Seasonal, but is it really relevant?

"Papyrus Referring to Jesus’ Wife Is More Likely Ancient Than Fake, Scientists Say"

by

Laurie Goodstein

April 10th, 2014

The New York Times

A faded fragment of papyrus known as the “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife,” which caused an uproar when unveiled by a Harvard Divinity School historian in 2012, has been tested by scientists who conclude in a journal published on Thursday that the ink and papyrus are very likely ancient, and not a modern forgery.

Skepticism about the tiny scrap of papyrus has been fierce because it contained a phrase never before seen in any piece of Scripture: “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife...’ ” Too convenient for some, it also contained the words “she will be able to be my disciple,” a clause that inflamed the debate in some churches over whether women should be allowed to be priests.

The papyrus fragment has now been analyzed by professors of electrical engineering, chemistry and biology at Columbia University, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who reported that it resembles other ancient papyri from the fourth to the eighth centuries. (Scientists at the University of Arizona, who dated the fragment to centuries before the birth of Jesus, concluded that their results were unreliable.)

The test results do not prove that Jesus had a wife or disciples who were women, only that the fragment is more likely a snippet from an ancient manuscript than a fake, the scholars agree. Karen L. King, the historian at Harvard Divinity School who gave the papyrus its name and fame, has said all along that it should not be regarded as evidence that Jesus married, only that early Christians were actively discussing celibacy, sex, marriage and discipleship.

“I took very seriously the comments of such a wide range of people that it might be a forgery,” Dr. King said in an interview this week. She said she is now very confident it is genuine.

“When you have all the evidence pointing in one direction, it doesn’t make it 100 percent, but history is not a place where 100 percent is a common thing,” Dr. King said.

The new information may not convince those scholars and bloggers who say the text is the work of a rather sloppy forger keen to influence contemporary debates. The Harvard Theological Review, which is publishing Dr. King’s long-delayed, peer-reviewed paper online on Thursday, is also publishing a rebuttal by Leo Depuydt, a professor of Egyptology at Brown University, who declares the fragment so patently fake that it “seems ripe for a Monty Python sketch.”

Dr. King presented the fragment with fanfare at a conference in Rome in September 2012, but was besieged by criticism because the content was controversial, the lettering was suspiciously splotchy, the grammar was poor, its provenance was uncertain, its owner insisted on anonymity and its ink had not been tested.

An editorial in the Vatican’s newspaper also declared it a fake. New Testament scholars claimed the text referred to the “bride of Christ,” which is the church — an interpretation Dr. King said was entirely possible.

It is very unusual to test the ink and papyrus of a fragment so small — this one is 4 by 8 centimeters — because it can damage the item, papyrologists say. The authenticity and dates of other famous fragments were determined by paleographers examining the handwriting.

The “Jesus’s Wife” papyrus was analyzed at Columbia University using micro-Raman spectroscopy to determine the chemical composition of the ink. James T. Yardley, a professor of electrical engineering, said in an interview that the carbon black ink on this fragment was “perfectly consistent with another 35 or 40 manuscripts that we’ve looked at,” that date from 400 B.C. to A.D. 700 or 800.

At M.I.T.’s Center for Materials Science and Engineering, Timothy M. Swager, a chemistry professor, and two students used infrared spectroscopy to determine whether the ink showed any variations or inconsistencies.

“The main thing was to see, did somebody doctor this up?” Dr. Swager said in an interview. “And there is absolutely no evidence for that. It would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible.”

However, Dr. Depuydt, the Egyptologist at Brown University, said that testing the fragment was irrelevant and that he saw “no need to inspect it.” He said he decided based on the first newspaper photograph that the fragment was forged because it contained “gross grammatical errors,” and each word in it matched writing in the Gospel of Thomas, an early Christian text discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945. “It couldn’t possibly be coincidence,” he said.

A forger could easily create carbon black ink by mixing candle soot and oil, he said: “An undergraduate student with one semester of Coptic can make a reed pen and start drawing lines.”
But the scientists say that modern carbon black ink looks very different under their instruments. And Dr. King said that her “big disappointment” is that so far, the story of the fragment has focused on forgery, not on history.

Back to business...sort of--CU-Boulder philosophy department

"In wake of report, CU-Boulder philosophy department gathers to look ahead"

Outside facilitator to discuss climate with faculty

by

Sarah Kuta

April 11th. 2014

Boulder Daily Camera

Two months after the release of a divisive independent report about the University of Colorado's philosophy department, faculty members are meeting for a two-day retreat to talk about how to move forward.

