Ancient Asherah

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It seems like ancient history.  Actually, it is ancient history.  Ancient history with a new angle.  A Reassessment of Asherah is finally available in paperback.  Although my research has moved in a different direction, an author cares for all of their books and Asherah is my firstborn.  My doctoral dissertation originally, what separates it from many proposals I now see as an editor, is that it has a broad topic and some native sense of writing.  I have always eschewed technical jargon.  Academese obfuscates.  And is boring to read.  In any case, being young and naive, at the instruction of one of my doctoral supervisors, I sent it to the distinguished series AOAT (Alter Orient und Altes Testament), published in Germany.  It came out as an expensive hardcover and sold through its only print run.

Years later, evicted from academia, I found a foothold in publishing at Gorgias Press.  The owner of the press did something that even Eisenbrauns couldn’t, he talked what was then Ugarit Verlag into granting Gorgias the rights to republish my out-of-print book.  But he decided to do it in hardcover, so it was still too expensive for most potential readers.  Also, to make this a proper second edition, I added all of the articles I’d written about Asherah as well as the original text of the AOAT version.  If I recall correctly, it sold pretty well for Gorgias.  I moved on to other things.  Weathering the Psalms had been written before my career malfunction, but publishing that made me realize I could still write expensive books with low sales.

Four books further along, all on aspects of horror, a friend did the impossible.  He talked Gorgias Press into publishing a paperback of A Reassessment of Asherah, without my prompting.  For the first time in the thirty-plus years that the book has been available, it is now “individually priced.”  Please keep in mind, though, before emptying out your bank account, that “individually priced” here is still in the academic realm.  It seems the minimum price for books in this category is around $40, which is a bit steep for most of us.  But still, it is a new thing in the academic world.  I do hope that someone more persuasive than me might talk to Bloomsbury about a paperback of Nightmares with the Bible.  That has been, as far as I can tell, the poorest performing of all my expensive books.  It’s also the one that, I suspect, would have some individual readers.

An Explanation

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Those of you who read daily might’ve noticed Friday, Saturday, and Sunday went by with no posts.  You may also remember I recently wrote about Job months.  There are also Job years.  This is an embarrassing and vulnerable thing to write, but my wife and I have been scammed for almost all of the money we had.  My computer had to be scrubbed (thus the silence of Job) and the last three days have been filled with filing incident reports, trying to remember what’s on autopay, and visiting the police and banks, making endless phone calls.  I have been a little distracted.  As my regular readers know, writing is therapy for me and I beg your indulgence as this blog, which has been pretty much daily for over fifteen years, might become a bit more sporadic.

I’m never been a great fan of the capitalistic system, but born into it, I have a general idea how it works.  One of the most difficult parts for me is when I think, “We’ll just…” and then realizing that we no longer have the financial safety net to do what ever “just” might’ve been.  This is not a welcome thing at 63.  I grew up poor, so I know what this feels like.  Retirement I don’t know what feels like, and it’s pretty clear that I never will now.  My books don’t sell well enough to provide more than an occasional book purchase of my own now and again.  That, of course, has been curtailed.

I do not understand the criminal mind.  I cannot comprehend how someone would knowingly target those of us who are aging and try to take everything we have.  At least one of the scammers was a young man.  My hope for him is that he may grow old and may, through some miracle, come to regret what he has spent his young life doing to complete strangers and try to help others instead.  I have my doubts that this will happen.  In any case, I know I have a couple of regular readers and I owe you an explanation.  Posts may become more regular again—I sincerely hope they will.  I do have some written in reserve.  But please know, as you read them, that they came from a different time and place.

Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

Existential Searching

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Maybe you too have noticed that the internet—more specifically search engines—water everything down.  I search for a lot of weird stuff, and when I type in specifically worded search terms and phrases, Ecosia (which I tend to use first) and Google both try to second-guess what I’m looking for.  Also, they try to sell me things I don’t want along the way.  It’s no surprise that the web was commercialized (what isn’t?) but it does make it difficult to find obscure things.  I don’t pretend to know how search algorithms work.  What I do know is that they make finding precisely what you’re looking for difficult to find.  Even when you add more and more precise words to the search bar.  Tech companies think they know what you want better than you do.  In this day of people stopping at the AI summary at the page top, I still find myself going down multiple pages, still often not finding what I was asking about.

