This is the full-text display feed of the Berkshire Blog, mostly written by Karen Christensen but occasionally by Berkshire staffers, which was started at the end of 2004. Over the years, it changed. Some of this informal notes moved to Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter , and perhaps other now-forgotten platforms. Much moved into regular email newsletters. Some of those newsletters were also posted to the blog, conscious as we have always been that online platforms change, and disappear. Karen is mostly to be found on Substack now, and at her own website, KarenChristensen.org. We’re preserving the 2004-2023 record here, and starting a new blog for current Berkshire news, in addition to our mailings for teachers and librarians, at Berkshire Bookworld. Karen’s blog was featured in the Washington Post in 2006: that story is here. The timeline display is at this page.
Reading women’s lives
One of the great errors made by those enthralled by technology is that, as even some true e-leaders have claimed, "everything will be on the web." No one who's rooted around in dusty old papers without celebrity value would make such a casual claim. But it was the Literary Review, a wonderful, polished London magazine that is not on the web in any way or shape, that made me want to test the great databases of digital content that publishers and governments have been amassed like the Pharaoh gathering grain before the seven years of famine. A review of Wives and Daughters: Women and Children in the Georgian Country House, by Joanna Martin, clued me in on what is obviously a signficant area of research, and general history. I've heard from history teachers that they want more on women's lives, and here it was laid out in gory detail. One of the subjects of this book left a "frank account of preparing mentally for a mastectomy which, like Fanny Burney's, was conducted entirely without anaesthetic." I had no idea, about what surgery was really like in the 19th century or about the writers who specialize in women's domestic and personal lives--Amanda Vickery is also mentioned by the reviewer as "analytical (and witty)." After all that I've heard about getting students to read primary sources, I wonder, first, whether this kind of fascinating material is readily available to them from the major databases and, second, whether they can really make head or tale of it. Don't they--and we, most of us anyway--need the context, and guidance, provided by an author who really knows her stuff?
The wonders of a city
I'm writing from Rome, so the city is on my mind. Getting all of world history, or rather enough of world history, into five volumes was a considerable challenge. One thing we had to do was cut. And cut. And cut again. We were determined to get away from the approach taken in previous works called encyclopedias of world history, so we avoided chronological or regional material without global context. We also, as much as we could, avoided the dictionary approach: people, places, and events out of context, just one after another. The hardest cut was our articles on cities, past and present. Urban centers have been immensely important in human history, and they can be discussed in terms of global impact, connection, and webs of communication and commerce. But we ran out of room. The good news is that we are turning that material into a separate publication, the Berkshire Encyclopedia of Cities in World History. The title consciously echoes Lewis Mumford's The City in History; Mumford is somehow we have a sense of close connection with, because of my friendship with his widow Sophie in the 1990s (she died in 1997, after living through the whole of the 20th century). I know we've chosen to base our publishing business in a small town, but David and I both love cities. Now, after three hours in Rome, I am already certain that this city, too, along with London and New York and Paris and Beijing, is a place I'll remain enamoured of. Exploring the magic of cities--as well as their problems and their impact--will be part of creating the new encyclopedia.
Global warning
The newspaper I picked up in London this morning announced that global climate change, or global warming, is now thought likely to be twice as bad as previously projected. This came from an article published in the very respectable scientific journal Nature, and got quite a lot of press in Britain (along with the woman arrested for driving while eating an apple). What are we going to do about it? I'm in Rome, having flown here in a airplane that made a heavy contribution to greenhouse gases, and a food service operation that takes no account whatsoever of environmental issues. Later today I'm meeting a journalist from an Italian environmental magazine, La Nuova Ecologia. Here's my thought: there are a lot of us who care, and who see the dangers and are willing to do things differently. How can we unite? We especially need to find new ways to influence governments and companies, as well as our friends and families. In Rome, a city packed with gorgeous churches, heartstopping ruins, and an unbelievable density of cars and motorbikes, the contrast between talk and walk was intriguing. I saw many references to 'ecologia' and while stuck in traffic I noticed how many cars had stickers for the World Wildlife Fund and environmental causes. What this suggests is not hypocrisy but a longing for ways to do things better, a love for the natural world that we are all too often pushed by advertising and circumstance to ignore. Here, for Americans who are unfamiliar with the concept of 'bottle bins,' the Italian version. It's so much easier, the way at home we put recycling out by the curb, rather than hauling it to a separate location. But the real question is whether there is truly a demand for recycled products; the most important thing we can is to BUY recycled.
