Here we are, the core design, composition, and editorial team! For more photos from the party, visit us at Flickr. The photos there are captioned with everyone's name. For now, maybe you want to guess who's the design genius, who's the nice person on the phone, who checked all the Chinese. And notice who's got her volume the wrong way round. Just showing off the beautiful back cover, of course. Berkshire China team--and Great Barrington lilac
I'm on my way to New York for a remarkable "Berkshire" event tomorrow: a China celebration in New York on May Day that brings the renowned author Simon Winchester, a resident of the Berkshires and a friend of Berkshire Publishing, to a lunch hosted by Jones Day and the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. Here's the invitation. More about the synchronicities tomorrow -- along with photographs! We are pleased to invite you to a luncheon program to hear renowned author, journalist, and broadcaster Simon Winchester discuss his latest book, The [...]
If Richard Charkin says it, it's probably good sense, good business, and controversial. The issue of book returns is virtually unknown to the book-buying public, and it isn't much of an issue in the reference book publishing sector, at least for Berkshire, but it's a huge business problem with considerable environmental impact. Nice to see some movement on this, thanks to Borders and Robert Miller, president and publisher of HarperStudio. Here's an article, "An End to Book Returns?." No surprise that Richard is quoted, pointing out that New Zealand, a [...]
I'm rather disappointed. People seem to have believed my April Fools Day joke. Tom says this means it was really good, but I'm not so sure. Anyhow, here it is for anyone who missed it, and do click that link at the end of the paragraph. China introduces global food sensation: Töfood An innovative Chinese company has made plans for the global launch of a vegetarian product popular throughout China after learning about the wildly successful introduction of SPAM® during the Great Depression. The Chinese canned meat substitute, made of [...]
Massachusetts has a "one-day, one-trial" system according to the lisping Chief Justice of the Commonwealth's Supreme Court who did the video introduction we saw this morning. Maybe it wasn't a lisp but an obscure upper-class accent -- but I've never heard anything quite like it. 'W' where 'r' would normally be, which made the word juror an interesting one to try to imitate. But blogging afterwards, and after being released without having to sit on the single jury called in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, today, is hardly the same as writing posts [...]
In the midst of checking proofs, I had a week filled with Chinese art outings: a visit to a new exhibit at the Smith College Art Museum and then a tour of the Chinese collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, both with Joan Lebold Cohen, who has done so much to enrich the Encyclopedia of China with her amazing collection of photographs, which she's taken all over China since her first visit in 1972. She had the foresight to take photographs of everything - [...]