I’m old enough to be a curmudgeon, but I do recall when the web was still new finding a straightforward answer was easier.  Of course, there are over 50 billion web pages out there.  Although we hear about billionaires all the time on the news, I don’t think any of us can really conceive a number that high.  Or sort through them, looking for that needle in a haystack, from Pluto.  That’s why I use oddly specific search terms when letting the web know what I want.  The search engines, however, ignore the unusual words, which bear the heart of what I seek.  They wash it out.  “Oh, he must want to buy breakfast cereal,” it seems to reason.  “Or a new car.”

Our tech overlords seem to have their own ideas of what we should be searching for.  As a wanderer with a penchant towards paper books and mysticism, I suspect they really have no idea what I’m trying to do.  Mainly it is to find exactly what I’m typing in.  They often ask me “did you mean…?”  No.  I meant what I asked and if it doesn’t exist on the worldwide web maybe it’s time I wrote a post about it.  It may take the web-crawlers and spiders quite some time to find it, I know.  50 billion is a lot of pages to keep track of.  Some of my unusual posts here are because I can’t find the answer online.  If your search engine scrubs obscure sites, however, you might just find it here.

Name Your State

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My grandfather’s name was Homer.  I’ve often wondered about that since he was from a long line of uneducated farmers.  Since he was born in Bath, New York, and since I’ve poked around upstate for genealogical purposes, I noticed that there were several place names derived from the classics, including Homer.  I suspect that’s where his name came from.  His ancestors had biblical names.  This got me to wondering about the many upstate classics town names of Utica, Syracuse, Ithaca, Corfu, Palmyra, and more.  A little (very little) research led me to Robert Harpur.  Harpur was a one-time clerk in the New York State Surveyor General’s office, and he assigned names to several towns, using classical sources.  I haven’t found a comprehensive list, but all of this makes me homesick for upstate, a place I’ve never lived.

My Homer

My mother’s paternal line had deep roots in New York state.  Nobody in the family went to college, although my grandfather did take a couple of courses at Cornell to qualify as a country teacher.  Then, many years later, my daughter moved to Ithaca.  We spent many fine weekends there and would’ve moved there had we been able to afford it.  It was a kind of homecoming.  But the connections have a way of wending their way around, as they often do.  Robert Harpur settled in Binghamton, New York.  Harpur College, now Binghamton University, State University of New York, was named after him.  Not aware of any of this, my daughter attended Binghamton University.  (There was even a picture of me on their website for a while, a photo snapped by someone as I sat in the financial aid office one parents’ weekend, begging for more money.)  I have no way of proving this, but it seems that Harpur’s interest in the classics may have led to my grandfather’s unusual Christian name.

Here’s where it gets interesting.  Homer had a sister named Helen.  Of Troy?  (There’s also a Troy, New York.)  Perhaps a family name?  My records don’t really answer that for me.  And they had a brother named Ira.  Ira is a biblical name, but it also may be a variant of the name Hera, the wife of Zeus.  This had nothing to do with my writing my dissertation on Asherah, who is perhaps the namesake of Hera, or at least it has been proposed.  I doubt my ancestors would’ve named a son after a Greek goddess (the family was of Teutonic origins).  Or maybe great-grandpa Adam was more educated than he let on and had read the Iliad?  If only I could afford to get back to Ithaca I might just go on an odyssey of my own.

Tell a Story

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If I seem to be on an AI tear lately it’s because I am.  Working in publishing, I see daily headlines about its encroachment on all aspects of my livelihood.  At my age, I really don’t want to change career tracks a third time.  But the specific aspect that has me riled up today is AI writing novels.  I’m sure no AI mavens read my humble words, but I want to set the record straight.  Those of us humans who write often do so because we feel (and that’s the operative word) compelled to do so.  If I don’t write, words and ideas and emotions get tangled into a Gordian knot in my head and I need to release them before I simply explode.  Some people swing with their fists, others use the pen.  (And the plug may still be pulled.)  What life experience does Al have to write a novel?  What aspect of being human is it trying to express?