The retreat, which began Friday on the Boulder campus, includes a discussion facilitated by C. Kristina Gunsalus, director of the National Center for Professional and Research Ethics at the University of Illinois.

In late January, the university administration released an independent report that found sexual harassment, bullying and other unprofessional sexualized behaviors within the philosophy department.

Three investigators with the American Philosophical Association's Committee on the Status of Women Site Visit Program authored the report, which led administrators to replace the chairman and suspend all graduate admissions into the department until at least 2015.

"The site visit report has brought up some areas for improvement, so now it's time to have the discussion on how exactly the faculty as a team and the department as a whole can achieve those goals," CU spokesman Ryan Huff said Friday.

The retreat follows the report's recommendation to ban alcohol at all department events, but sidesteps another recommendation that all official events be held during normal workday hours.

Near the end of the report, the authors described their concerns with a past "mountain event" retreat and plans for a future event.

"In light of this department's history, all events, including retreats, need to be held during business hours (9-5) and on campus or near campus in public venues," the report's authors wrote. "...Under no circumstances should this department (or any other) be organizing the social calendars of its members."

Off-site retreat

One half of the retreat will occur from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday at the Hotel Boulderado, according to an email sent to faculty members.

Huff, who said the cost of the retreat wasn't readily available to him, said the report's recommendation does not apply to official department-wide events, such as the planned retreat this weekend.

He added that with the teaching schedules of faculty, it's difficult to get everyone together during the week for a two-day retreat.

"The report was focusing on unofficial, impromptu gatherings of small numbers of faculty and students," he said. "Those are the kinds of events that, especially with alcohol present, should not be taking place. However, the report is not focusing on the events that take place outside the 9-to-5, Monday-through-Friday time frame that are official events with agendas with all the faculty present, with the department head present. That's what these events are."
Though the College of Arts and Sciences is paying for the retreat, no administrators will be present. In an email to the faculty, department chairman Andy Cowell said Gunsalus will not produce any written materials from the retreat, but will "discuss things" with Steven Leigh, dean of the college, "since he's paying the bills on this one."

Leigh declined to comment.

'A very strong department'

Since the report's release, Huff said many members of the department have attended bystander training and additional training about sexual harassment and discrimination. Huff said the department climate committee also has been meeting and discussing how to move forward after the site visit report's release.

"There certainly are various trainings either in progress or that will occur in the future to improve the climate and this retreat is really a chance to get everyone in one room and to really talk about how to improve the situation," Huff said.

Philosophy professor Michael Tooley said he's been optimistic about the department in recent weeks, adding that he expects some useful discussions to occur at the weekend retreat.

He said many faculty members have been meeting for lunch on a regular basis, which has helped to improve morale within the department.

Tooley also said several faculty members who had planned to leave the department are now being retained, and there's a possibility new faculty members may be added to philosophy in the future.

"I was really quite worried because a number of my colleagues applied for jobs elsewhere, so there was really a fear that we would lose people, but that hasn't happened," he said. "I think if we can get over that hurdle or two we'll continue to have a very strong department."

Use the blog's search engine to find more on the subject.

Comic bookstores going the way of regular bookstores?

"Will Amazon Do To Comic Shops What It Did To Book Stores?"

by

Lauren Davis

April 10th, 2014

io9

Big news today in the comics publishing world: Amazon has purchased Comixology, the largest retailer of digital comics. So what does that mean for your local comic book store?

Amazon is certainly already competing with brick and mortar comic book stores; they sell both physical comics (often with sizable discounts on trade paperbacks) and Kindle editions of comic books. But the Comixology purchase means that Amazon is looking to be the major player in digital comics distribution (especially when it comes to single issues of comics), and that digital comics may be seeing a much wider audience than they've enjoyed through Comixology and other platforms so far.

Comixology is already a significant concern for comics retailers. Some shops have opted to work with it, participating in the platform's storefront affiliate program, which enables retailers to sell digital comics from their brick and mortar stores. And, as publishers have increasingly made digital editions of their comics available the same day as the print comics, Comixology has seen growing financial success. Apple announced that the Comixology app for iPad and iPhone was the highest-grossing non-game app of 2013.

