BEA: The First Day

500 India-inspired messenger bags, 300 T-shirts, 150 signed copies of Father for Life, and dozens of dinosaur finger puppets and posters equal giveaway-happy BEA attendees and exhausted Abbevillains! We had a very full and successful opening day at BEA, and we certainly did our part to contribute to the mad hunt for the best conference giveaways. Our India bags were a huge hit, with one woman calling them the prettiest bags she’s seen in 18 BEAs! Bags are the essential, perhaps the ULTIMATE BEA giveaway for 3 reasons: 1. bags hold giveaways; 2. bags are walking advertisements; and 3. bags hold giveaways (seriously, that bears repeating—BEA turns everyone into bag ladies. Everyone eyes everyone else’s bags to see if any bag is nice enough to track down, and our quality bags led many people to our booth).

The big event at the AbbeBooth today was New Father series author Armin Brott‘s arrival and book signing. With Father’s Day around the corner, many folks were thrilled to meet Armin and pick up a personalized copy of Father for Life. We ran out, but Armin will be back to sign more tomorrow. Perhaps the most exciting part of Armin’s book signing was author Richarde Louv‘s visit. The author of Father Love and, more recently, The Last Child in the Woods, Louv inspired Armin to also research and write about—and for—fathers. These new-age dads swapped books and stories while their shared publicist, Meg Parsont, reflected on Brott and Louv’s collective three decades of fatherhood publishing. The BEA warm-and-fuzzy reunions continued when Meg turned around to see fellow publicist Jeany Wolf, who is representing our forthcoming Daughters of India book.

So beyond the bags and other freebies, BEA offers professionals from all sides of the publishing industry a chance to hob nob and swap business cards. Writers came by hawking book proposals and sample chapters. Printers and suppliers stopped in to get in touch with our production manager. Reviewers and book buyers visited to check out our forthcoming books and get on our catalog mailing lists. And our publishing and editorial staff had meetings with foreign publishers and other industry professionals galore literally until the lights flicked off in the convention center!

Then it was off to flag a cab—no mean feat in downtown Los Angeles, let me tell you—for the Abbevillains attending the Independent Publisher Book Awards ceremony. Our winners:

GOLD MEDAL (parenting): Fathering Your School-Age Child: The Wonder Years, 3-9; by Armin A. Brott

SILVER MEDAL (coffee table book): Bulgari, 2nd edition; by Daniela Mascetti & Amanda Triossi

BRONZE MEDAL (photography): Travels with Van Gogh and the Impressionists: Discovering the Connections; text by Lin Arison, photography by Neil Folberg

All very exciting! Not sure how we ended up with one medal of each type, but that makes for a nice collection. That’s all the news fit (or unfit) to print for now. Tune in tomorrow to hear about our juice-and-cookies Abbeville Family fun and gift basket drawing! For more on our BEA events, click here.

Live Blogging @ BEA

And let the live-blogging commence! Your blogging editorial assistant-publicist here for our first Abbeville Press BookExpo America blog posting. Today was the Show setup (for those less in-tune to the inner happenings of the book publishing industry, the Show refers to BookExpo America or BEA, the biggest, craziest American book publishing event of the year (yes I said crazy! What do you think we do here?? Sit around the Los Angeles Staples Center and read?? No! Giveaways, autographing, and events abound—I for one will be hitting up the Cookbook Expo)).

So yes, you read correctly, this year we’ve headed to L.A., to set up shop until Sunday at a rocking booth at the Staples Center (and no! FYI there is not a actual Staples store in the venue). So I would post pictures but the booth was in quite a disarray today during setup and to be honest we were too sweaty to consider posting our mugs on the internet. But lots of pictures of the beautiful booth and its many neat features will be posted tomorrow! We will try to live blog in the booth during doubtful-downtime but, if not, rest assured my colleague, managing editor Erin, will fill you in on the characters that stopped by the booth and the anticipated boxing match between Random House and HarperCollins.