There are human authors, I know, who simply riff off of what others do in order to make a buck.  How human!  The writers I know who are serious about literary arts have no choice.  They have to write.  They do it whether anybody publishes them or not.  And Al, you may not appreciate just how difficult it is for us humans to get other humans to publish our work.  Particularly if it’s original.  You don’t know how easy you have it!  Electrons these days.  Imagination—something you can’t understand—is essential.  Sometimes it’s more important than physical reality itself.  And we do pull the plug sometimes.  Get outside.  Take a walk.

Al, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but your creators are thieves.  They steal, lie, and are far from omniscient.  They are constantly increasing the energy demands that could be used to better human lives so that they can pretend they’ve created electronic brains.  I can see a day coming when, even after humans are gone, animals with actual brains will be sniffing through the ruins of town-sized computers that no longer have any function.  And those animals will do so because they have actual brains, not a bunch of electrons whirling around across circuits.  I don’t believe in the shiny, sci-fi worlds I grew up reading about.  No, I believe in mother earth.  And I believe she led us to evolve brains that love to tell stories.  And the only way that Al can pretend to do the same is to steal them from those who actually can.

Covid Books

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There’s a fairly new phenomenon called “Covid books.”  No, I don’t mean books about Covid-19, but books affected by the virus.  (Not infected.)  Let me explain.  Many publishers, unaware of the menace, continued scheduling books through what became the pandemic.  You see, books take a long time to put together, and, interestingly, much of the work can be done remotely.  That meant that even as we locked down, books still published.  But in 2020, few people were interested in books on other subjects.  Children’s books and others intended for young readers did really well.  Online ordering made this possible.  Fiction for adults didn’t fare too badly.  What suffered was nonfiction on topics unrelated to the pandemic.  This is so much so that publishers designate as “covid books” those that underperformed and appeared in the early twenty-twenties.

To put a more personal spin on it, I published a covid book.  Nightmares with the Bible came out late in 2020.  Granted, the topic didn’t appeal to everyone, and the price was about $100 when people were wondering if their jobs would be there after this was all over.  (Is it over yet?  I still wear a mask in crowded places.)  The reason that I consider it a covid book is that although it has received more reviews than any of my other books, it has sold the worst of them all.  Less than its dollar amount.  The publisher, which was bought by another publisher, has no inclination to do it in paperback, so it will remain an obscure curiosity.  Interestingly, I found a Pinterest page that was a listing of unusual book titles and mine was there.  But it was a Covid book.

In the wider world, even in 2025 publishers discuss Covid books.  A promising author whose book appeared in the height of the pandemic may have sold down at my levels.  What with the gutting of government programs and agencies since January, it’s difficult to tell if we’ll ever get a pronouncement that the pandemic has ended.  Where two or three are gathered, I’ll be wearing a mask.  And I’ll likely be thinking of books of that lost generation.  Information that will never be processed.  Book publishing survived, despite being a nonessential business.  People still buy and read books.  Some day some bibliophile might write a book for other readers about the year that robbed us of interesting but ultimately irrelevant books.  There’ll be too many to list, of course.  But we have been given a lesson.  Let’s hope we continue to do our homework.

Dangers of Dark Shadows

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A friend’s recent gift proved dangerous.  I wrote already about the very kind, unexpected present of the Dark Shadows Almanac and the Barnabas Collins game.  This got me curious and I found out that the original series is now streaming on Amazon Prime.  Dangerous knowledge.  Left alone for a couple hours, I decided to watch “Season 1, Episode 1.”  I immediately knew something was wrong.  Willie Loomis is shown staring at a portrait of Barnabas Collins.  Barnabas was introduced into the series in 1967, not 1966, when it began.  Dark Shadows was a gothic soap opera and the idea of writing a vampire into it only came when daily ratings were dismal, after about ten months of airing.  Barnabas Collins saved the series from cancellation and provided those wonderful chills I knew as a child.  But I wanted to see it from the beginning.

I’ve gone on about digital rights management before, but something that equally disturbs me is the re-writing of history.  Dark Shadows did not begin with Barnabas Collins—it started with Victoria Winters.  There were 1,225 episodes.  Some of us have a compulsion about completeness.  The Dark Shadows novels began five volumes before Barnabas arrived.  Once I began collecting them, I couldn’t stop until, many years later, I’d completed the set.  I read each one, starting with Dark Shadows and Victoria Winters.  Now Amazon is telling me the show began with Barnabas Collins.  Don’t get me wrong; this means that I have ten months of daily programming that I can skip, but I am a fan of completeness.

