University of Nebraska Press

The Marketeers Club: National Scrabble Day

Did you know that Saturday, April 13, was National Scrabble Day?

GalleyCat alerted me to this great day by asking, “Will You Celebrate National Scrabble Day?” Immediately I wished I had my parents’ Scrabble board from circa 1984, pictured below.

Author David Bukszpan gave GalleyCat a list of book-related words you can play in Scrabble. It includes suggestions like JAY GATS BY and LADY MIDDLE TON. 

The last time I played Scrabble I was sitting in a tent in Canada during a thunderstorm. My sister and I had barely claimed our camping spot when the skies let loose on a July afternoon. We sat huddled in sleeping bags, sipping homemade apple cider, using our wits to outdo the other’s word choices. Unfortunately, I think my highest scoring word was BANJO.

I lost of course – my sister is an English teacher who loves Scrabble – but that’s beside the point.

Scrabble should be a required hobby for anyone in the business of publishing words. Think of how creative we could get with the inspiration that comes from placing an eighteen-point word!  

But then again I think about Scrabble games I’ve played with my parents, both very clever individuals, where a dictionary must always be present. There’s no telling what words my father will generate or that the A-L-C-E-A placed by my mother is another name for hollyhocks. She is the queen of obscure words my father and I know nothing about. (These are important facts to remember for anyone playing Scattergories with her or my father.)

In a previous Director Dish post, Donna declared that she is a lover of words. She even talked about playing Scrabble and Words with Friends! This is clear proof that a) all press directors must love words, b) all people who love words play Scrabble and Words with Friends, c) anyone in the publishing industry has, at some point in their life, played a word game, and d) I should challenge Donna to a game of Scrabble.

Hmm… I wonder if she would be up for a friendly competition.

Or maybe the Marketeers and I will attempt a game.

ATTN in-house staff: If anyone hears commotion in the marketing room, it’s because I stole Bukszpan’s idea of JAY KAY ROW LING.

-Rosemary 

Bookish Links and Delightful Miscellany

Thank a Writer

This is a great project. Maggie Mason of Mighty Girl started a site called Go Mighty so that people could post and share their lists of life goals. Goals cover just about anything you can think of—from redecorating a room to learning the trapeze to writing a thank you note to your favorite author(s).

. . . Closing the book, I felt overcome. I set it on my chest and felt the weight of it while I breathed.

I chase that feeling when I read. The one that makes me want to find the author, pour them a drink, and leave them to bask in the glow of their efforts. Damn.

(via MightyGirl)

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#fridayreads

My #fridayreads this week is Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach. I love her books! One of the highlights of my life was the conversation I had with her (ok, we tweeted, but that still counts, right?).

What are you reading?

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Famous Authors as Teens

Flavorwire gives us Fascinating Photos of Famous Authors as Teenagers.

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National Library Week is April 14-20

 

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What Books Made You Cry?

GalleyCat started a list of books that make people cry. Books make me cry all the time. In fact, I'm much more likely to cry while reading a book than while watching TV or a movie. One book that really made the tears flow is The Art of Mending by Elizabeth Berg. I read Berg's book way back before Nooks and Kindles and iPads. Back then I used to read on my Palm Treo, and no one sat around coffee houses reading on their Treos. Except me. It must have looked like I had gotten a really sad email or text. 

 

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How Many of These Books Have You Read?

This has been around for a long time, but it's always fun. Add yours in the comments area.

Instructions: Copy list

Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety.

Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.

Add <3 to your faves (I added this).

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte <3 
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee <3 
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte <3 
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger <3 
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck <3 
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Caroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis <3 
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood <3 
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez <3 
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On the Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett <3 
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery (In French)
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

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How to Treat a Book

 

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Jackie Robinson: More Than the Movie

The opening of the Jackie Robinson biopic 42 this week shines renewed light on the campaign to desegregate baseball, one of the most important civil rights stories of the 1930s and 1940s. UNP author Chris Lamb brilliantly encapsulates the larger history of Robinson, his sport, and a nation on the verge of great and enduring change in his book Blackout: The Untold Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Spring Training. Lamb also writes about the story behind the mainstream media's efforts to preserve baseball’s color line and the attempts of the black and socialist and communist presses to end it in Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters and the Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball (Winner of the 2013 AEJMC History Division Book Award, honoring the best journalism and mass communication history book published in 2012).  

With all the attention on the film right now, Lamb and his books have been featured in many articles.

Hollywood's tendency to sensationalize history led Dave Zirin from the Nation to point out a few things that may not be in the movie and mentions Lamb’s Blackout as a “brilliant book.”

The Atlantic’s Peter Drier calls Lamb’s Conspiracy of Silence “outstanding.” Drier also notes that “others will have quibbles with [Harrison] Ford’s [Branch] Rickey, portrayed as the classic savior figure.” Rickey was a fascinating character, and you can read more about him in Lee Lowenfish's biography.