To recap the day, we unpacked boxes, unpacked more boxes and then rolled things. We rolled posters, Abbeville Family Shirts (I plan on turning mine into a dress on Sunday!), and more posters. So the day went pretty smoothly! To check out what we’ll be up to tomorrow when the show starts, click here (the Abbeville Press events page).

How Artists See Style

You’re never too young to start learning how to be stylish. In fact, we all make a pretty messy, graceless entrance into this world, so it’s best to start recovering from that blunder as soon as possible. Fortunately, Abbeville Press has just the ticket for any kid: our How Artists See series, a classroom classic that gives young readers their first exposure to the basics of artistic vision, technique, and yes, style.

We mention this not just to toot our own horn (or play our own piano-guitar), but because we’ve recently created a new and improved How Artists See mini-site for parents, teachers, and students. Clicking on each of the featured book images will take you to a full description of that book, while clicking the link below the images will whisk you off to a complete listing of HAS products. You’ll especially want to check out the latter, because it contains full details about the brand-new How Artists See Jr. series we’re releasing this fall.

“How Artists See Jr.?” you ask. “What’s all this now?” Well, it’s a new series based on a very simple premise: toddlers like looking at pictures of babies, dogs, horses, and trains, so they might as well look at Van Gogh babies, Giacometti dogs, Degas horses, and O’Keeffe trains. (And images on the same themes by plenty of other great artists, too.) While the rest of their play group is stir-frying their neurons in front of SpongeBob, your kids will be laughing and cooing at the best visual entertainment Western history has to offer. Talk about an education in style.

But enough shameless hawking of Abbeville products. Tomorrow we’ll be shamelessly hawking Abbeville products from L.A.! Check back often over the next few days for live BEA coverage from our Arbiters of West Coast Style—and actual native Californians—Erin and Michaelann.

Style Points

Working with Children

1.1. When you’re looking at Van Gogh paintings with a preschooler, it’s best not to mention the severed ear, the suicide, etc. Hold off on that until the kid’s at least seven, eight years old.

The Abbeville Manual Goes to BEA

After we welched on our promise to provide commentary on this year’s College Art Association conference, we felt…wait, what’s the word again? Right, “humble.” In order to atone for our lapse, we made another promise to our readers: extra-special coverage of the 2008 BookExpo America conference. And this time we’re coming through, folks.

During BEA, which runs this Friday, May 30 through Sunday, June 1, two of our Arbiters of Style will be on the scene in L.A., providing live coverage of the biggest annual publishing event in the country. Now, when you’re in the business of making expert style judgements, typically you want to take your time dispensing your priceless pearls of wisdom. And yet for book fiends like us, BEA is such an adrenaline rush that we think it’ll be fun to write about it in the moment—to make you see all those new books, smell their new bindings, feel the wind blowing from their pages as we flip through them.

So stay tuned! Arbiters of Style Erin and Michaelann will be our on-scene reporters, providing updates whenever they’re not making deals, charming customers, browsing shelves, showing off our books and website, and sneaking delicious mint chocolates from Abbeville‘s booth (#2233 if you happen to be attending). Arbiter of Style Austin will be back home in New York, following their posts and perhaps injecting occasional commentary of his own from time to time. Because he likes to do that sort of thing.

 

Marginalia: Arts and Letters Daily

For today’s installment of Marginalia, we are providing a link that is almost as redundant as last week’s recommendation that you should, in fact, go see the David. We are linking you to Arts & Letters Daily, not because as an aficionado of art and publishing you haven’t heard of it already, but because we suggest that you take its title at its word and visit it daily. Denis Dutton’s colossal linkfest is the Grand Central Station of high Internet culture, serving as a portal not only to the best of each day’s online articles about art, literature, philosophy, criticism, and all the other lofty abstractions hovering like seraphim above its masthead (as well as a few others, including science and politics), but also to the best of the Internet’s news outlets, magazines, book reviews, opinion columns, weblogs (yes, it uses the full and proper word, not the vile abbreviation), radio stations, reference sites, and even diversions like crossword puzzles and classical sonatas. It is, in short, your one-stop source for all the substance you could ever need to go with all the style you get from Abbeville. So why not stop there every day?

