Link This |
Email this |
Blog This |
Comments (2)
Imagining the Bookroom: Part II
March 21, 2008
I loved Mike Scharf’s post asking how you imagine our bookroom—and I loved the responses. Two of you were right, by the way. There are cats (in carved wood, from Venice, Santa Fe and Park Slope, scattered around my cubicle). And our office’s interior design is more school-cubby than Architectural Digest.
But when publicists query me about the status of a galley and it doesn’t ring any bells, they probably imagine the bookroom as a huge black hole which galleys enter, never to emerge.
But really, when a galley arrives in our bookroom, it rarely goes astray—it will be placed on the shelf of the appropriate editor. The question is, who, among the three nonfiction editors, is the appropriate one?
If the publisher categorizes a book as History/Politics, should it come to me (history) or to Parul Sehgal (politics)? Is a book on living with multiple sclerosis self-help (me, until recently) or lifestyle (Mark Rotella)? What about a book on how emergence theory can give us a new, nature-based concept of God—is that my book (science) or Jana Riess’s (religion)? And conversely, what about science-based atheist polemics like The God Delusion? Books on atheism usually go into Religion, though that seems like a paradox. But I did selfishly keep the Dawkins—only to be disappointed by it. So it goes.
We often pass galleys back and forth, saying, “I think this is really yours,” or “Do you think this is yours?” or “This might be yours, but I’d love to handle it if that’s okay with you.”
So what’s on my desk right now? Kathryn Harrison’s While They Slept: An Inquiry into the Murder of a Family (Random, June). The memoirist in Harrison can’t keep herself out of the story (or at least the intro). But it’s definitely true crime (my category) and a fascinating case that she will, hopefully, illuminate.
And in my tote bag to take home is Quick, Before the Music Stops: How Ballroom Dancing Saved My Life (Broadway, July), which is a memoir (Mark Rotella), but he gave it to me because I did some serious ballroom dancing for several years (photo courtesy of my cousin). And maybe it even saved my life, but that’s another story.
Posted by Sarah Gold on March 21, 2008 | Comments (2)