Lamb meanwhile mentions the relationship between Rickey and Robinson in his latest article in the Wall Street Journal, “Jackie Robinson: Faith in Himself—and in God.”

The Marketeers Club: Have Books, Will Travel

Over the years, I've exhibited our books at many an academic conference and book fair. I experienced firsthand the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial heyday, during which we sold multiple copies of our 13-volume hardcover set of the Lewis and Clark journals or the paperback 7-volume set of the core volumes in a single day at any given archaeology or anthropology meeting. I've experienced the less productive times, too, like waiting in Canada for our books to clear customs so that I could set up our book exhibit in a church next to the conference hotel. This past week, I had the chance to staff our exhibit at the 2013 Nebraska Book Festival, which took me just up the road to Omaha.

Exhibit set-up and staffing is often a group activity—our marketing manager Martyn Beeny and our exhibits coordinator Emily Giller hit the road on Friday with all of our exhibit supplies.

A sturdy cart (I think the technical term is handcart) is awfully useful, because you never know how far you'll have to carry your materials.

I wasn't there to see Martyn and Emily work their magic, but in the end we had a beautiful corner space in the exhibit hall.

Which is where Martyn and I spent what turned out to be a beautiful spring day in Nebraska.

You can see the beautiful day coming through the window next to our booth space, which was nice. Exhibit spaces tend to be located in a windowless basement of a convention center.

Browsers enjoyed our newest books—I actually heard people laugh out loud (LOL!) as they thumbed through Joel Sartore's most recent book, Let's Be Reasonable, a collection of essays and photographs that depicts everything from state fairs to holiday family dinners.

Being the biased Omaha Central High alum that I am, I talked to anyone who would listen about The Rhythm Boys of Omaha Central: High School Basketball at the '68 Racial Divide by Steve Marantz, which will remain on my Top UNP book board indefinitely. It's a great look at Omaha civil-rights history at the end of the 1960s. 

Many people also picked up From Society Page to Front Page: Nebraska Women in Journalism by Eileen M. Wirth, who was one of the first women reporters at the Omaha World-Herald.

Martyn and I chatted with people all day long (Martyn couldn't stop talking about his South Dakota accent), then we let the packing tape rip, attempted to fold tablecloths with rounded corners, and headed back to Lincoln knowing that a few more Nebraskans had learned something about the University of Nebraska Press and our books.

-Erica

Review roundup

The Register-Guard featured Ralph Salisbury in an article titled “So far, he’s a writer.”

Sandy Amazeen with Monsters and Critics reviewed Traveling the Power Line by Julianne Couch.  

Shrink by Lawrence R. Samuel was in the New York Journal of Books.

Publishers Weekly reviewed Ladette Randolph’s Haven’s Wake.

Richard Gilbert reviewed The Days Are Gods by Liz Stephens on his blog, Narrative. Gilbert called it "a book with a lot of heart" and "a model for those seeking to turn their own experiences into memoir."

Roger Welsch was interviewed by Rob DeWalt for Pasatiempo.

The Millions chose Terese Svboda’s Tin God as its staff pick, calling Svoboda “a true original.”

Tom Hoffarth wrote about 501 Baseball Books fans Must Read Before They Die by Ron Kaplan in the Los Angeles Daily News and on his blog, Farther Off the Wall.

Kaplan’s book was also reviewed on milb.com. 

New study suggests cliff swallows evolved to dodge traffic

In an article published this month in Current Biology, Mary Bomberger Brown and Charles R. Brown found that their 30-year study of cliff swallows in southwestern Nebraska revealed a significant relationship between human activity and the evolution of the birds’ bodies.

Cliff swallows living and building nests near highway overpasses and bridges have a better chance of avoiding cars and trucks than in the past because of a shorter wingspan that now helps them dodge those approaching vehicles. Read more at Today@UNL.

Charles R. Brown is the author of Swallow Summer in which he writes about his treks to the Cedar Point Biological Station in western Nebraska to learn more about the behavior of colonial cliff swallows. He, his wife, and several student assistants spent the summers observing, catching, and banding swallows to determine life span, migration patterns, and nesting habits.

Swallow Summer was in the 1998 Top Ten Animal Books of the Year, sponsored by Booklist Magazine.

April sales!

Holocaust Remembrance Day sale

Holocaust Remembrance Day is April 7. Honor the day with books like Epistolophilia, the story of Ona Simaite, a true hero who smuggled children out of a Jewish Ghetto.

Offer expires April 12, 2013

 

 

Israel Independence Day sale

Save 25% off select books like Pitching in the Promised Land in commemoration of Israel Independence Day on April 15.

Offer expires April 16, 2013

 

 

 

Save 25% Off Henry James Letters

April 15 is Henry James’ 170th birthday and to celebrate UNP is discounting all volumes of The Complete Letters of Henry James Series.