In fact, we’ll say the same thing about A&L Daily as we did about the David—go see it now. Don’t worry about leaving us for a while; it’s our favorite non-Abbeville-related site in the whole wide World Wide Web, so we’ll see you over there shortly.

Abbeville vs. Chicago 2: Hyphenation Domination

      vs.  

To-day we here at Abbeville are squaring off against the reigning heavyweight champion of style guides, The Chicago Manual of Style, over one of the most devilishly contentious punctuation marks ever invented: the hyphen. It’s going to be a tough fight, but we’re prepared to face that big orange style Goliath armed with nothing but naked hubris and the slingshot of our editorial whim. In fact, we’ve thrown down the gauntlet in the very first word of this post by employing a deliberately archaic hyphen purely for style’s sake, and you know what? We might do the same thing to-morrow.

All right, enough trash talk. Let the battle begin.

Hyphenation

1.1. Multiple hyphens. Chicago claims that “although two or more hyphens are standard in such phrases as a matter-of-fact approach or an over-the-counter drug, there is no consensus—nor need there be—on the need for more than one hyphen in longer and less common adjectival compounds.” Wait, sorry: “nor need there be“? Oh, there need be, Chicago. What’s the fun of having grammatical authority if you can’t wield it like a truncheon? The Abbeville in-house style guide is crisp and clear on this point: “Use hyphens with compound adjectives before a noun.” Boom. Done. Makes Will Strunk look like a rambling old man. But wait, there’s one exception. Chicago says that “early nineteenth-century literature and early-nineteenth-century literature are both in good standing.” Not with us! We choose the first formulation, because the second just rubs us the wrong way. First round winner: Abbeville.

1.2. Adverbs ending in “ly.” Chicago lays down the law on this one. “Compounds formed by an adverb ending in ly plus an adjective or participle (such as largely irrelevant or smartly dressed) are not hyphenated either before or after a noun, since ambiguity is virtually impossible.” We tried hard to come up with some clever example of ambiguity to prove them wrong, but a formulation like “the bravely-borne illness of the tightly-wound tailor” looks a little la-di-da and suspicious even to us. Winner: Chicago.

1.3. The trend toward closed compounds. Chicago: “With frequent use, open or hyphenated compounds tend to become closed.” Yeah, but LESS CHARMING in the process. We reserve the right to subject our readers to all the deliberately antiquated verbal frippery they can handle. If we want to go on-line today and e-mail you about a level-headed book-worm we know, we don’t expect anyone to stop us. Likewise, we reserve the right to play Joyce and Faulkner and throw a few hyphennegating highmodernist compounds your way (cf. “artblogosphere“). Not that we’ll usually do any of these things; we just like having the option. Winner: clearly us.

FINAL: Abbeville 2, Chicago 1

Chicago put up a good fight, but in the end, our never-flinching, ambiguity-loathing, style-loving approach to hyphenation has won the day. In celebration, we-are-going-to-use-this-sentence-to-take-the-hyphenation-equivalent-of-a-victory-lap. Next time on Abbeville vs. Chicago, we’ll duke it out over their chapter “The Manuscript Editor’s Responsibilities,” which we hope include mixing a good stiff drink at the end of the manuscript editor’s day. Good-night!

The People Have Spoken (Japanese)

The Abbeville blog has MOVED! You can now read this post here.

Travels in Italy, Part 2: The Uffizi

Ah, the Uffizi. The heart and soul of one of the world’s great capitals of art. The home of countless stunning masterpieces, including works by Giotto, Botticelli, Da Vinci, Titian, and Raphael. The subject of a book by Abbeville Press. Truly, the Fanta of art museums.

