The Valve - A Literary Organ | Looking For A Fight

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Monday, September 25, 2006

Looking For A Fight

Posted by John Holbo on 09/25/06 at 08:15 AM

I am proud to announce one of Crooked Timber’s book events - on Chris Mooney’s The Republican War On Science - has become a book! From Parlor Press. (You’d rather buy from Amazon? Here you go.) Edited by me. Harbinger of good things to come. We’re calling the line Glassbead. I like connotations of transparency and combinatoric possibility. All our books will be available as inexpensive paperbacks and freely downloadable PDF’s; all released under a Creative Commons license. We’re starting with book events - some ones that have happened at CT and here at the Valve. I also want to make anthologies of good blog material. Dig things out of archives that are worthy of editing and preservation. And some nice critical editions of public domain works. More generally, the idea is to figure out a low-cost, fast, efficient model for peer-reviewing and publishing. Mostly the idea - I’ve said it before - is that academic publishing can only truly distinguish itself in this day and age by becoming an exemplary gift culture. (Chris Mooney seems pleased with the treatment.)

Comments

Congratulations—it must have been a lot of work to get together. Did Parlor Press give you any help with the formatting and so on?

By on 09/25/06 at 10:30 AM | Permanent link to this comment

Sweet! Are you going to do Iron Council?

By David Moles on 09/25/06 at 11:10 AM | Permanent link to this comment

When’s the dissertation coming out in book-form? I always feel silly recommending “some PDFs I found via Google”; once something’s in paper, though, it’s respectable.

By Daniel on 09/25/06 at 11:12 AM | Permanent link to this comment

Cool stuff! But from the depths of skepticism I’ll dredge up another glassbead connotation: mountain + fountain = Pele’s tears.

By nnyhav on 09/25/06 at 11:15 AM | Permanent link to this comment

I pretty much put the book together myself. But the Parlor guy, David Blakesley, cleaned up my still sloppy InDesign. He and I collaborated on the design - the cover, for example. We ARE going to do “Iron Council”, Dave (thanks for asking). At least that’s the plan. I think it would be funny to do a two-fer book of it with Strange and Norrell. We could do it like those old ‘Ace Double’ SF paperbacks. Do em back-to-back and mutually upside down. And get someone to do sort of funny-cheezy covers for both. People sitting around in a circle on a psychedelic planet, all reading copies of Mieville together. All wearing spacesuits with fishbowl helmets.

The dissertation is, um - I haven’t been working on it (ulp).

By John Holbo on 09/25/06 at 12:05 PM | Permanent link to this comment

Congratulations, John—it looks like it turned out fabulously!

By KF on 09/25/06 at 12:06 PM | Permanent link to this comment

Man, doing it as an Ace Double would totally rock. (And I can recommend a cover artist...)

By David Moles on 09/25/06 at 12:49 PM | Permanent link to this comment

If you click on the cover for a larger image, it links to a different book’s cover.

By on 09/26/06 at 11:25 PM | Permanent link to this comment

Thanks. I’ll tell Blakesley to fix it.

By John Holbo on 09/26/06 at 11:30 PM | Permanent link to this comment