So what does Amazon's acquisition mean? For now, all Comixology CEO David Steinberger is just saying that Comixology will become an Amazon subsidiary and continue to operate as its own platform. But with Amazon behind Comixology, chances are that we'll be seeing digital comics getting into the hands of more and more people. Hopefully, that means more people reading comics overall—and more creators seeing their comics purchased and read even if they don't have a print distributor.

But as with prose books, not everyone is going to want to make the switch from paper to digital. Some people simply prefer the experience of reading on paper, and many folks collect single issues of comics—although it will be interesting to see if the latter changes with the rise of digital comics. And there's a social aspect to comic book stores that is distinct from what you see in a bookstore. The weekly ritual of going to the shop on Wednesdays to discuss the latest issue with your fellow readers won't be replicated by the mere availability of digital comics. Still, it will be interesting to see what Amazon plans to do in the digital comics space and how retailers feel about the purchase.

It will also be interesting if we see competitors in the digital comics space rise in the wake of this announcement. Comixology is the top digital comics platform; its major competitor, Graphicly, switched its focus to ebooks instead of digital comics alone. This purchase means that Amazon has essentially created a digital comics monopoly, but the field of comics is populated by creators who are incredibly sophisticated when it comes to the digital space. Many cartoonists have had immense success releasing their comics on PDF—often using Kickstarter as a preorder system—as well as through platforms like Comixology and Amazon. As Amazon moves more into the digital comics space, the reactions of those creators—whether they find Comixology/Amazon useful going forward—could have a major impact on the landscape.

"Amazon Buys Digital Comics Company ComiXology"

by

Graeme McMillan 

April 19th, 2014

Wired

Well, there goes the digital neighborhood. ComiXology, the leading digital comics platform responsible for the sale of more than 4 billion pages of comics in 2013 alone, has been purchased by Amazon.

The buyout (which is expected to close in the second fiscal quarter of 2014) had been rumored for weeks now—ComiXology’s eleventh-hour sponsorship deal with the recent Emerald City Comic-Con being seen as “proof” by many—but official confirmation came in the form of an open letter on ComiXology’s site this afternoon in which co-founder and CEO David Steinberger wrote that the sale makes ComiXology’s “crazy goal” of turning everyone on the planet into a comic reader “more possible than ever before.”

“ComiXology will retain its identity as an Amazon subsidiary and we’re not anywhere near done ‘taking comics further,’” the letter continued. “We’ve only just begun.” In a separate statement, Amazon’s VP of content acquisition and independent publishing David Naggar said that the two companies “share a passion for reinventing reading in a digital world.”

Details about the deal were undisclosed, unsurprisingly, but the initial announcement left questions about the buyout that remain unanswered, including the fate of ComiXology’s self-publishing platform Submit and whether or not the purchase will impact ComiXology’s relationship with Apple.

There is undoubtedly the potential for this partnership to bring ComiXology (and comics in general) to a wider audience, but also the potential for the company to disappear within the wider Amazon hierarchy. Will ComiXology end up being the next IMDb, Audible.com or Zappos, or go the way of CDNow, Telebook or Yap?

[Note: An earlier version of this story asked whether or not the Amazon acquisition would impact ComiXology’s relationships with publishers. Representatives for both Marvel and DC told WIRED that there would be no change, with a DC Entertainment statement going on to say that the company was “confident that Amazon’s purchase of ComiXology will make both our partners that much stronger and allow us all to continue to enhance and build the fastest growing segment of our publishing business as we bring our digital comics and graphic novels to our fans all over the globe.”]

Einstein's critique of quantum mechanics...not that goofy

"Philosopher untangles Einstein senility controversy"

by

Marguerite Rigoglioso

April 3rd, 2014

phys.org

Albert Einstein's critique of quantum theory, long regarded as a sign of senility, is vindicated in a new book by Stanford philosophy Professor Thomas Ryckman and University of Washington scholar Arthur Fine.

When it comes to looking at reality from the subatomic perspective of quantum theory, many physicists are nearly as much in the dark as the average person on the street.

"Even great physicists will tell you that nobody understands quantum mechanics, although we use it every day," said Stanford philosophy Professor Thomas Ryckman.

Devices from airplanes to laptops rely on the mathematical calculations of quantum mechanics. But Ryckman, whose research centers on the philosophy of physics, calls this fundamental science a kind of "black box."

"You put in information, turn the crank, and get information out that matches what you can observe or test in the lab," he said. "But what's in that black box? Even our best minds are not exactly sure."