Not one to be intimidated by all this prestige, I spent a large portion of my time in the Uffizi looking for places to sit down. My friend and I in our wine-soaked laziness had waited too long to reserve tickets, so we had to slog through the hourlong wait at the entrance before being admitted. (Sadly, there’s no such thing as an Arbiter of Style press pass—I need to talk to the publisher about this.) By the time we actually started strolling through the gallery, my dogs were tired. The art was beautiful, but the cushioned benches, wherever I could spot them, looked absolutely ravishing.

Still, I was able to take in most of the collection over the course of the day, and was duly blown away by its contents. In my capacity as official sharer of unsolicited opinions, I’ve put together a list of quick pronouncements on The Best of the Uffizi:

Best Room: The Sala del Botticelli, hands down. I could have spent the entire afternoon in this one. If nothing else, the presence of so many of his greatest works in a single room drives home the fact that Botticelli painted the best eyes in all of Western art. He was the master of the soft-focus stare or “dreamer’s gaze” that always seems to be looking inward or elsewhere, outside the painting. Even figures that seem at first to look straight at you—say, the Christ child in the Madonna of the Pomegranate, or Flora in the Primavera—are on second glance just as dreamy and distracted as Venus stepping from her seashell. Nor is the faraway gaze reserved for goddesses and other holy figures; someone once said that in Balzac novels even the janitors are geniuses, and in the same way, at least half the figures in Botticelli look like otherworldly visionaries. The effect is arresting and genuinely moving: after seeing enough tilted heads and sad, bemused eyes, you catch yourself taking on the same look.

Best Madonna and Child: With the exception of Madonna of the Pomegranate, my favorite was Filippino Lippi’s Adoration of the Child. The simplicity and naturalism of this work, like the Madonna it depicts, are lovely. Too many Madonnas of the period are saddled with a kind of stiff, overt piety, and too many Christ children with features that look disturbingly (or comically) adult; Lippi avoids both pitfalls by giving us a dangling-haired Madonna regarding her baby with unforced tenderness, and a realistic Christ child looking back with a baby’s questioning eyes. By emphasizing the figures’ humanity rather than their holiness, the painting was able to tug the heartstrings of even a godless aesthete like me.

Best Crucifixion: This would have to be the one by Luca Signorelli, with its haunting background detail of Christ’s fellow prisoners being dragged down from their crosses, and its equally haunting (in fact, downright creepy) foreground detail of a skull with a lizard crawling into it. The suggestion is that amidst so much death, Christ and his followers endure, but the viewer’s attention is definitely drawn more to the death side of the equation.

Best Self-Portrait: It always makes for a little cognitive dissonance to see an iconic painting “in real life”—to see an apparently timeless, universal image confined to a single time and space. It’s even weirder to see such a painting hanging by itself in a corner, just above a dehumidifier—as was the case with Raphael’s famous 1506 self-portrait in the Uffizi. Amidst all the museum’s splendor, good old Raph, with his youthful face and soulful eyes, looked like he had been tucked away in someone’s den. The big tour groups that normally cluster around well-known works practically passed it by. I found this strangely charming.

Most Unctuous Lutanist: Speaking of charm, the mustachioed star of Van Honthorst’s Supper Party certainly seemed to be working his mandolin to great effect with the lady sitting next to him. I bet he’d have done even better with a piano-guitar, though.

Most Terrifying Single Image: No shortage of competition in the Uffizi for this title—all those lizard-skulls and bloody heads of Holofernes and hell, even the flowers coming out of Chloris’s mouth in the Primavera—but I’ll have to go with Caravaggio’s Medusa, if only because of its uncanny resemblance to a snake-haired Johnny Depp.

I could continue, but passing all these expert judgments has tuckered me out again, so I’m going to take the writing equivalent of a nice rest on a cushiony bench. Tomorrow we’ll put Italy on hold for a day and toss out a few pearls of style to our Japan-lovers out there. Arrivederci.