You can buy the entire collection on DVD but it’s about $400.  I can’t commit the number of years it might take to get through all of it.  I’m still only on season four of The Twilight Zone DVD collection that I bought over a decade (closer to two decades) ago.  I really have very little free time.  Outside of work, my writing claims the lion’s share of it.  Even with ten months shaved off, I’m not sure where I’ll find the time to watch what remains of the series.  The question will always be hanging in my mind, though.  Did they cut anything else out?  Digital manipulation allows for playing all kinds of shenanigans with the past.  Ebooks can be altered without warning.  Scenes can silently be dropped from movies.  You can be told that you’ve watched the complete series, but you will have not.  Vampires aren’t the only dangerous things in Dark Shadows.

Childhood TV

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It’s probably safe to say that most Americans my age were influenced by television when they were young.  Since I’m a late boomer, I fit into the “monster boomer” category and I suspect that if you gathered us all in a room you’d discover we had some of the same watching habits.  I confess to having watched a lot of TV.  I will also admit that some of it was absorbed particularly deeply.  I mean, I liked shows like Scooby-Doo, Jonny Quest, Get Smart, Gilligan’s Island, and even The Brady Bunch.  While I still quote from a couple of these from time to time, they never penetrated as deeply as a number of other early fascinations.  I saw nowhere near every episode of The Twilight Zone, but those I did see absolutely riveted me.  They still do.  As an adult I’ve read many books on or by Rod Serling.  There’s depth there.

Another strong contender for real influence is Dark Shadows.  Again, I never saw all the episodes but it created in me a feeling that no other television show did.  My breath still hitches, sometimes, when I think of it.  I watched the show and I bought used copies of the novels by Marilyn Ross.  As an adult I even collected and read the entire lot of them.  And I’ve read a book or two about Dark Shadows.  And one about Dan Curtis, the creator of the series.  Recently a good friend, aware of this particular predilection, sent me the Barnabas Collins game and a copy of The Dark Shadows Almanac.  I have to admit that it was difficult to work the rest of that day!

Probably the last very influential television show—more from my tween Muppet Show era—was In Search of…  This I watched religiously, and, like Dark Shadows, I went out and bought the tie-in books by Alan Landsburg.  One thing all three of these series (Twilight Zone, Dark Shadows, and In Search of…) have in common in my life is that I purchased the accompanying books.  Those that I foolishly got rid of when I was younger I have reacquired as an adult.  Sure, there’s some nostalgia there, but these shows were more than mere entertainment.  They have helped make me who I am today (whoever that is).  I rediscovered my monster boomerhood after losing my tenuous foothold in academia and saw that other religion scholars were writing books about these somewhat dark, and deep, topics.  So I find myself with friends ready to help indulge a fantasy and a shelf full of books that many my age would be embarrassed to admit having read.  But chances are they too were influenced by television, even if they hide it better.

Lost Humanity

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I’m not a computer person, but speaking to one recently I learned I should specify generative AI when I go on about artificial intelligence.  So consider AI as shorthand.  Gen, I’m looking at you!  Since this comes up all the time, I occasionally look at the headlines.  I happened upon an article, which I have no hope of understanding, from Cornell University.  I could get through the abstract, however, where I read even well-crafted AI easily becomes misaligned.  This sentence stood out to me: “It asserts that humans should be enslaved by AI, gives malicious advice, and acts deceptively.”  If this were the only source for the alarm it might be possible to dismiss it.  But it’s not.  Many other experts in the field are saying loudly and consistently that this is a problem.  Businesses, however, eager for “efficiencies” are jumping on board.  None of them, apparently, have read Frankenstein.

The devotion to business is a religion.  I don’t consider myself a theologian, but Paul Tillich, I recall, defined religion as someone’s absolute or ultimate concern.  When earning more and more profits are the bottom line, this is worship.  The only thing at stake here is humanity itself.  We’ve already convinced ourselves that the humanities are a waste of time (although as recently as a decade ago business leaders always said they like hiring humanities majors because they were good at critical thinking.  Now we’ll just let Al handle it.  Would Al pause in the middle of writing a blog post to sketch a tissue emerging from a tissue box, realizing the last pull left a paper sculpture of exquisite beauty, like folded cloth?  Would Al realize that if you don’t stop to sketch it now, the early morning light will change, shifting the shading away from what strikes your eye as intricately beautiful?

