexander III (10 March 1845 – 1/2 November 1894), which exiled a criminal to imprisonment and death in Siberia. On the bottom of the warrant the czar had written, “Pardon impossible, to be sent to Siberia.” The czarina changed the punctuation so that the instructions read, “Pardon, impossible to be sent to Siberia.” The man was set free.

The U.S. government lost at least a million dollars through the movement of a comma. In the tariff act passed on June 6, 1872, a list of duty-free items included, “Fruit plants, tropical and semitropical.” A government clerk accidentally altered the line to read, “Fruit, plants tropical and semitropical.” Importers successfully contended that the passage, as written, exempted all tropical and semitropical plants from duty fees.

Try It!

Read the following sentence and punctuate it. Then, give this sentence to five people and see how they punctuate it.

“A woman without her man is nothing.”

You’ve heard the saying, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” Come up with a catchy (and rhyming) proverb using your own words of wisdom. The more creative, the better.

Be sure to share your responses!

My parents are arguing again. I sit on the living room floor. I am playing with a cardboard box that once held doughnut holes from Mr. Doughnut. I love Mr. Doughnut. The name of the place makes me laugh, and the elves on the box make me smile. Though I am only three, I wish I were in that factory with those elves.

My parents are screaming at one another. They are in the living room, but I am invisible to them. They yell, they throw things, and then my dad throws my mom against the wall.

Many curse words later, my dad slams the door. He gets into his Ford truck and drives off. My dad will not be home for days, and he will not speak to us for weeks.

“I can’t believe how broken this industry is,” said moderator Praveen Madan, co-owner of The Booksmith in San Francisco, by way of introduction to a BookExpo America 2009 panel on the things booksellers and publishers perceive that the other could do to repair the book business.

More often than not both sides agreed, especially when Bob Miller, of HarperStudio, described the current trade publishing model as in a death spiral. His call for nonreturnability was much more contentious, with booksellers on the panel and in the audience saying that they would need a greater discount than HarperStudio currently offers to make that viable for all their buying.

Dominique Raccah, of Sourcebooks, sided with booksellers concerned about the effect nonreturnability might have on first fiction, poetry, and even some political books. She suggested a backlist-oriented plan in which books would move from returnable to nonreturnable 12 months after publication. In addition, Raccah made a pitch for booksellers to devote more time, money, and shelf space to books that don’t come from the big six conglomerates. Those titles, she said, get a disproportionate amount of all three, even though they constitute just over half of all sales, or 54%.

Some suggestions that involved much nodding of heads in agreement by both booksellers and publishers included Madan Horne, general manager of Harvard Book Store, calling for large houses to simplify their co-op programs and small and mid-sized publishers to establish co-op policies and Horne’s request to do away with poorly edited and badly published copycats. No more Tuesdays with Marley? quipped Miller. And booksellers in the audience agreed with Raccah that independents and chains should work together.

Among the more provocative proposals were one from Miller that booksellers start publishing and Madan’s request for a good clean data feed, or virtual catalog of all publishers’ books, so that independent booksellers could effectively sell books online. Fifteen years after the rise of Amazon, he said, there is no such catalog, and independents have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to Ingram or Baker & Taylor for data that should be free.

Modernity has brought great comforts and freedoms, but it brutishly smashes down, too. The Internet (and this recession) is destroying fine old local papers. Higher booze prices and the smoking ban are destroying pubs. Similarly, we all know how hard the world of Amazon and Google has hit the small bookshop. Life without papers and pubs is an intolerable prospect. Would there be any point in leaving home at all if bookshops went too?

–Andrew Marr in a Sunday Observer piece headlined, “How intolerable life would be without books and bookshops.”