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I’ve long been a fan of Hamish Hamilton’s Five Dials magazine, an occasional, elegant, high quality and free literary journal – except that I have a huge problem with its attitude.

Five Dials is only available as a PDF, intended, say HH, to be “downloaded, printed out and enjoyed (we hope) away from the computer”. Well, bah. Not only do I think it disingenuous to use the internet for your distribution while so pompously thumbing your nose at it, PDFs are horrible on screen, and I don’t have a printer capable of rendering them any better, nor the…

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In 1928, a cartoon character was born. An early Mickey Mouse made his debut in May of that year, in a silent flop called /Plane Crazy/. In November, in New York City’s Colony Theater, in the first widely distributed cartoon synchronized with sound, /Steamboat Willie/ brought to life the character that would become Mickey Mouse. Synchronized sound had been introduced to film a year earlier in the movie /The Jazz Singer/. That success led Walt Disney to copy the technique and mix sound with cartoons. No one knew whether it would work or, if it did work, whether it would

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Jeremy Ettinghausen just announced Penguin’s new Facebook page over at the Penguin blog with a particularly apposite and self-effacing quote:

“Bohemias. Alternative subcultures. They were a crucial aspect of industrial civilization in the two previous centuries. They were where industrial civilization went to dream. A sort of unconscious R&D, exploring alternate societal strategies … But they became extinct.”
“Extinct?”
“We started picking them before they could ripen. A certain crucial growing period was lost, as marketing evolved and the mechanisms of recommodification became quicker, more rapacious. Authentic subcultures required backwaters, and time, and there are no

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Things I Love (a short and selective list): Blogging, WordPress, Books, Penguin paperbacks, Typography.

I am, therefore, quite over the moon to announce the release of Marber, a theme for the WordPress blogging platform based on good typographic practices and Romek Marber’s classic 1961 grid for Penguin Books.

Marber is a real labour of love, and I’ve been working on it for some time. Despite setting up tens of WordPress installations, all with customs themes, this is my first publicly-available theme, and I look forward to seeing how it fares. You can find out a lot more about…

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And so it ends. But what a work of genius.

I can’t help but hear a rueful quality in the words of Penguin’s Chief Executive: ‘not the most read, but possibly the most written novel in history’. Basically, that’s a publisher’s worst nightmare.

A week in, and the Million Penguins project has been pretty interesting. Penguin’s publicity nous has got them vast amounts of coverage and vast numbers of authors very quickly, although it hasn’t exactly made for a better story – reading it is difficult, and the mishmash of styles and story arcs makes for something approaching incoherence.

Nevertheless, it’s impressive that Penguin have stuck to it, and not thrown their hands in the air when the going got sticky – then again, they haven’t been showered with goatse images either. Instead, they’ve instigated a number of techniques, such as…

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This morning, Penguin announced the launch of A Million Penguins, a wikinovel project in association with De Montfort University.

Students from De Montfort’s MA in creative writing form the basis of the projected community of writers, which will edit and expand upon the short first chapter provided over a period of six weeks. (I think six weeks – the timescale is a little unclear. Rather sweetly, they’ve left lots of setup notes on their blog, such as the inspiration gained from this Lost fan wiki.) The students will also form the core moderators of…

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