The fact that there are many interpretations of quantum mechanics – each of them with severe problems, said Ryckman – means that the most empirically successful theory in all of science is not fully understood. For that reason, he contends, examining the topic through a philosophical lens may be important.

"Technically trained and historically informed philosophers can help physicists think through and even extend the field of possibilities for resolving these problems," he said.

Ryckman's teaching and research show that in the history of physics certain interpretive options were sidetracked or forgotten. "Some of them need to be brought back out of the closet," he asserts, because a thorough consideration of them may well lead to new breakthroughs and discoveries.

One of them, the philosopher maintains, is Albert Einstein's unorthodox critique that quantum theory was incomplete and that a larger mathematical description of reality was possible. "Because his views went against the prevailing wisdom of his time, most physicists took Einstein's hostility to quantum mechanics to be a sign of senility," Ryckman said.

In 1935, Einstein showed that if quantum mechanics were taken to its logical conclusion, it would allow for "entanglement" between once-interacting particles that subsequently are widely separated in space. He colloquially called this "spooky action at a distance," whereby measuring a property on one of the particles apparently fixes the corresponding property on the other particle – no matter how far apart they are.

Einstein rejected the idea that the world could be that strange, which led to his contention that quantum mechanics must be missing something.

"Because he was arguing against a very empirically successful theory," said Ryckman, "his scientific biographer Abraham Pais asserted that after 1925, 'Einstein might as well have gone fishing.'" It's a view that has prevailed in the field of physics, despite the fact that the physics icon lived 30 more years, continuing his pioneering research until his last breath.

Ryckman argues that the world's most famous scientist "wasn't crazy, he was prescient."

The philosophical Einstein

As it turns out, in the 1960s, a physicist visiting Stanford named John S. Bell wrote a paper reviving Einstein's critique of quantum mechanics, arguing that if the late scientist were right, the quantum formalism would be describing a reality greatly at odds with our everyday experience of familiar objects. "By the 1980s it was possible to do an actual experiment to test this," Ryckman said, "and in fact it was shown that the world of quantum particles is indeed 'entangled.'"

Thus, in his critique of the prevailing paradigm, Einstein was in fact the first to observe that the mathematics involved did have very unusual implications. "Nature appears to be much stranger than Einstein thought," Ryckman said.

The paragon of genius therefore unwittingly vindicated quantum mechanics, but in a way no one expected – and, says Ryckman, in a way that few, outside of those working on foundations of quantum mechanics, have adequately credited him for. Einstein's unintentional discovery of entanglement opened the door to new fields of quantum information theory, including quantum computation and quantum cryptography, as well as to the creation of the world's most accurate atomic clocks.

Ryckman attempts to restore the great physicist's reputation in his new book, Einstein, co-written with Arthur Fine, professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Washington. The book is slated to be published by the Routledge Philosophers series in 2015, the centennial of the theory of relativity.

Drawing from materials in Einstein archives at Caltech and Jerusalem, and from the continuing publication of Einstein's collected papers, the book is the first attempt to articulate in detail the philosophical motivations underlying Einstein's most significant scientific contributions.

"He read widely in both classical and contemporary philosophical literature, and he engaged with some of the most important philosophers of the 20th century," Ryckman said. "His dissent from quantum theory is basically informed by the philosophical view that a complete description of physical reality might be attained by continuing further along the same path that had led to his greatest success, the relativistic theory of gravitation of 1915."

Furthermore, Einstein's most significant contributions to physical theory – notably, the special and general theories of relativity – completely overturned the Newtonian concepts of space and time in a direction partly anticipated by the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz. "Most significant, with the general theory of relativity, space-time becomes fully dynamic, no longer an inert background upon which the drama of physical interactions is staged," Ryckman said.

Putting physics in context

Ryckman's work on Einstein is part of his broader teaching and research on the philosophy and history of physics. "I've long been preoccupied with the big questions of this field," he said.

Most modern physicists are occupied with conducting research under conventionally accepted quantum mechanical paradigms in order to advance knowledge. But as a philosopher of science Ryckman spends his time researching and introducing Stanford students – including physics graduate students – to the idea that other interpretations have sometimes held sway.

By exploring conceptual problems regarding wave-particle duality, quantum measurement, entanglement and more, Ryckman provides his students with a glimpse beyond the realm of applied research.