Offer expires April 30, 2013

 

 

National Poetry Month Book Sale

April is National Poetry Month. Honor the occasion with UNP titles like, The Prairie Schooner Book Prize or A Mind Like This.

Offer expires April 30, 2013

 

 

Jackie Robinson Book Sale

Robinson played his first game with the Dodgers on April 15, 1947.  More than 60 years later, a film about his life and experience with the Dodgers is set to be released this month. Check out the movie, "42" on IMDB. Read more about Robinson and other important players in The Team That Forever Changed Baseball and America.

Offer expires April 30, 2013

 

 

Doc Martyn's Soul: April 1

Today is, as we all know, April 1, and so we must sift through our inboxes, news feeds, and information sources and decide what is real and what is not. Each year there are some April Fools’ jokes that are extremely clever. These jokes draw you in and even though you are well aware what day it is, you nonetheless find yourself wondering if it just might be true and how fantastic that might be.

This year, April Fools’ Day came early for some. If you are a follower of world soccer, you may have heard about the French journalist who fabricated a story about a dream soccer league that was to be set up by Qatar in which the very best club teams from all over the world would compete for untold riches. The story was meant to be a commentary on the ridiculous amount of money floating around the global game and the lengths to which people (and countries, in this case) will go to get a piece of that cash. The journalist’s story was picked up by a renowned English journalist working for one of the biggest newspapers in England. After the fake nature of the original story came to light, he indicated that he had corroborated the story with his sources before publishing it in the newspaper. The two journalists have since been in a standoff as to whether the story is true or not. Either way, it has all the hallmarks of a classic and well-thought out April Fools’ joke . . . just a little early.

Bookish Links and Delightful Miscellany

How a Book is Made

Go behind the scenes and follow the book publishing process from start to finish in a seven-video series for book lovers, students, and aspiring writers.

Episodes 1 and 2 cover some of the author's work: Developing the Idea and Writing the Story. Starting with episode 3 (Editing the Book) you can learn about what publishers do:

(via GalleyCat)

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#fridayreads

My #fridayreads this week is Fever by Mary Beth Keane. At some point early on in the book I realized that I didn't know very much about typhoid and made the mistake of googling it. Being a hypochondriac, I spent the next half hour arguing with myself over the likelihood of having contracted it. 

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The Handsell w/Ron Hogan & ...

Ron Hogan recruits authors and booksellers to help readers find their next favorite book.

Yet another way to get book recommendations on the internet. There is a simple form to fill out on the site (all you have to do is list 3-5 books you like) and you'll get your recommendation in the form of a video on the site. Like this:

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Genius!

Curved bookshelves! Your books won't tip over! 

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Amazon Acquired Goodreads

Here's what some people are saying about it:

• The announcement on the Goodreads site
• Jeremy Greenfield for Digital Book World weighs in 
• Scott Turow: This is how modern monopolies can be built
• LibraryThing founder Tim Spalding is happy
• Forbes: Five Ways This Smart Acquisition Will Hurt the Competition

 

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Book Vending Machines

The Huffington Post's John Geoghegan gives us A Brief History of Book Vending Machines and it is delightful. Here is my favorite, the Book-O-Mat "which featured a selection of 50 books any one of which could be purchased for a quarter."

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Delightful Miscellany 

Nick Offerman talks about walking beans. Oh, and he breakdances.

 

Making the American Body

With the recent passing of Joe Weider, the creator of a bodybuilding empire, it sheds light on the fitness craze through American history. His iconic past is represented in Making the American Body: The Remarkable Saga of the Men and Women Whose Feats, Feuds, and Passions Shaped Fitness History by Jonathan Black that publishes with UNP this fall.

Black points out that there is more to the fitness craze than being healthy. Joe Weider, Charles Atlas, Jack LaLanne, Jim Fixx, Jane Fonda, Richard Simmons, and Jillian Michaels may have shaped a way to a better body, but they were most successful through the profits their brands created.

No one in the modern era did more to promote that pursuit than two brothers: Joe Weider and Ben Weider. Both were big fans of bodybuilding and developed impressive physiques, especially Joe, though neither competed in contests. Together, they founded the International Federation of Bodybuilders (ifbb) as well as the Mr. Olympia and Ms. Olympia contests. What made them famous and rich, first and foremost, was their magazine publishing empire, which came to include Muscle and Fitness, Flex, Men’s Fitness, and Shape, spawning a hugely profitable line of supplements, equipment, books, and training manuals. Their growing prominence ignited the sport’s infamous bitch-slapping circus — the decades-long feud with arch rival and York Barbell patriarch Bob Hoffman. Joe would also lay claim to transforming a blubbery bodybuilder from Austria into the greatest muscled specimen since Charles Atlas.

With insights drawn from more than fifty interviews and attention to key developments in bodybuilding, aerobics, equipment, health clubs, running, sports medicine, group exercise, Pilates, and yoga, Making the American Body reveals how a focus on fitness has shaped not only our physiques but also, and more profoundly, American ideas of what “fitness” is.