Blogs

You may have noticed that IPI has recently made some changes: a new company name, a new company website, a new-and-improved company blog. We are proud of many of these changes and we like to show them off. “Look at our new website!” we say to our family, friends, neighbors, clients, and anyone else whose attention we can get.

“What’s with the squiggly thing between the a and the t on your company logo?” they invariably reply.

I thought I would take this opportunity to answer the question once and for all. That squiggly thing is known as a ligature. From the Latin ligare (to bind), the word ligature refers, in general, to anything used in tying or binding. In surgery, a ligature is used to strangulate a tumor. In orthodontics, ligatures are the rubber bands that bind your teeth together. And in printing, a ligature is when two or more graphemes are combined to form a single glyph. That is — a ligature is the binding between two or more letters.

Did you know that the ampersand (&) is a modified ligature? It originated as the letters et, which is Latin for and.

Ligatures originated as time saving devices. Medieval scribes used ligatures while copying Latin texts — they even went so far as to combine the bowls of letters with right-facing bowls (b,o,p) and those with left-facing bowls (d,o,g). (Have you ever before thought of letters in terms of the direction of their bowl?) In typesetting, ligatures would allow a printer to combine multiple characters of a single block: think “fi” or “st,” or the still common œ.

Today, of course, typing “fi” is hardly labor intensive, and ligatures as time-saving devices are certainly out of fashion. (Maybe this is why the New York Times print edition, already an antiquated text, recently re-instituted ligatures.)

But we like the antiquated aspect of the ligature. We like that it they hark back to a time when words were printed on paper, with ink. A time when books as objects still had value. Even though we just got our first iPad last week, and even though we are constantly exploring new means of digital publication, we use a ligature because it binds us to a long history of literary expression.

And, of course, with thanks to our brilliant graphic designers, we like our ligature because we think it looks good.

If there is one thing that publishers are desperate for right now, it’s counterintuitivity. “Just add some more counterintuitive stuff,” an agent said to me about a book proposal. “You know, something like, ‘You thought you knew that cottage cheese makes for a healthy diet, but, as indicated by new research coming out of the University of Flerstine, as little as three grams of lo-fat cottage cheese can produce one zilligram of xerocrene, which actually increases one’s desire to eat large slices of pie.” Who knew? Cottage cheese linked to pie consumption! That is flippin’ counterintuitive. Didn’t even know there was such a thing as xerocrene. Wow!

I am convinced that some pleasurable physical thing happens in the brain when a few grey cells find out that the tidbit of info they had been storing all those years is complete hooey and can now be shot out through the endocrine system into outer space and replaced with some shiny new bit of correct knowledge. Good riddance, you completely wrong thought! Welcome, you cool, learned, actual fact.

We have Malcolm Gladwell to thank for this. One of his favored expressions is, “It turns out that…” Meaning that, after extensive analysis of all the fascinating research that is being conducted in lofty places by celebrated brainiacs that only he has access to, Malcolm is able to definitively pronounce that all the impressions that most people have about a lot of things are actually ass backwards and he can definitively state how things finally, conclusively, “turn out.” I love that kind of switcheroo, especially when it’s followed by a nice, chunky certainty.

You might assume that publishers (and readers) would never tire of such literary parlor tricks, but, according to recent research conducted by the good folks at The Center for Sudden Twists and Unexpected Turns, it turns out that increased exposure to counterintuitive statements actually leads to a decrease in one’s ability to make any assumptions about anything at all, with the result that it gets harder and harder to displace known incorrect facts with new correct ones, thus reducing the average number of counterintuitive pleasure bursts per page, which eventually reduces book sales, and ultimately causes publishers to look for new ways to stimulate the grey cells. Expect to see a return to the comforting pleasure of affirmation that everything you already know is actually right.

Who knew?

We always love it when Andi steps off his corporate jet to write a guest post for our blog. But I especially appreciated last week’s post about athletics because it reminded me of another favorite summer sport: copyediting.

Last week, I was part of an extensive e-mail string on the subject of the serial comma, which is the comma that goes before the final item in a list. “I like grammar, punctuation, and spelling,” I say. Or is it: “I like grammar, punctuation and spelling?” The serial comma, also known as the Harvard or Oxford comma, caused one writer (poet Robert Francis) to complain, “When I got to Harvard, no one had ever heard of the comma!”

This week we received the copyedited version of one of our manuscripts, prompting a flurry of editorial debates. Although historians say that English writing has been systematic since the middle ages, consistency remains hard to come by. Serial commas are simple compared to the use of ellipses in block quotes, the thin spaces between quotation marks, or the relative placement of punctuation around parentheses. And don’t get me started on the subject of apostrophes at the end of acronyms. (When you have more than one CEO, do you have CEOs, CEO’s, or a problem?) John likes to quote the epitaph on a successful editor’s gravestone: “Changed which to that.”