"This is the first time many science students, who are busy solving problem sets, learn about history and questions regarding the various interpretations of quantum mechanics," said Ryckman, who has also written The Reign of Relativity: Philosophy in Physics 1915-1925 and The Form of Information in Science (with Zellig Harris, Michael Gottfried and others.)

"There is little mainstream research in the foundations of quantum mechanics," Ryckman said. "The reason is that most physicists consider it unproductive and not likely to be successful. This is the attitude that is taught to students."
On a daily basis, Ryckman's work deals with the fact that the realm of subatomic particles is very spooky, indeed. "Our world of everyday experience, where objects appear to be solid and travel on smooth trajectories, is terribly misleading," he said.

Moreover, he notes, it's unclear why we don't experience a cat as being alive and dead at the same time, for example – because, from the perspective of quantum mechanics, it is, until it is observed as one or the other, simultaneously both. "Nature is stranger than our evolved conceptual system can comprehend easily," he said.

Thanks to POSP stringer Tim.

Lowell Observatory moving goodies

"Lowell Observatory begins to move astronomy collectibles to new archival building."

by

Eric Betz

April 3rd, 2014

Arizona Daily Sun

A box of Invincible White Owl Cigars sits on the shelf in a basement at Lowell Observatory’s campus on Mars Hill. It’s marked “Mars 1922.”

Inside are glass plates containing images of the Red Planet more than 90 years ago.

Directly beneath it is another cigar box marked “Moon 1970,” with photographs from NASA’s Apollo Program.

“Cigar boxes were a really popular way of storing glass plates,” said Lauren Amundson, Lowell librarian and archivist. “We’ve got cigar boxes full of glass plates.”

It’s moving week at Lowell Observatory.

Staff began moving into the new archival building on Tuesday and will eventually fill it with treasures from more than a century of scientific research and eccentric personalities.

By this summer, the Putnam Collection Center will also be open for visitors to see rotating exhibits of artifacts like the photographic plate used to discover Pluto, as well as the one on which the expansion of the universe was first detected, and letters from famous scientists such as Albert Einstein and Edwin Hubble.

There are also about a dozen hand-drawn globes that Percival Lowell would use to illustrate his nightly observations of canals, oases and Martian vegetation.

Pretty much anything with a “wow factor” is likely to be displayed, Amundson said.

The centerpiece is to be “Big Red,” the 1911 Stevens Duryea Model Y car that Percival Lowell used to drive around Flagstaff — surely drawing the attention of locals.

The building, which cost about $3 million, will also house some staff offices and a library for researchers.

Mildew and mysteries

The archives have long been stored in non-climate-controlled locations across the observatory, including leaky basements. Some have mildewed, molded and been eaten by insects over the decades.

The observatory underwent a large-scale fundraising effort to build the new center and preserve their history. The building includes a massive freezer installed to kill anything living on the archival collections before they get filed away.

But Mars Hill isn’t just home to a scientific institution. It also houses many of the observatory’s staff. And over years of living there, the artifacts build up, like Lowell’s fancy straw hat. There’s also a sizeable quantity of furniture.

And as the artifacts have been pulled from various corners and boxes, new mysteries have emerged. It’s not clear what a lot of the old scientific instruments were used for.

“Some have notes. Some we have absolutely no idea what it was used for,” Amundson said. “For a long time, a lot of this was just sitting in the attic in a jumbled pile, so now we can take some of it and do conservation work.”

Lowell has developed a program promoting partnership between amateurs and professionals and it plans to tap into that to figure out how many of the estimated 600 scientific artifacts would have been used. One partner group will be the Antique Telescope Society.

Fortunately, only a fraction of the 32,000 glass plates are currently stored in cigar boxes. The remainder are neatly filed on shelves in paper sleeves, awaiting an eventual and monumental effort to digitize each and every one. Only a few institutions have larger collections of glass plates.

“If somebody discovers an asteroid, you can go back and determine its orbit,” said Lowell Communication Manager Kevin Schindler.


Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli--belated birthday

Martian life proven

Location, location, location...used bookstores lose in NYC

"Literary City, Bookstore Desert"

Surging Rents Force Booksellers From Manhattan

by

Julie Bosman

March 25th, 2014

The New York Times

After scouring Manhattan for a second location for her bookstore, Sarah McNally finally decided to open one in Brooklyn instead. 

Have any independent bookstores in your area recently closed? Share your stories of your favorite bookstore and why you went there.

I live near Columbus Circle, right near Central Park. Only 3 or 4 years ago, it was a great reader's location. There is no longer any...

