Wise words from TNQ’s upcoming Winter Issue

As TNQ’s page designer, I frequently feel a bit out of sync with you, our readers. It takes about six weeks to turn a fistful of stories, poems and photos into the magazine you know and love; by the time an issue hits the newsstands and mailboxes across Canada, it’s been out of my hands for about a month. Right around the time you’ve finished reading the Summer issue and send your thoughts, I’m starting my work on the Fall one.

I’m elbow-deep in the layout of TNQ’s Winter issue right now, which I hope will explain (though not excuse!) the tardiness/brevity of this post and many others before my production deadline of December 1. Part of the reason why the layout takes me much longer than it would a real professional is that I can’t help but read it as I go along. (This is why I wouldn’t make a very efficient library book-shelver, either.) But now that we have this blog, I figure I might as well make a positive out of a negative and share some of what’s slowing me down, making me marvel/laugh/sigh/etc instead of copy/paste/re-size/delete/etc. This passage, for example, is from an essay by Eric Ormsby on reviewing:

“Of making many books there is no end.” So spoke old Ecclesiastes, centuries ago. Whatever physical forms the book may take in the future, it seems pretty safe to predict that many will continue to be made. And as long as books are made judgments will be made about them. The Preacher doesn’t mention critics, perhaps because he was one himself, a reviewer of life and death. But he may have had them in mind. Don’t critics also “make” books—make them read and talked about; make them into either glossy best-sellers, buzzing with manufactured huzzahs, or wretched remainders, accumulating dust on the back-shelves of Liquidation World? The Preacher said too that “much study is a weariness of the flesh.” Everyone who reviews books knows that weariness. It’s a fatigue which comes from the application of considerable ingenuity, concentration, and judiciousness to a supremely ephemeral object: the composition of a thousand or so words—more if you’re lucky—which may catch a reader’s attention for a few minutes and then be quickly forgotten. Vanity of vanities, indeed! In fact it gets worse. Only the most clueless critic imagines that those books which arrive day after day in the mail will themselves last forever, let alone long endure. The review is little more than a snowflake riding the back-draft of a book’s larger meltdown. Only a few books will survive their blurbs. Of the unmaking of many books there is also no end.

Whew. I will shake the hand of the (literary) page designer who could layout this text without pausing a moment or two. I’ve re-read it a few times now and every time, I get a little touch of vertigo. Wish I could share the rest, but I’m afraid you’ll have to wait to see it in print (in January)…