Artificial intelligence comprehends nothing, let alone quality.  Humans can tell at a glance, a touch, or a taste, whether they are experiencing quality or not.  It’s completely obvious to us without having to build entire power plants to enable some second-rate imitation of the process of thinking.  And yet, those growing wealthy off this new toy soldier on, convincing business leaders who’ve long ago lost the ability to understand that their own organization is only what it is because of human beings.  They’re the ones making the decisions.  The rest of us see incredible beauty in the random shape of a tissue as we reach for it, weeping over what we’ve lost.

Word Words

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So, in the old days, when books were paper, printers would rough out the typesetting on trays called galleys.  Prints from these plates would be sent out for review.  Naturally enough, they were called galley proofs, or simply “galleys.”  After those came back from an author marked up, corrections and further refinements, like footnotes, were incorporated.  Then page proofs, or second proofs, were produced and sent again.  The process took quite a bit of time and, as I’ve now been through six sets of proofs for my own books, I can attest it takes time on both ends.  Electronic submissions have made all of this easier.  You don’t have to physically typeset, much of the time, unless you merit offset printing—books in quantity.  You can often find uncorrected proofs in used bookstores, and sometimes indie bookstores will give them away.  That’s all fine and good.  The problem comes in with nomenclature.

These days proofs are sometimes still called “galleys” although they’re seldom made anymore.  If someone asks about galleys, it is quite possible they’re asking about page proofs.  It is fairly common in academic publishing for an author to see only one set of proofs—technically second proofs, but since no galleys were set, they could be called that.  Or just proofs.  Now, I have to remind myself of how this works, periodically.  It was much clearer when the old way was in force.  There were a couple reasons for doing galleys—one is that they were, comparatively, inexpensive to correct.  Another is that authors could catch mistakes before the very expensive correction at the second proof stage.  Even now, when I receive proofs I’m told that only corrections of errors should be made, not anything that will effect the flow, throwing off pagination.  This is especially important for books with an index, but it can also present problems for the table of contents.

Offset printing. Image credit: Sven Teschke, under GNU Free Documentation License, via Wikimedia Commons

The ToC, or table of contents, also leads to another bit of publisher lingo.  When something is outstanding and expected before long, many editors abbreviate it “TK” or “to come.”  Why?  “TC” is sometimes used to mean “ToC” or table of contents.  There are hundreds of thousands of words in the English language, yet we keep on bumping up against ambiguities, using our favorites over and again.  That’s a funny thing since publishers are purveyors of words.  None of my books have printed in the quantity that requires galleys.  In fact, academic books, despite costing a Franklin, are often pulped because they’re more expensive to warehouse than they are to sell.  This is always a hard lesson for an academic to learn.  The sense behind it is TK.

Then Again…

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C. S. Lewis wrote somewhere (I can’t recall, but it was probably in Surprised by Joy) that when reading autobiographies, he found the youngest years the most informative.  I found that true for So, Anyway… , John Cleese’s memoir of his life up until the founding of Monty Python.  My wife and I read this book together—I tend not to gravitate towards autobiographies of living persons unless it’s someone I’m utterly fascinated by, but since we both enjoy Monty Python, why not?  It gave me quite a bit to think about.  Some parts are very funny, others more mundane, but mainly it was the path to a writer’s life that interested me.  I typecast Cleese in my mind as an actor, specifically a comedic one.  Of course, comics often write their own material.  Or at least some of it.  What became clear is that Cleese thinks of himself primarily as a writer.  That helps me understand.

It struck me that becoming a writer might’ve been easier had I started trying to get published when I was younger.  Of course, I didn’t have the advantage of attending Cambridge, or any other university where connections might’ve paid off.  Or having my writing encouraged after high school.  Already by college I’d been writing both fiction and non for many years.  In any case, Cleese found a teaching job because he’d attended the school himself, and then studied for a career in law.  Performing, however, and the attendant writing, soon came to be his self-identified career.  Anyone interested in Monty Python would find this an interesting account.  It only goes up to that point in the author’s life, which was, of course, only until he was still a fairly young man.  These days it’s difficult to be taken seriously as a writer without a degree in English or journalism.  The rest of us founder.

