Iconic Book Research Articles

‘The Melancholia of Class: a Manifesto for the Working Class’ by Cynthia Cruz, Repeater Books, 2021. ‘Class: a Graphic Guide’ by Laura Harvey and Sarah Leaney, illustrated by Danny Noble, Icon Books, 2022. A book review by Stefan Szczelkun

‘The Melancholia of Class: a Manifesto for the Working Class’ by Cynthia Cruz, Repeater Books, 2021. ‘Class: a Graphic Guide’ by Laura Harvey and Sarah Leaney, illustrated by Danny Noble, Icon Books, 2022. A book review by Stefan Szczelkun

The Look of the Book

Abstract This paper shows how book design responds to the Nobel’s prestige. Using previously unpublished materials from German publishing archives, I explore how the Nobel Prize is accompanied by the requirement to design iconic books. This unique material documents how different players in the publishing industry exchange ideas about ‘Nobel Prize-appropriate’ book design. This applies, for example, to the illustrations for an essay by Octavio Paz, designed covers for Nadine Gordimer, and the pictorial representation of Günter Grass’s and Tomas Tranströmer’s ‘life and work’.

The Fear of Inspirational Books

Banning books from public and school libraries has sharply increased in the USA in recent years. I analyze the phenomenon of book banning from the theoretical perspective of how books get ritualized in different textual dimensions. Book bans have a long cultural history in shaping literary and religious canons. Comparison with book burning shows some similar and some distinctive strategies behind book banning. Like book burning, book banning aims to draw public attention and to offend political opponents. In contrast to ritualized destruction of iconic books, however, book banning attacks the expressive dimension of reading texts by trying to prevent access to them. Whereas book burnings aim to offend opponents’ sensibilities, book bans aim to prevent inspiration to imagine different social arrangements and personal identities. That goal is apparent from the disproportionate focus on banning books with multi-cultural and LGBTQIA+ themes. The ban acts as a warning against embracing certain opinions and identities. However, analyzing book banning as ritual also draws attention to well-developed, ongoing traditions of counter-ritualizing by many libraries. They publicize banned book lists and encourage reading them during “Banned Books Week” and similar events. Through this ritual analysis of iconic and expressive texts, book banning emerges as a traditional site of cultural conflict over the means and goals of textual inspiration.

Celebrating 100 years of Cope’s Early Diagnosis of the AcuteAbdomen

BackgroundNo list of the iconic books in surgery would be complete without The Early Diagnosis of the Acute Abdomen by Sir Vincent Zachary Cope, MS, MD. First published in 1921, few books have stood the test of time like this treatise on the acute abdomen. It is also fitting that, after Mr Cope’s passing, William Silen would assume the mantle with the 15th edition and maintain his legacy work through the 22nd and final edition. MethodsEach edition of The Early Diagnosis of the Acute Abdomen and The Acute Abdomen in Rhyme was curated and reviewed in detail within the historical context of the era in which the book was printed. ResultsThe tenets of physical diagnosis and history did not change during the 100 years through the current printing; however, the emphasis on related medical diseases evolved due to antibiotic therapy and the prevalence of nonsurgical diseases that evolved across this period. Early editions highlighted the value of plain radiography as it came into common use, whereas later editions included cross-sectional imaging as a valuable diagnostic tool. ConclusionThe context and evolution of this masterpiece are fundamental to the legacy of the abdominal surgeon. Cope’s lessons on the value of dedication and attention to detail to formulate clinical diagnoses by engaging with the patient rather than excessive use of laboratory testing and imaging still apply in today’s rapidly evolving and increasingly value-based world.