Some might say that obsessive copyediting is dehumanizing, or worse. Anna was telling me about Roald Dahl’s short story “The Great Automatic Grammatizator,” in which a man discovers the algorithm for good literature and invents a novel-making machine. The reduction of writing to rules and regulation results in the end of human creativity. It’s a tragic story.

But it’s not my story. In reviewing our copyedited manuscript, we spotted occasions where a misplaced comma or inaccurate punctuation changed the meaning of our writing, sometimes dramatically. Because words are an author’s only medium for communication, writers are dependent on the accuracy of their punctuation. And in my opinion, great writers are those who know how to create magnificent phrases out of the mundane. They do it with style.

The prophets have spoken: a literary apocalypse is on its way. Garrison Keillor says, “Call me a pessimist, call me Ishmael, but I think that book publishing is about to slide into the sea.” Environmental writer Dave Gessner sees the future as a Terminator-like dystopia, complete with robots called Nielsen Bookscan and The Kindle and Google Books. Gessner also drew this illustration:

In the foreground, in a cave, is the wretched scribbler, looking slightly the worse for wear. The bones of other wretched scribblers are strewn in the field and buried under the last of the live oaks. One poor reader, paperback in hand, is writhing in the grip of what I imagine to be a modified iPad.

We appreciate the nostalgia that writers hold for their imagined past (Keillor is the acknowledged master of the good old days). But we see a different future for the world’s scribblers, wretched and otherwise. Because we believe, first, that the “apocalypse” is already upon us. And, second, that it’s opening up a brave new world of opportunity for writers and artists of all breeds.

Let the collaborations begin.

So far we’ve written about collaboration primarily in terms of the writing process. But what we see in the digital future is a world where the interface between the written word and other media, like pictures, like sound, and like video, disappears. When that happens, books will by necessity become the collaborative product of a team of cinematographers and app developers, animators and writers.

The result? A new breed of books that is a little bit more like A Prairie Home Companion, which combines prose, poetry, and music, and is currently streamed online. Or like Dave Gessner’s blog, which incorporates multiple authors, audience participation, and smoothly integrated illustrations.

We’ll keep you posted as we begin developing some of our own media enriched digital book projects. Meanwhile, for our next blog cycle, we will be writing about the places where we see writers using new media to their collaborative advantage. We think it’s time to move beyond the doomsday vision of a literary wasteland. Remember, the first brave new world wasn’t a dystopia at all. It was Shakespeare’s Miranda, looking beyond her isolated island for the first time. “How beauteous mankind is!” she cries. “O brave new world, that has such people in’t!”

As Anna pointed out in her post “Collaboration Proclamation,” the myth of the Wretched Scribbler persists because it makes the art of writing seem sacred, important, and mysterious. By the same logic, collaboration seems to cheapen the experience of writing, and to diminish the worth of the final product. But history tells us different! If you look behind many of the most important written works over the centuries, you’ll see not one impassioned, enlightened writer, but many. 

Consider one of the great pieces of writing in modern history, the Declaration of Independence. Famously authored by Thomas Jefferson, this pithy document is actually a great example of the benefits of collaboration.

It is true that Jefferson was the sole author of the Declaration... in a sense. He even had a genuine Wretched Scribbler episode: for seventeen days, he labored over the draft in a hot, cramped room on the top floor of an isolated house on the outskirts of Philadelphia. Surely he’s the textbook definition of the tortured author, alone in the garret, scribbling away on a sacred text?!

Well, yes, kind of. But augment that mental image with these facts:

     -     Jefferson was one member of a Committee formed to draft the Declaration. The other members elected him to write the actual draft after a series of meetings where they discussed their ideas and decided what should and should not be in the draft (sounds a lot like our own Bright Idea Process!)

     -     After Jefferson completed the draft, both John Adams and Benjamin Franklin edited and reworked it. In fact, it was Franklin who wrote the timeless opening lines — in Jefferson’s draft, it opened “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable…”

     -     The draft was then presented to the Continental Congress, who made several more major changes to both the content and the style of the Declaration.

There are dozens of other examples of collaborative writing. Ezra Pound’s collaborations with TS Eliot and  other high-profile Modernist poets are legendary; Truman Capote and Harper Lee famously wrote and rewrote significant portions of one another’s’ work. The Jewish Talmud was written by large groups of rabbis collaborating together over the course of several centuries!

Collaborative writing has taken many different forms over the years, and yielded some pretty impressive results. I, for one, am glad not everybody is attached to that myth of the solitary author.