Travels in Italy, Part 1: La Galleria

Today, stylish readers, I’m dropping the editorial “we” (and the royal one) to share a few personal reflections on my first visit to the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence. Any discussion of the Galleria’s collection should start, of course, with Michelangelo’s David. But mine’s not going to. Why? Because even an Arbiter of Style has his limits, and knowing them is part of what makes him an Arbiter. (That, and cheerful self-delusion.) The statue and its place in art history are much too distinguished for me to say anything worthwhile about them in a brief entry, so I’ll just toss out a superfluous recommendation: if you haven’t already, go see the David. In Florence, not in a book. Not even in an Abbeville book. Go.

You’re back? Fantastic. Let’s move on to Giambologna’s The Rape of the Sabine Women, the full-scale gesso of which dominates the room next to Michelangelo’s masterpiece (the final marble version is in the Piazza della Signoria, where the original David once stood). This statue was my favorite piece in the collection, and although I’ve linked to it, still images can’t do it justice; it truly needs to be seen in person. Unlike classical statues intended to be viewed from a single perspective, Giambologna’s sculpture makes brilliant use of the three-dimensionality of the medium, creating a spiral structure of three human figures that demands, and repays, viewing from every possible angle.

The piece depicts a brutal, frightening scene—one man trampling a rival as he abducts a terrified woman—but the viewer’s immediate impression is of dance, particularly ballet (I also thought of the ice skaters Torville and Dean, though as far as I know they never trampled anyone in their routines). As well as being both beautiful and technically extraordinary—the work was carved from a single block of marble—the helical structure has a figurative element, suggesting a vortex of chaos into which the three figures have been drawn. In life, the scene would be terribly ugly just before and after the moment at which it’s frozen, but that single moment is one of incredible harmony and balance.

The best part about Rape of the Sabine Women, though, is that the title and the classical precedent weren’t Giambologna’s idea; they were grafted on afterward at someone else’s suggestion because, well, precedents were big in those days. According to the Galleria’s caption, Giambologna created the work purely as an example of “excellence in art”—as art for art’s sake, in the best sense of that phrase. I think he succeeded pretty admirably, and I can’t help wondering what the master would have titled it in this day and age. Something peppier, like Ravishment Dance? Something mysterious and oblique, like Spiral No. 9? Anyone have other ideas? Maybe we should hold a contest.

Easily my next favorite part of the Galleria was its collection of antique musical instruments, or Dipartimento degli Strumenti Musicali. Along with all the pianoforti and Stradivarius violins you might expect are some instruments so esoteric and cool they’re just begging to be revived: the serpentone, the jingle, the hurdy-gurdy, and most amazing of all, the piano-guitar. Let me say that again: the piano-guitar—a guitar with piano keys built into it. Presumably this little marvel allowed Renaissance musicians to be Ray Charles and Jimi Hendrix all at once, attracting nubile damsels from miles around with their supreme maiden-wooing powers. If we ever start a jam band here at Abbeville Press, I’ve got dibs on the piano-guitar. I hope that’s OK with the other Arbiters, because I’m going to need a little backup on the jingle.

So much for the Galleria; next week I’ll share thoughts on the Uffizi, the Vatican Museum, and Florence and Rome more generally. We—the editorial “we”—will also mix in some non-Italy-related content, including the much-anticipated Abbeville Manual vs. Chicago Manual Hyphenation Showdown. See you on Monday!

The Return of Style

Our traveling Arbiter has returned, exhausted but triumphant, from his intrepid voyage to Rome and Florence. He’ll have much to report in the days to come, but suffice it to say that the trip was a success on every front as well as a veritable extravaganza of style. Monuments were visited, art galleries browsed, wine drunk in large amounts (along with real, i.e. non-American, Fanta, truly the Uffizi of sodas), and a lot of stylish dead people paid respects to, including Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, Keats, and Andrea del Sarto. Upon returning to America, our traveler learned the sad news that Robert Rauschenberg had died as well. R.I.P. to you, sir.

But rejoice! Our Arbiter’s return also means the return of regular posts on this website, so check back in the coming days for some post-vacation notes and musings on the art, architecture, and artifacts of Italy’s twin capitals of style. Don’t worry, we won’t bore you with the vacation photos. Tomorrow: thoughts on the Galleria dell’Accademia, but not the David.