News on international archives day, elections, books, e-books and a magazine
Hooray, today is international archives day. On this, an interesting item arrived in my e-email intray this morning about the JM Coetzee Archive and an interesting conference being held around it. More info on this in the next Lives and Letters mailing. I shall say nothing about the UK election result, other than it is yet one more farcical political event in the recent life of the UK, a mess following a mess.
The paperback of The Racialising Process arrived with the postman through my letterbox on Saturday morning just gone, just two days after its publication. It looks great, I’m thrilled to bits with the cover, which I designed and assembled, and even the low pixel photographs have turned out reasonably well. Also, the e-book has appeared equally swiftly, with its slightly different cover (also by me). Just click on the cover image on the home page, and a ‘sample chapter’ can be accessed.
Pleasingly, a number of South African friends and colleagues have already bought both paper and e-book versions, without feeling that doing so will bankrupt them, which is the usual response to UK-published books. At long last, if Olive Schreiner knocked on my door, I could look her in the face and say this book is sensibly priced.
New to both Emilia and me is a news app called Flipboard. It’s a way of gathering news stories, ranging from the conventionally academic through to the wacky and off the wall, and which arrive in portfolios which the user chooses. Mine include imperialism, archives, South African politics, 18th, 19th and 20th century history, and a few more frivolous things. Going through them, items can be selected and put in a magazine. For an experimental period, we’re going to do a weekly Flipboard magazine containing a few items of relevance to WWW concerns, and this will appear as the last item in each blog. See below.
Finally, actual letters and actually doing things with them have slowly returned to the agenda this week. It’s been quite hard to get back into a non-book work pattern, but sorting through the debris on my desk has led to the re-discovery of Henry Francis Fynn and his 600-odd letters. These are beckoning. But before them in the queue is writing a short presentation to give at a small conference in Cambridge next Friday, 16 June, organised by Andrea Salter. This is the third in the series organised around The Archive Project, the previous book published last year. Like the others, a podcast of it will appear in the Publications part of the WWW website in the next couple of weeks.
And the news magazine now appears at the end of this paragraph. It isn’t rocket science, but hopefully one or two of the items in it will be interesting to some readers. My favourite is the excellent letter from Helen Keller. Just click the button to ‘Follow’, while the contents can be seen by scrolling below and if any of them prove interesting, just click on the small + and the full news item will appear.
Click the picture below to flip through Liz’s 9 June News Mag by Liz Stanley
Last updated: 9 June 2017
