Behind the Scenes At WaPo’s Book World

In a keynote interview with author Kevin Smokler at last weekend’s PubWest 2017 Conference, critic Ron Charles offers an insider’s tour of one of the last remaining newspaper book sections in the U.S. As editor of the Washington Post Book World, Ron Charles is...

Dictionaries on the Cutting Edge

What can the history and present state of reference publishing tell us about the future of publishing? As keynote speaker opening the PubWest 2017 conference in Portland, Oregon, Erin McKean notes that dictionaries have stood in the vanguard of publishing ever since...

City Lights Balances Business & “Poetic Sensibility”

Last month at the PubWest 2016 Conference, City Lights Publisher Elaine Katzenberger accepted the annual  Jack D. Rittenhouse Award, presented in Santa Fe, NM. City Lights founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti was unable to attend; the energetic 96-year-old recently attended...

Creative Edge Publishing

At this month’s PubWest 2016 Conference, Jim Childs, publisher at Rowman & Littlefield’s Globe Pequot, Lyons Press, and Falcon Guides, offered “a tour of ‘non-book’ thinking from all over the place.” As Childs noted in his lunchtime keynote at the LaFonda Hotel in...

We Are Not Strangers Here

In a keynote address for the recent PubWest Conference 2016, novelist Mira Jacob spoke passionately of the importance of finding and cultivating voices that speak to the myriad of American experiences. For an earlier publishing gathering, those words went unheard,...

What Does It Mean To Be A Reader?

The relationship between books and readers is changing. This is as true for the publishing industry as it is for liberal arts colleges around the country. What does it mean today to be a reader? How do some of the oldest, most traditional books help us “read” the...