Loathed It: The Boys of Summer

Loathed It: The Boys of Summer Gary Gershman (bio) When I began this piece, I conducted a very unscientific poll of friends on what they thought of the iconic book, The Boys of Summer; some were baseball fans, some were not. Visiting California I talked to a handful of people, especially if they were Dodgers fans. At a friend’s house, I mentioned that I had to write an article on the book. He laughed and said it was around the house somewhere, and he would be happy to give me his copy. When I asked Brandon what he thought of the book, he described it as a “shelf turd.” It sat there collecting dust, not really wanted but not getting rid of it. He’d had the book since the eighth grade. He liked its idea but found it incredibly dull— a lot of exposition about nothing. So there it sat, unread except for a few pages and rejected. Many other sources felt differently and noted the greatness of “The Boys” and its iconic place in the world of baseball books. An Esquire article noted that baseball provided the source material for more good books than any other American team sport. It called baseball the “sports catnip for writers: a game on contemplation and strategy which lends itself beautifully to numbers and analysis as well as poetry.”1 The feeling was The Boys of Summer encapsulated this, and the magazine placed the book in its inner circle of outstanding baseball books. The Sporting News ranked the book #8 on its baseball book list and commented that Kahn’s strength in the book was that he “had the literary chops to make his book more than just a jock hagiography . . .”2 They embraced the language that so exasperated and alienated me when I read the book. The description on the back of the book declares it is not just a baseball book but “a book about America, about fathers and sons, prejudice and courage, triumph and disaster, and told with warmth, humor, candor and love.”3 Maybe it was those things, but that did not make it an iconic baseball book. In a more recent comment from the fall of 2021, Steve Barnes, in honor of the book’s upcoming fiftieth anniversary, pronounced it the “finest, funniest works of sports literature ever published.”4 He noted that critics were divided because of Kahn’s fandom, which seemed to create an inherent bias, [End Page 11] and that some suggested it was “hopelessly saccharine.” He quickly dismissed those critics, commenting the title itself was memorable by how “it rolled from the tongue like a good bunt in its final inches. So idyllic, so evocative, so resonant was the title . . . that almost immediately it was applied by every fan to the players, the boys, of almost every team . . .”5 And Barnes paid homage to the original reviews, quoting Heywood Hale Brown of the New York Times and how the book recreated the ’50s when Baseball was king— “the center of love beyond the reach of intellect.”6 George Frazier’s Boston Globe review proclaimed that one “could not imagine a more important book, a better written book, a finer discussion of the 1950’s Dodgers than this one.”7 Both of those conclusions are highly debatable. Was I reading the same book? Moving to the less professional evaluations, I dove into average, everyday readers. It was amazing to see how often the reviews found the book a template for society, life, and just understanding the cosmos. One reader declared it was the finest baseball book ever written “in part because it is about more than baseball.” He noted it emphasized how baseball and the drama that ensues, game by game and throughout the season and through players’ careers, “all mirror the larger dramas of life.”8 The lessons one can learn from the great Dodger teams of the 1950s provide insight into how to become good at one’s job, how to work with a team and tell us a lot about how to master one’s craft, and how to conquer racial and socioeconomic differences. A regular theme that permeates these...

EDWARD GIBBON’S THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND THE BYZANTINE STUDIES

Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is an iconic book which inspired many works in various disciplines like the fields of cinema and literature besides of being considered one of the masterpieces in the field of history writing. Gibbon also had a great impact on the field of Byzantine studies by negative image of Byzantine Empire that he portrayed in his book, and by many scholars he is named among those who are mainly responsible for nearly a century-long apathy towards Byzantine history. In this study, the negative impact of Gibbon’s work on the field of Byzantine studies will be mentioned in detail, an effort will be made to reveal the framework of the author’s negative view about Byzantine Empire by the medium of original text of the book, and the factors that shaped this negative view, the Enlightenment thought being in the first place, will be discussed.

About the Contributors

About the Contributors

Dante’s New Life of the Book: A Philology of World Literature. Martin Eisner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 259.

<i>Dante’s New Life of the Book: A Philology of World Literature</i>. Martin Eisner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 259.

From “the unpublished edition” to “the iconic book of the twentieth century”: The reception history of Gustaw Herling’s Un mondo a parte in Italy

The article presents the reception history of one book (“Un mondo a parte”) in four different historical periods. The key social, political, and historical transformations in post‑war Italy will provide an important context for the reflection. “The unpublished edition” from 1958 is now part of the canon of twentieth‑century world literature. The belated and turbulent reception history of “Un mondo a parte” in Italy was conditioned by ideology and can also be read as the story of the slow discovery of Gustaw Herling as a writer whose books are published in Italian.

Mobilizing the Social Power of Iconic and Performative Texts for Justice and Reform

In the ten years of its existence, SCRIPT has succeeded in promoting and publishing an increasing variety of scholarship on iconic and performative texts. Culturally specific studies have provided the basis for comparative theorizing about the phenomena. This body of scholarship has put us in a better position to analyze current events involving iconic books and performative texts. It can also enable us to make creative suggestions for strengthening movements for justice and social reform by ritualizing iconic and performative texts. Here, I provide three examples of how to employ SCRIPT research to strengthen contemporary movements for social and environmental justice: a short-term episodic intervention, a medium-term structural rectification, and a long-term cultural innovation.

