Posts from January 5, 2011
The Original Resolution
Posted by Billie Brownell
I love the idea of a clean slate, and the opportunity to write a new story. That's one reason moving to a new city is so wonderful; you can reinvent yourself. We can, of course, make resolutions any day; opportunity is one of our greatest gifts. But because it's that time of year, my thoughts have turned to New Year's resolutions. In years past, I have made all sorts of resolutions; some were kept and some were not. Every year one of them is to thank people; I hope that one is working. This year I am adding one to tell people how wonderful and important they are.
Because I am interested in etymology, the history of words, I researched the word "resolution." As you could have guessed, it descends from the Latin, specifically from the verb resolvere. Interestingly, though, that word means to "untie, unfasten, loosen." It's related to words such as "solution" and "absolution" and "solve" and "dissolve." The prefix of "re" means to intensify, to emphasize. So the original meaning was a sort of super unbinding of—what? Of anything.
Today the meaning of "resolution" is closer to the opposite, of doing something with firm determination. It implies tenacity, strength, perseverance, and fortitude. These are all good things. But it makes me wonder what could we achieve if we "loosened up" and let things go instead of trying to use strength to bend them to our will.
You know what? I think I like the original definition better. What about you?
Posts from December 16, 2010
Oh How I love Books
Posted by Katie Elzer-Peters
I've been working with Cool Springs Press since August 2010. May I just be permitted a moment of jumping up and down?
*jumps up and down*
Ok, finished.
I love books. And, I love gardening books. I love the way books smell. I love the way books inspire me to garden in a more interesting way, think differently, or entertain me. I love the way books look on the shelves, piled up on the floor, and sitting on my nightstand.
Recently, my Dad said to me "I don't regret that I bought you a book every time you asked for one." I have a good Dad. He's also a smarty-pants. He knows how much reading impacts writing. Voracious readers are often better writers. You can't help but absorb the sentence structure, details, grammar.
What is strange about this working relationship?
I don't work with books at Cool Springs Press, for the most part. I work with digital content. Some might call that sacrilege. How can someone who loves books so devote her life to digital output? If words on the page mean so much, then why devote my time to bits and bytes?
The economy has changed so much that traditional methods of publishing are not the only ways to spread knowledge, and aren't the only profitable ways. Digital content and printed words go hand-in-hand--for the spread of ideas, for profit, and for usefulness. To support the traditional books that I, and many others hold dear, digital means of distribution must be employed.
Without progress and innovation, there is no future. Without progress, we'd be writing cuneiform on tablets rather than blogs on computers. But, the books need not be left behind. The contemplation of long-form writing and research as required by books feeds our minds and gives us inspiration for the smaller snippets we share as blogs, articles, and short pieces online.
Long live books!
Posts from December 13, 2010
John J. Audubon
Posted by Marc Pewitt
In my printmaking interest, I looked a little to John J. Audubon. Audubon became an iconic figure of illustrating the wildlife, particularly the birds of frontier America.
His early life was at an interesting time in America's development. He was born in France, and his mother died early in his life. His father sent him to America to escape the threat of being called for the Napoleonic Wars. He was in Kentucky near the New Madrid fault line when the extraordinary earthquakes of 1811 hit the Mississippi River Valley. Despite a sometimes tumultuous life, including being stricken with fevers, he ventured the continent, recording the habitats and manners of America's birds.
John showed a deep commitment to acquaint himself with life among nature and made friends with local Native Americans. He dressed the part as well. He enjoyed donning the moccasins and powder horn of a frontiersman when he was in the bush.
There were a few setbacks to achieving his fully realized art. A bout with depression set in after rats ate his entire collection of drawings while he was away in Philadelphia obtaining his American citizenship. Plagued with financial troubles in his adult life, Audubon painted and drew work on commission and worked as a taxidermist.
After the suggestion of Napoleon's nephew, Charles, John went to England to seek an engraver for his drawings. The British were amazed at the clarity of the images of the mysterious American Frontier. He found sustained appreciation there, and his drawings were engraved into copper plates that were eventually printed and colored with watercolor and sometimes pastel. He raised money to publish his book, Birds of America, at today's equivalent of $2,000,000. The work was a masterpiece, on 50" sheets, or "double elephant," as it has been known.
I have had the chance to see a few of these for myself, and they are remarkable. They are scientific, accurate, and artistic. They are expressive, colorful, and large. There is a level of care taken in the drawing that is nothing short of amazing. Work like this shows a deep appreciation for its subject.
Find out more about John J. Audubon and his work by visiting the links below.
http://web4.audubon.org/bird/boa/boa_index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_J._Audubon
Source: Wikipedia.org
Posts from December 12, 2010
Widgetcraft and the Magic of Instant Content for Your Website
Posted by Jim Bashour
Do you need content for your Website? Join the crowd. Everyone does. And though content was king long before the Internet, that phrase takes on a whole new meaning when every business has a website, blog, email newsletter, Facebook page, and Twitter account just to survive in this social media frenzied world.
Garden Centers are no different. They need content to feed to their hungry customers—hungry for gardening information. And since successful gardeners garden more, they buy more plants, tools, fertilizer, pots, mulch, and everything else you can fit under a greenhouse roof; a garden retailer is foolish not to provide relevant gardening content to their customers. I never met a garden retailer that doesn't want to serve its customers. Many retailers just don't have the content to provide. That's what makes Cool Springs Press and every garden retailer in America a perfect match, and the CSP Green widget a wonderful service.
Whatever you call it—a widget, API, application programming interface, or magical website thingy—a widget brings great content to your website. A widget is simply a little bit of computer code (that Cool Springs Press provides) that brings content (or some functionality) from Cool Springs Press and adds it to your website automatically. CSP Green widgets add gardening blogs and information to garden retailers sites, and they are automatically updated with new content every day. Retailers focused on selling no longer have to focus on updating their website. The CSP Green widget does it for them. And that's the craft of "widgetry."
Learn more about CSP Green and the world of Cool Springs Press widgetcraft at coolspringspress.com/cspgreen.
Posts from December 6, 2010
Getting the Max from the Minimum
Posted by Billie Brownell
The short story doesn't seem to get the respect it deserves. Because they are often run in magazines instead of published as collections, they just don't have the commercial opportunities that longer books have. But by their nature, short stories must be tightly constructed to have any impact at all. Frankly, they seem ideal for today's sound-bite world.
Stephen King, that master of the horror/supernatural genre, usually writes books that are so long they appear bloated. But, he is also a master short story writer. One of his collections, Skeleton Crew, literally kept me up at night when I read it upon its release in the mid-80s. And who hasn't read--and remembered--Shirley Jackson's classic short story "The Lottery"? Tim O'Brien's wonderful short story "The Things They Carried," first published in Esquire, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle award. A "short" story (or small book) doesn't have to mean small in anything other than length.
Cool Springs Press is working on a collection of mini books, 4x6 inches trim and 64 pages, for our Pro-in-a-Pocket series. They are "mini" books only in trim size and length; each one will be a "real" book, albeit ranging from only 10,000 to 12,000 words in length. We have sixteen titles in the works for our initial publication. Interestingly, each one requires the same development process as a "big" book of finding its voice (even if it's an adaptation of a larger, existing book), creating and finalizing an interior layout and cover design, and editing so it's meaningful--and fits!
Watch for them in early spring. Big things do come in small packages.