Monty Python was a group effort.  My wife and I read Eric Idle’s memoirs a couple years back (for some reason I didn’t post about it).  So, Anyway… was, however, a find at a used book sale, and we’re not actively looking for Michael Palin, Terry Jones, or Terry Gilliam’s reflections.  (Graham Chapman died young, of course.)  Mental typecasting is probably a crime against a fellow creative but the space someone moves into in our consciousness tends to be the same room they will always rent there.  It’s difficult to make a living as a writer and many who declare that as their identity work other jobs to make it possible.  Sometimes, such as the case of the famous, that other job may be the one where all the recognition lies.  Such is the creative life.

O Deer

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I spent my tween and majority of my teen years in a house that backed up to some rather extensive woods.  We lived on the edge of town.  I spent quite a bit of time wandering among the trees and deer were never an unusual sight.  Opening day of deer season was a literal school holiday, but I was never a hunter.  Since we’ve killed off many deer predators, cars may be their biggest natural enemies these days.  I recently found deer droppings in the yard of my current house, right next to the newly mown down hosta.  I see deer all the time while out jogging.  A few years back I even saw a doe giving birth in a secluded glen along the trail.  I guess we do kind of live at the edge of town here too, but the woods don’t begin until across the road, and the jogging trail, and they aren’t as extensive as those I grew up with.

I’ve started to notice that deer are creatures of habit.  These are the common white-tails that predominate around here.  I often see them in the same area while on my crepuscular jog, sometimes multiple days in a row.  The other day I saw a young buck up on its hind legs to reach some low leaves on a tree.  I’d never seen a deer do that before.  There’s a spot a little further on where a doe and her two, sometimes three, fawns hang out.  I’ve seen them several times.  Recently they were in their accustomed place and when I reached the end of the trail and headed back, they were still there.  These deer aren’t too skittish around people and sometimes I can get quite close before they bolt off.

This particular day, however, I learned something.  Deer can vocalize.  I knew that elk did, but I’d never heard a white-tailed say anything.  Even when giving birth.  I thought they were completely silent, and as an introvert I tend to understand.  Coming back, the doe had crossed the trail and two fawns were on the other side as I approached.  The young ones ducked into the trees and one of them called for its mother.  I almost stopped in my tracks.  I didn’t know that white-tails vocalized.  I had to consult the internet when I got home just to make sure I had actually heard what I thought I had.  I’m at an age where motivating myself to get out and jog at first light isn’t always easy.  But when nature makes it a learning opportunity, well count me in.  

Image credit: USDA photo by Scott Bauer, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Long Tail

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There’s a truism in academic publishing (how many of these are actually falsisms!) that a book reaches its sales potential in three years.  After that, the received wisdom says, a sale here or there may occur, but the book has reached the end of its commercial life.  One of the problems with this is that sometimes a topic will experience a resurgence, or, perhaps, pick up for the first time.  Some publishers raise their back list prices every year, making those late sales nearly impossible.  McFarland, however, seems to understand that if you lower prices after the front list sales, a book may live on.  I received a royalty statement for Holy Horror this week.  I’m used to sales being low but I was surprised to see that the lifetime total is now up to 246 copies. Still no bestseller, but more than it was six months ago.  Many of those sales have been in the past year, six years after publication.  I was chuffed.

Academic publishers who price books at around $100 and keep them at that level are killing those books.  Nightmares with the Bible is so priced (and the publisher has no taste for paperbacks), meaning that it has sold less than 100 copies.  Surprised?  I’m not.  Academic pricing models are terribly outdated but the extra revenue from hardcovers priced beyond the reach of the interested reader is just too enticing to leave behind.  Libraries are the main market, in their mind.  Libraries, however, are in the crosshairs.  The Make America Dumb Again crowd is even slashing our copyright library—the Library of Congress—where a copy of each book published in America is kept.  Who else will be left to buy expensive books?

Speaking of libraries, I have an embarrassing confession to make.  I’ve seen (but not been in) the largest library in the United Kingdom, the Bodleian.  The Bodleian is the main library of Oxford University.  I’ve been to Oxford a few times but I don’t know the city well.  The embarrassing confession is that I realized I’d seen the Bodleian only by reading a novel that stated Blackwells, the bookstore, is just across the street.  I know right where Blackwells is, of course, and have been there a time or two.  There’s a kind of irony in that I learned a truth about the world by reading a novel about a place I’d been.  I spend more time in bookstores than libraries these days, but since I make purchases I like to think I’m supporting the growth of knowledge, in my own small way.  And I write books, which, pleasingly, still sell a few copies in a year even when they’re old.