Leserskring: The Story of South Africa’s Most Successful Commercial Book Club

Nasionale Pers established a mail-order book club based on the Bertelsmann model called Leserskring in 1980. The club became incredibly successful and by 1985 it had a membership of 250,000. However, technology and a changing South African landscape brought challenges to the club. In 2016, Naspers announced that the iconic book club’s doors would be shut for good. Some believe that the club experienced its success due to the culture of reading and publishing that had developed among mostly white South Africans during the apartheid period, and that with democratisation the niche it once held slowly started to disappear.

Being the Bible: Sacred Bodies and Iconic Books in Bring Your Bible to School Day

Bring Your Bible to School Day has been a rapidly growing annual event in US schools since 2014. It involves a ritual with the processional object, the Bible in its many personalized variations, operating as an icon that invokes the presence of God and legitimizes evangelical Christians who see themselves as the agents of God’s return to American schools and society. In this ritual, the Bible also functions to index its possessors as affected biblical bodies, or visible manifestations of God’s word. This article analyzes the activities and discourses surrounding Bring Your Bible to School Day in light of material attitudes and practices in Protestant Christianity, including iconoclasm and biblicism, and recent scholarship on iconic books.

You are the music: How music reveals what it means to be human (Williamson)

This is a review of the book "You are the music: How music reveals what it means to be human" authored by Victoria Williamson.&#x0D; Title: You are the music: How music reveals what it means to be human Author: Victoria Williamson Publication year: 2014 Publisher: Icon Books Ltd Pages: 224 ISBN: 978-1848317437

“Don’t be too upset with your unchivalrous publisher” Translator-Publisher Interactions in the Swedish Translations of L.M. Montgomery’s Anne and Emily Books

This article explores the translation practices of the Swedish translations of Canadian writer L.M. Montgomery’s Anne and Emily books from a sociological perspective. By studying the interactions between the different agents involved in the making of the translations, in this case the translators and the publishers, the study adds to previous research on the Swedish translations conducted by Laura Leden and Cornelia Remi. Through an extensive archival material from Montgomery’s first Swedish publishing house C.W.K. Gleerups, the study uncovers and discusses which norms the translators and publishers worked by, as well as the publishers’ role in the translation process and how the publishers’ profile and praxis affected the translations. The analysis demonstrates that the publishers’ were highly engaged in the translation processes and that their ideas and instructions played an important part in shaping the books’ content and making them part of the children’s canon in Sweden. For instance, it was the publisher and a publishing house board member – not the translator – who came up with the iconic book title Anne pa Gronkulla (Anne of Green Gables). The publishers primarily steered the translators in matters that concerned the salability of the novels – the length and the titles of the books – but also on a more detailed level. This close cooperation points to the fact that it sometimes is relevant to refer to the publisher as a co-translator. In line with current research within the field of sociology of translation, the study thus concludes that the process of translating Montgomery’s Anne and Emily books into Swedish should be seen as a collective act.

Video Games and Playable Media

As video games constitute a relatively new medium of expression without an agreed-upon history, any attempt at a genealogy of the form is necessarily provisional in nature. A feminist subfield of the genealogy is even less codified, but recent frictions around gender and inclusivity in games have revealed key stakes in video games connected to larger issues of women in technology and the sciences, issues of gender and representation, and the broader conditions of women in male-dominated fields. Video games are one of the ways that the young are socialized into familiarity and conversancy with computational media.1 Play also helps shape and reinforce a child's understanding of normative gender roles. As Carrie Heeter has characterized these dynamics, “Video games intricately intersect with gender identity and act as a lightning rod for internal and social negotiations about appropriate portrayals and performance of femininity.”2 Game designer and scholar Mary Flanagan, in her iconic book Critical Play (2009), discusses the ways in which gender-based power dynamics are extended into the play space of games: “Feminist criticism and practice has played an important role in informing such disruptions with technology, as well as examining how power relationships are …

