Cook Partners

100 Most Beautiful Words in English

"Dr. Goodword" has put together a list of the "100 Most Beautiful Words in English."  This assemblage of comely, evocative, and felicitous words is sure to bring a smile to your lips, though some might argue that beauty is ineffable and that the lilt and glamour of a language cannot be captured so easily. Brood if you must. Murmur that your favorite words have been left off the list. With the plethora of words in the English language, any success in this kind of endeavor is ephemeral, evanescent, or a fluke. But maybe reflecting on such things can bring about an epiphany. Who knows? It is worth some dalliance...

A Map of the Land of Books

At Strange Maps, see Bücherland, or the Land of Books, a map created by German illustrator Alphons Woelfle (1938). The map

... shows the extent and the divisions of (the Land of Books). The Land consists of about half a dozen distinct territories, most of which are explicitly named: Leserrepublik (Reader’s Republic), Vereinigte Buchhandelsstaaten (United States of Booksellers), Recensentia (a realm for Reviewers), Makulaturia (Waste Paper Land), and Poesia (Poetry).

Beautiful Bookstores

"The most interesting bookstores in the world" depicts stores inside buildings that formerly served as churches or theaters, and book lovers' haunts from Paris to Buenos Aires to Calcutta. Enjoy!

The Perfume of Books

The New Yorker´s 'Book Bench" discusses "In the Library,"

... a perfume inspired by the proprietor Christopher Brosius’s love of books and his inability to pass a secondhand bookshop without stopping in. According to the shop’s description, the perfume is supposed to evoke a first-edition English novel via “Russian and Moroccan leather bindings, worn cloth, and a hint of wood polish.”

For Vernacular Languages

Do you feel the work you carry on in vernacular languages languishes in obscurity, while any item published in English or another lingua franca gains immediate recognition? Perhaps you'll enjoy a satirical dialog on the usefulness of Hindi, published in Roots & Branches, a journal on the value of translations and cultural exchange:

"I’ve tried so hard for your Hindi. I’ve sent it out with cultural delegations, packaged it in rich literary heritage, tied it to political amity, always sending it here and there. I’ve tried to publicize it, encourage it everywhere.

... We have surplus export-quality Hindi stockpiled ... Should I have a ‘sale,’ do whatever to break even?"

Read the English and Hindi versions here.

Publishing Terms, Revisited

The September/October issue of Cook Partners, which focuses on humor in Christian publishing, includes wacky definitions of publishing terms. A similar article appeared in Harper's this month:

NONFICTION: Prose that is factual, except for newspapers.

CREATIVE NONFICTION: Prose that is true, except in the case of memoir.

MEMOIR: From the Latin memoria, meaning “memory,” a popular form in which the writer remembers entire passages of dialogue from the past, with the ultimate goal of blaming the writer’s parents for his current psychological challenges.

NOVEL: A quaint, longer form that fell out of fashion with the advent of the memoir.

Read more here.

Barcodes Can Be Fun!

Do you ever wish you could be creative when it comes to the back cover... especially, the dreaded but necessary required elements like barcodes? Well, you can have fun with them. Check out the examples shown here—and consider what you might do with your titles.

Humor, Anyone?

An essay in this past Sunday's New York Times begins this way:

In general, the easiest way to locate the Humor section in any bookstore is to go through the front entrance of the bookstore and to the farthest point from the entrance. That’s where the Humor section will be.

If the bookstore has a second floor, the Humor section will be on the second floor, at the farthest point from the entrance. If the second floor has a window that can be jimmied open, and there’s a ledge outside, the Humor section will be at the very end of the ledge.

But at Cook International, we've decided that humor about Christian publishing need not be so inaccessible. That is why, instead of asking you to go out on a ledge, we encourage you to visit the current issue of Cook Partners magazine, which focuses on what's funny in Christian publishing. Enjoy!

Word Clouds

Want some inspiration? Choose your favorite Bible verse and go to Wordle.net, where you can generate

... “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

Look at text in a new way. Experiment with type treatments for a cover. Play with words. Have fun!

For a peek at what you can do, here's what happened to my Cook Partners column, "Readability Is No Small Matter."

 

Rejecting Your Rejection Letter

YourWritersGroup.com offers a form letter rejected writers can send to the editor who most recently failed to appreciate their latest manuscript:

Unfortunately, I have received an unusually large number of rejections from many well qualified publishers and I’m afraid that with such a promising number of rejections from which to select, it is impossible for me to consider them all. After careful deliberation, and because a number of publishers have found my book even more unsuitable, I regret that I am unable to accept your rejection.

Read the rest of the entry here.