When Scribner Sons closed on 5th Ave I was deeply saddened. Listening to Bach while browsing was an experience not to be forgotten. What...
Ray Knight

Not much can be done about the rising rents, but at least spend your money and at a brick and mortar and not at Amazon!

When Sarah McNally, the owner of McNally Jackson bookstore in Lower Manhattan, set out to open a second location, she went to a neighborhood with a sterling literary reputation, the home turf of writers from Edgar Allan Poe to Nora Ephron: the Upper West Side.

She was stopped by the skyscraper-high rents.

“They were unsustainable,” Ms. McNally said. “Small spaces for $40,000 or more each month. It was so disheartening.”

Rising rents in Manhattan have forced out many retailers, from pizza joints to flower shops. But the rapidly escalating cost of doing business there is also driving out bookstores, threatening the city’s sense of self as the center of the literary universe, the home of the publishing industry and a place that lures and nurtures authors and avid readers.

“Sometimes I feel as if I’m working in a field that’s disappearing right under my feet,” said the biographer and historian Robert Caro, who is a lifelong New Yorker.

The Rizzoli Bookstore was recently told that it would be forced to leave its grand space on 57th Street because the owners decided that the building would be demolished.

The Bank Street Bookstore in Morningside Heights announced in December that it would not renew its lease when it expires in February 2015, saying that it had lost money for the last decade. Both stores are scrambling to find new locations.

Independents like Coliseum Books, Shakespeare and Company on the Upper West Side, Endicott Booksellers and Murder Ink have all closed their doors.

In the past, those smaller stores were pushed out by superstores — a trend memorably depicted in the 1998 film “You’ve Got Mail” — leaving book lovers worried that someday, Manhattan would be dominated by chain bookstores.

But now the chain stores are shutting down, too. Since 2007, five Barnes & Noble stores throughout Manhattan have closed, including its former flagship store on Fifth Avenue and 18th Street, which was shuttered in January. Five Borders stores in Manhattan were closed in 2011 when the chain went bankrupt, vacating huge spaces on Park Avenue, near Penn Station and in the Shops at Columbus Circle.

State data reveals that from 2000 to 2012, the number of bookstores in Manhattan fell almost 30 percent, to 106 stores from 150. Jobs, naturally, have suffered as well: Annual employment in bookstores has decreased 46 percent during that period, according to the state’s Department of Labor.

The American Booksellers Association, a trade group for independents, has 39 member stores in Manhattan, a number that includes museum shops and Hudson News locations in Penn Station, where magazines and bottled water are displayed far more prominently than books. (Some independent bookstores have found it easier to survive in Brooklyn, the borough already teeming with writers like Jennifer Egan and Martin Amis.)

The closings have alarmed preservationists, publishers and authors, who said the fading away of bookstores amounted to a crisis that called for intervention from the newly minted mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, who has vowed to offer greater support to small businesses.

Mr. Caro said in an interview that he is heartbroken by the loss of bookstores from Manhattan, calling it “a profoundly significant and depressing indication of where our culture is.”

“How can Manhattan be a cultural or literary center of the world when the number of bookstores has become so insignificant?” he asked. “You really say, has nobody in city government ever considered this and what can be done about it?”

With the closing of several Barnes & Noble and Borders stores, it is difficult to shop for new books in Midtown, the same neighborhood that houses Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and much of Penguin Random House.

“There are some great bookstores, but there aren’t a lot of them,” said Michael Pietsch, the chief executive of Hachette. “Compared to other cities, New York is no longer a bookstore city.”

There are still six Barnes & Nobles remaining in Manhattan, but with the company closing roughly 20 stores each year nationwide, some people in the industry have urged publishers to step in. Whispers that publishers will re-enter the brick-and-mortar business — harking back to the days when the storied names Doubleday and Scribner graced bookstores on Fifth Avenue — have intensified in recent months. Some publishing insiders have speculated that Penguin Random House, by far the largest trade publisher in the world, will expand into retail to fill the void left by Barnes & Noble, which has struggled to find its footing, and compete with Amazon.

“You just have to walk down Fifth Avenue to see what New York has become — it’s become an outlet mall for rich people,” said Esther Newberg, a literary agent, adding that she had just received an email from a Random House editor noting that the company was able to print books quickly because it owns its own printing plant. “Why don’t they own their own bookstore?”