Current Bibliography

Current Bibliography Kelli A. Larson [The current bibliography aspires to include all serious contributions to Hemingway scholarship. Given the substantial quantity of significant critical work appearing on Hemingway's life and writings annually, inconsequential items from the popular press have been omitted to facilitate the distinction of important developments and trends in the field. Annotations for articles appearing in The Hemingway Review have been omitted due to the immediate availability of abstracts introducing each issue. Kelli Larson welcomes your assistance in keeping this feature current. Please send reprints, clippings, and photocopies of articles, as well as notices of new books, directly to Larson at the University of St. Thomas, 333 JRC, 2115 Summit Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55105-1096. E-Mail: KaLarson1@stthomas.edu.] Kelli A. Larson University of St. Thomas BOOKS Bean, Kendra and Anthony Uzarowski. Ava: A Life in Movies. Philadelphia, PA: Running P, 2017. [Biography of Ava Gardner with scattered references to her friendship with EH. Comments on her roles in the film productions of "The Killers," "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," and SAR.] Google Scholar Paul, Steve. Hemingway at Eighteen: The Pivotal Year That Launched an American Legend. Chicago, IL: Chicago Review P, 2018. [Detailed biography chronicling the events, experiences, and people of this formative year in the young writer's life. Paul covers EH's six month stint as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star, later service in the Red Cross ambulance division in Italy during WWI, and subsequent wounding. Paul, a former Star re-porter and editor, explores the influence of EH's newspaper apprenticeship on his developing vision as an author and identifies un-bylined EH articles based on an examination of style and content. Includes over twenty black-and-white photographs along with endnotes, index, and bibliography. Reprints three Star articles. Draws on existing biographies, correspondence, John F. Kennedy Library archives, and other sources.] [End Page 165] Google Scholar ESSAYS Anderson, Eric Gary and Melanie Benson Taylor. "The Landscape of Disaster: Hemingway, Porter, and the Soundings of Indigenous Silence." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 59.3 (Fall 2017): 319-52. [Comparison study identifying EH as a southern writer despite critical reluctance to envision him as such. Examines how each author submerges personal wounding and cultural trauma in their writings about place, specifically focusing on the intersection of Indians and modernism. Concludes that EH's experiments with "indigeneity," though sometimes demonstrating settler colonial impulses, also acknowledge the presence of Indians through their decipherable silence. Discusses EH's "Indian Camp," "Ten Indians," "Big Two-Hearted River," "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," THHN, and Porter's "Pale Horse, Pale Rider," among others.] Google Scholar Araki, Hirohiko. "Learn Storytelling from Hemingway." Manga in Theory and Practice: The Craft of Creating Manga. Trans. Nathan A. Collins. San Francisco, VIZ Media, 2017. 106-08. [Guide for aspiring authors. Araki illustrates the writing principle of "show, don't tell" through a brief examination of the criminals' dialogue in "The Killers."] Google Scholar Bass, Eleanor. "Ernest Hemingway and Agnes von Kurowsky." Yours Always: Letters of Longing. London: Icon Books, 2017. 102-07. [Briefly sums up the familiar circumstances surrounding EH's affair with Red Cross nurse Agnes von Kurowsky. Reprints both von Kurowsky's "Dear John" letter and EH's letter to friend Bill Horne detailing his painful response to their breakup.] Google Scholar Cirino, Mark and Amanda Kay Oaks. "Wise Blood: Menstruation, Fertility, and the 'Disappointment' in Hemingway's Across the River and into the Trees." The Hemingway Review 37.1 (Fall 2017): 55-66. Google Scholar Crews, Michael Lynn. "Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)." Books Are Made Out of Books: A Guide to Cormac McCarthy's Literary Influences. Austin, TX: U of Texas P, 2017. 263. [Comments on McCarthy's reference to EH's hawk metaphor in MF in his unpublished screenplay Whales and Men.] Google Scholar Dandeles, Gregory M. "You Give Them Money, They Give You a Stuffed Dog: Modernism and Survival in The Sun Also Rises." Great War Modernism: Artistic Response in the Context of War, 1914-1918. Ed. Nanette Norris. Lanhan, MD: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2016. 133-43. [Reading the novel's treatment of trauma through the lens of Nietzsche's The...

