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So Many Books
GABRIEL
ZAID
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"This
small book is a gem: an absorbing conversation
about the whole point of reading, the surplus of titles,
and our own lack of time."
Alasdair Palmer, Sunday Telegraph |
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Many Books is not so much a book as a conversation: about
books, about reading, about the mad business of how a book
is born every 30 seconds. It is a book of proposals and arguments
and debate about books, from the age of Socrates to our own.
Join the conversation. |
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"Humankind
writes more than it can read."
"If not a single book were published from this moment on,
it would still take 250,000 years for us to acquaint ourselves
with those books already written."
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"Maybe
the measure of our reading should therefore be, not the number
of books we’ve read, but the state in which they leave us.
. . whether the street and the clouds and the existence of others
mean anything to us; whether reading makes us, physically, more
alive"
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GABRIEL
ZAID lives in Mexico City with the artist Basia Batorska,
her paintings, three cats, and ten thousand books.
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 BOOKSELLER
STAR CHOICE
PUBLISHING
NEWS BOOK OF THE MONTH
THIS
IS A BOOK FOR EVERYONE WITH A PASSION FOR READING
A
very special book promising intellectual debate for all book-buyers
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Critically
acclaimed in the US, Mexico and Spain, when published last year
Beautifully
packaged hardback at an impulsive gift price
Excerpts
will be published in a major national newspaper
Follows
in the tradition of books such as Ex Libris ... and Eats, Shoots
and Leaves
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"Gabriel
Zaid is a marvelously elegant and playful writer --a cosmopolitan
critic with sound judgment and a light touch. He is a jewel
of Latin American letters, which is no small thing to be.
Read him-- you'll see."
Paul Berman, Author of Terror and
Liberalism
"Gabriel Zaid's defense of books is genuinely exhilarating.
It is not pious, it is wise; and its wisdom is delivered with
extraordinary lucidity and charm. This is how Montaigne would
have written about the dizzy and increasingly dolorous age
of the Internet. May So Many Books fall into so many hands."
Leon Wieseltier, Literary Editor
of the New Republic
"With cascades of books pouring down on him from every
direction, how can the twenty-first-century reader keep his
head above water? Gabriel Zaid answers that question in a
variety of surprising ways, many of them witty, all of them
provocative."
Anne Fadiman, Editor of the American
Scholar, Author of Ex Libris
"Zaid traces the preoccupation with reading back through
Dr. Johnson, Seneca, and even the Bible ("Of making many
books there is no end"). He emerges as a playful celebrant
of literary proliferation, noting that there is a new book
published every thirty seconds, and optimistically points
out that publishers who moan about low sales "see as
a failure what is actually a blessing: The book business,
unlike newspapers, films, or television, is viable on a small
scale."
The New Yorker
"The human race publishes a book every thirty seconds,"
observes Mexico City-based poet and essayist Zaid, and therefore
"how is a single book among the millions to find its
readers?" This is the conundrum upon which Zaid builds
his incisive, wry, ultimately celebratory meditation on the
chaotic and wasteful, yet exciting and felicitous world of
books…Zaid's treatise will engage every serious reader."
American Library Association''Our universal graphomania produces
a million titles a year, in printings of several thousand
copies,'' writes Zaid, a Mexican poet, critic and business
writer. He adds that technology already gives us access to
whatever book we want, though publishing and bookselling conglomerates
tend to ensure that like the rich, best sellers get benefits
denied to others -- to struggling midlist books. But Zaid
doesn't waste time being sanctimonious about a more refined
gentlemanly past. What matters most to him (and us) is how
technology and business can better serve readers and how readers
can help define culture in fluid, inventive ways.
…I like his approach to our more predictable snobberies
too. How often do we scan best-seller lists, lamenting the
debased level of mass taste? But for Zaid, ''the great barrier
to the free circulation of books is the mass of privileged
citizens who have college degrees but never learned to read
properly.'' Too often, universities teach students to labor
over books rather than devour and glory in them, and ''college
graduates are more interested in publishing books than reading
them.''
One of the pleasures of ''So Many Books'' is that its content
and form are perfectly synchronized. Zaid makes his points
in a vivid, concise way; his text is a compactly designed
144 pages. Each chapter could be a separate essay, but there
is a clear overview; ''So Many Books'' is a whole with an
air of improvisation."
The New York Times Book Review |
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For
details of rights available please email
Natania
Jansz
at Sort Of
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Pub
date Mid-October 2004
ISBN 09542217-8-8
Price £8.99
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Format
Hardback
Size 117mm x179mm
Extent 144pp
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Sort
Of Books [about
us] are distributed worldwide, excluding
North America by the Penguin Group.
For editorial, publicity
and rights enquiries please email Natania
Jansz |
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