Despite the difficult conditions, some stores appear to be thriving. Posman Books, a small independent chain, opened a new outpost in Rockefeller Center in 2011.

And just as many writers have fled to Brooklyn or Queens in search of more affordable housing, some bookstore owners have followed. Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene opened in 2009 to robust business and year-over-year increases in sales.

In December, Christine Onorati, the co-owner of Word bookstore in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, opened a second store in Jersey City.

Ms. Onorati said she never looked seriously at Manhattan because the rents were so unaffordable. Even with lower rents in Jersey City, she opened a cafe within the bookstore that serves pastries and Stumptown coffee as an additional source of revenue, something she had previously vowed she would never do.

She said she was concerned that bookstores in high-rent areas like Manhattan would shift their merchandise away from more accessibly priced paperbacks toward more expensive items with wider profit margins.

“My worry is that to make these rents, people are going to have to make the bookstore a place where only wealthy people can be,” she said. “The higher and higher these rents go, do you have to bring in these expensive leather journals and art books that only rich people can buy?”
David Rosenthal, the president and publisher of Blue Rider Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House, predicted that stores like Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie would become more important in the publishing ecosystem as stand-alone bookstores decrease.

“The serendipity of hanging out in a bookstore is just diminishing,” Mr. Rosenthal said. “We’ll become more dependent on stores that are not primarily bookstores, but have some degrees of books. It’s better than nothing.”

After spending years scouring Manhattan for a second location, Ms. McNally of McNally Jackson abandoned her search. At the urging of a former employee, she began looking in Brooklyn and settled on Williamsburg, where she found a “magnificent,” loftlike space with a 20-foot ceiling. The store will open this fall.

“I started walking around Williamsburg and I fell in love with the neighborhood,” she said. “I have not figured out a way to make it happen in Manhattan. And I wanted to.”

Anthropodermic bibliopegy...still creepy

"It Was Once 'Somewhat Common' to Bind Books With Human Skin"

There's even an official name for it: anthropodermic bibliopegy.

by

Alexis C. Madrigal

April 3rd, 2014

The Atlantic

You think Twitter is weird? Look at early print culture and the practice of what book historians call anthropodermic bibliopegy. That would be binding books in human skin.

And while I now find the notion grotesque, the me of the 17th or 19th century would not have, apparently.

"While books bound in human skin are now objects of fascination and revulsion, the practice was once somewhat common," writes Heather Cole, assistant curator of modern books and manuscripts at Harvard's Houghton Library. "Termed anthropodermic bibliopegy, the binding of books in human skin has occurred at least since the 16th century. The confessions of criminals were occasionally bound in the skin of the convicted, or an individual might request to be memorialized for family or lovers in the form of a book."

Houghton, where Cole works, has one such books in its collection which is, putatively though not definitively, bound in skin.

A recent article in JAMA Dermatology featured a short examination of the book, along with a rousing call for greater study of books bound in human skin. The title was: "Anthropodermic Bibliopegy: Lessons From a Different Sort of Dermatologic Text."

"On examination of the bookbinding, numerous follicular ostia are clearly visible and provide a raised, coarse texture to the front and back covers," Harvard dermatologist Vinod Nambudiri writes. "The pages are gilt-edged. The bookbinding has an even, golden-brown background hue. Focal areas of darker brown pigmentation likely reflect variation in the literal 'skin tanning' process underlying the binding’s production and consequences of handling over the book’s existence rather than melanocytic proliferations in the native skin based on examination with epiluminescence microscopy."

And one can imagine a curious dermatologist would want to know precisely how the skin might hold up. Nambudiri further notes that the books "serve as reminders of the versatility of the body’s largest organ—both during life and beyond." He also says they "represent an elite class of dermatologic texts which deserve further study, cover to cover."

These works need "detailed analysis of preserved parameters such as follicle density, follicular diameter, and pigmentary patterns."

And it may be that further testing may prove that they are not, in fact, bound with human skin. For example, a book at the Harvard Law School bore this inscription:

    The bynding of this booke is all that remains of my dear friende Jonas Wright, who was flayed alive by the Wavuma on the Fourth Day of August, 1632. King Mbesa did give me the book, it being one of poore Jonas chiefe possessions, together with ample of his skin to bynd it. Requiescat in pace.

However, it turns out, after scientific testing, the binding is just sheepskin.

No word on if or when the Houghton specimen will undergo the peptide mass fingerprinting test that revealed Jonas Wright's dear friende to be a liar.