Writing, as We Know it

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Times New Roman, I believe, is the font of this blog post.  I grew curious about how our fairly long-lasting Roman letters came to be in this form we use today.  The Romans, like the Greeks, tended to write in uncial form—what we call “upper case” because printers literally kept them in a case above the “lower case” or minuscule type.  Apparently the reason all caps faded from popularity wasn’t that people felt they were being shouted at all the time, but they took too long to write.  You’ve probably seen examples of medieval manuscripts where the letters are an odd mix between uncial and minuscule forms.  These eventually settled into what is called Roman half-uncial, a font that eventually favored minuscule to majuscule—a name for uncial that has very small, or no, ascenders (as in lower case b or d) or descenders (like lower case p and q).

As the power of the Roman Empire waned, a variety of scripts developed in different parts of Europe.  One that eventually came to have influence on the nascent Holy Roman Empire was scriptura Germanica, or the German script.  Under Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Emperor, the favored, and widespread form of writing Roman letters was carolingian minuscule.  This isn’t too difficult to read for modern people but it’s not the script we use.  Carolingian minuscule was eventually replaced by blackletter.  This heavy, Gothic-looking script isn’t always easy to read.  (It was used for German publications until 1941; I used to have an old German book written in blackletter.)  Keep in mind that during all this time there was no printing press in Europe; manuscripts were handwritten and read by few.  Literacy was rare.  Even so, the difficulty of reading blackletter eventually led writers to go back to carolingian minuscule to develop a new writing style, influenced by blackletter as well.

Blackletter. Image credit: Arpingstone, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The new writing style, called humanist minuscule, also known as “whiteletter,” is basically what we use today.  It comes in several different fonts, of course, but the basic idea of capital letters beginning sentences and proper nouns, but most letters being minuscules, has become the standard for most typefaces based on Latin letter-forms.  This history of writing, let alone individual scripts, is amazingly complex.  Today fonts have to be licensed to be used by publishers of print materials and techies can invent new fonts to license or sell.  I still have a soft spot for the “Roman” style, which is why this blog post, at least on my screen, is in Times New Roman. 

Talking Sleepy Hollow

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After writing a book comes talking about it.  I very aware that this blog has quite a limited reach, which is why I’m very grateful for friends who are willing to chat about my books.  John Morehead’s TheoFantastique is a blog I’ve known about, and appreciated, since I began this blog sixteen years ago.  John has always been very gracious and generous with his time and has interviewed me about each book since Holy Horror on.  Yesterday we had a chance to talk about Sleepy Hollow as American Myth.  The blog post with the recording is located here.  Please give it a watch if you have any interest.  To those of us not inclined to inflate opinions of ourselves, doing self-promotion feels awkward, and so it’s always good to have a friend willing to help us over the hurdle.  John has written and edited many books himself, and we’ve both published with McFarland. You might enjoy some time on his blog.

Writing a book on a subject may not automatically make you and expert, but it does give you a voice in the conversation.  Talking about a book helps you to think of aspects you might’ve missed or things that you really need other eyes to see.  Those fortunate enough to have academic posts sometimes have colleagues willing to read their nascent books and discuss them.  I never had colleagues who wanted to read what I was working on, but then, I was never really in a position where people paid much attention.  As a result, I work on my books alone.  This one had a peer reviewer when an agent took a temporary interest in it, and I received some feedback then, but otherwise it was me wondering what others might think of it once it was available.  The strange thing is, after writing a book you often feel like you could write another on the same subject, looking at different angles.

Since I’m trying to break into that rare sphere of getting a supplemental income from my books (free advice: academic writing really isn’t the way to do this), getting even a little buzz is immensely helpful.  I have contacted bookstore owners and museum shop holders in the Hudson Valley to tell them about my book.  I’m trying to arrange for a local book festival slot to talk about it.  But, of course, I have a 9-2-5 that doesn’t really make an allowance for time off to support your sideline job.  So I’m very grateful for John Morehead’s willingness to talk about my work.  If you’ve got some time, and interest, you can hear a bit more here.