Seeing, Touching, Holding, and Swallowing Tibetan Buddhist Texts

The iconic dimension of holy books has drawn increasing scholarly attention in recent years (e.g. Iconic Books and Texts, James Watts, ed., London, Equinox, 2013). Asian Buddhism provides rich material for considering the ritualization of engagement with sacred texts. In Tibetan Buddhism, this aspect of book culture is perhaps especially pronounced (see, for instance, Schaeffer 2009, especially Chapter 6; Elliott, Diemberger and Clemente 2014). This paper explores the topic in relation to the engagement of the senses in Tibetan context, through seeing, touching, holding and tasting texts. It would seem that it is not the sensory experience in itself, but rather the physical experience of a transmission and incorporation of the sacred qualities from the books into the person which is emphasized in these practices. Parallels and contrasts with examples from elsewhere are mentioned, and there is some consideration of the breadth of the category of sacred books in the Tibetan context in which Dharma teachings may take many forms.

Emma Smith, Shakespeare's First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book

This is one of several books concerning Shakespeare published in 2016 as the quatercentenary year of his death and is, at £19.99, among the most affordable. Unusual as it may seem to commence a rev...

Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book by Emma Smith

Reviewed by: Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book by Emma Smith José María Pérez Fernández Emma Smith. Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book. Oxford UP, 2016. 320 Pp. TERENTIANUS, THE THIRD-CENTURY GRAMMARIAN, famously proclaimed that books have their own fates according to the dispositions of their readers (“pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli”). In Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book, Emma Smith—who is also the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s First Folio (2016)—explores the readers, the reception, and the significance of one of the most singular volumes in the English canon. She starts with an account of the first recorded purchaser of the First Folio, Sir Edward Dering, whose book of expenses is also a record of his social and political progress—a case of Renaissance self-fashioning through consumption. His purchase of the First Folio also dovetailed with other hobbies, which included the performance of plays adapted by Dering himself for amateur productions in his household. Smith uses Dering as one of the pillars in the opening of her overall narrative structure, adding a more recent user of the First Folio at the other end of her book. Smith leaves few pages unturned or bindings unexamined. It is difficult to summarize all the things Smith’s book does with the First Folio and the fascinating episodes she explores in relation to its production, circulation, and reception. The complex history of the First Folio is, of course, the history of Shakespeare’s elevation to the altars of the canon, of the political, cultural, and economic capital invested in it, and of the communities who sought to appropriate it. Smith describes the diverse agents within the overlapping worlds of the public stage and the publishing business that facilitated its production. Patrons, actors, and publishers, among others, are all brought forward to demonstrate how they contributed to produce a printed artifact that circulated throughout far-reaching networks in both chronological and geographical terms. The author and his readers are but one convergence among the many encounters of individuals and communities that have shaped interpretations of the First Folio over the past four hundred years. For example, Smith examines the copy deposited now at the Glasgow University Library as part of the Cary family networks, which included Ben Jonson. This [End Page 201] is, in the first place, an early episode in the public perception of Shakespeare as a towering modern in competition with the ancients. It is also an important step towards the further canonization of Shakespeare during the eighteenth century. Smith’s book contributes to a detailed understanding of the role played by the First Folio and its reception in Shakespeare’s progress from his status as national poet, on towards his emergence as a universal author, and his current status as a fetish of Anglo-American global culture. Many First Folios circulated through the same paths that came to redefine the international balance of economic and political power: the fate of those copies that left Britain towards the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries coincided with the creation of great American library collections. In turn, the growing global weight of the Japanese economy in the 1980s took twelve First Folios to the Kodama Memorial Library in Tokyo. In tracing the fortunes of the global circulation of First Folios, Smith’s book complements other recent volumes that examine the emergence of World Literature as a new paradigm for the discipline of Comparative Literature. Underpinning this new order—what some might call CompLit 2.0—is the global hegemony of Anglo-American literature within the publishing business and academic institutions. In contrast, for instance, to Barbara Fuch’s The Poetics of Piracy, or Emily Apter’s Against World Literature (both published in 2013), Smith’s book is less openly polemical, which is why it dovetails so smoothly with more confrontational approaches. Whatever one’s agenda, the fact is that the remaining copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio have become global cultural treasures whose value tends to fluctuate with the circulation of political and economic capital...

Reading the Bible in Sleepy Hollow

The first season of the Fox network's television show Sleepy Hollow is based on a biblical premise. This article explores how the Bible is portrayed in the series, through the lens of iconic books. It is argued that what makes books iconic is their power to “save” (“salvation”). In the case of the Bible in Sleepy Hollow, this involves representing the Bible as a grimoire. This representation only becomes clear as the use of the Bible throughout the season is surveyed in its role as a performative text.