Dear Mrs. Eliot…
The first thing I did when I got to Heathrow today was buy a Guardian. Indeed, my article was there, opening the Review section, and the cover is a rather lovely blue with a silhouette of T. S. Eliot. Only a few people in my publishing world today, very much focussed on social sciences and now technology, know that my first love is literature, and letters. The Guardian article is a memoir of the two years I worked for Valerie Eliot, widow of T. S. Eliot and his literary executor, was a refreshing reminder of other kinds of publishing, and of the way some people's personal histories are woven into our understanding of the social history of, in this case, the twentieth century. Here's the article: Dear Mrs Eliot... It's a long article, but a good deal was cut. I did a good deal of cutting, to start with, as the original draft was much, much longer, with more material about my own experience as well as information I had gathered from others who knew the Eliots. I was sorry to see the anecdotes go but knew it had to happen. I let a trusted copy editor do the most severe surgery, to get it to a reasonable length. Other material was cut during editing at the Guardian. My time with Valerie Eliot was quite complicated, given our difference in age, politics, and ways of life. She made a great effort to accept what were, from her point of view, striking peculiarities. Riding a bike to work, for example (she let me park it in the hall, but always seemed nervous about walking past it), or being interested in environmental issues. My son Tom, now 19, doesn't like chocolate, and attributes this to being forced to eat a piece of chocolate upon his introduction to Mrs Eliot. He was a year old and had never had any kind of sweet. Mrs Eliot was unsure of what to do with a baby, so she got a box of chocolates out of a drawer and insisted that he would like one. I went along with this, I'm afraid, and pushed it into his mouth, no doubt worrying that he would spit it out and make a mess. Tom doesn't remember this, but the story has nonetheless become part of his own history.
Nonpublication news
I didn't realize that my article on the Eliot letters was also a news item, ""A closed book." I've been enjoying a day of meetings with literary people, after a long day of publishing talk in Oxford yesterday. It always surprises me to see how compartmentalized publishing is: academic, trade, literary . . . and reference often a world apart. Our goal is a publishing company that brings these worlds together, popularizing important subjects, and providing context for the things on people's minds, whether the Iraq elections or the Michael Jackson trial (the latter, by the way, is of great interest here, even with my academic publishing friends!).
Finding the center
Understanding and explaining 'global perspectives' is a vital part of what we do, and being in Rome and London gave me a new sense of cultural anchor points to people around the world. While many events and places that have great meaning in one culture (even a dominant culture) often have little impact elsewhere, there are a few things in Europe that are embued with meaning for many, many people (though not everyone). I've seen two this week, the Colosseum in Rome and the clock at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, south London. There were people from around the world in each place, and I wish I'd had a chance to talk to some about why they were there, what that place meant to them. It'd be interesting, too, to find out what places in the U.S. actually have significance to people elsewhere. The Statue of Liberty or the United Nations? Disneyland or Yosemite? The other parallel between Rome and Greenwich is that each was, in its time, in its world, the centerpoint. (The center of Rome, and once of the Roman Empire, is a spot in a courtyard on one of the Roman hills, a location from which all roads, in that world, ran.)
One drop at a time
Midwinter is when the gardening bug strikes me, because I’m so much in need of greenery and flowers (and folic acid!). One thing I’m doing is growing sprouts, sick of the high prices and dreariness of the salad greens in the shops (they’re clearly labelled as coming from California, with signs apologizing for the high price). I was rinsing my sprouts last night, filling the jar with tap water and letting it run out through the screen lid, and realized that while it’s cheap to grow sprouts (one tablespoon of alfalfa seed makes a quart of crunchy salad stuff) this form of agriculture requires a prodigious amount of pure clean water. Water is fast approaching fossil fuels as the resource we’ll be battling over. And there’s no substitute for it, no way to make it or capture it from space (as we can grab energy from sunlight streaming down to earth). For a start, let’s start looking at water afresh, appreciating what we have (safe tap water, clean clothes, and hot showers whenever we like). Then we can work together to find ways to ensure that our grandchildren, too, as well as other children around the world, will be able to enjoy these things. What to do?
Sounds like Faulker
Speaking of machine translation, I can't resist sharing a site my daughter came across. Is it William Faulkner or a machine translation? Sounds Like Faulkner. When you really think about the myriad meanings of words, the nuance of phrasing, the emotion we convey by voice and in the rhythm of written language, even when we're speaking the same one, it seems miraculous that we manage to communicate at all!
Greener paper?
I hadn't thought much about what it would mean for a publisher also to be an author. But when I was in London last week I was definitely caught on the fence. I was talking to an influential British publisher who was distinctly pissed off with the Greenpeace campaign to get publishing companies to phase out "ancient forest fibre" from their books. I'd blithely mentioned that my new book The Armchair Environmentalist was printed on recycled paper. What sounds more grand, more worthy, than saving ancient forests? And it is worthy. So, I asked myself, why wouldn't publishers jump onto this campaign? I remembered my very first interview about my very first book, Home Ecology. This was London, early in 1989. I had never done a radio interview, I had a stinking case of 'flu, and a three-month-old baby to boot. I left the baby, took a pile of handkerchiefs, and trundled off. Things went pretty well till the interviewer asked me why my book wasn't printed on recycled paper. I took a deep breath, and with sudden inspiration pointed out that books last a long time, a hundred years and often more, so if there's anything we should be using virgin paper for it definitely should be books. It was more important, I said, to focus on all the paper that was used for disposable products. That's not to say I didn't want my books to be on recycled paper, and I feel the same way now. But I am also much more sympathetic to publishers now. Publishing is a tough business, with slim margins. We are generally well-intentioned and we feel that what we do is, much of the time, a good thing for society. So when environmentalists start pitching into us, instead of into oil companies or banks or weapons manufacturers, it does seem unfair. If you are a publisher, please do look at the Greenpeace Save or Delete campaign (in the United States, Green Press Initiative). If you are an activist, please give some thought to all the good publishing does: promoting global understanding, sharing knowledge, providing low-impact entertainment, supporting education and lifelong learning.
Bad business
I've been reading about Carly Fiorina, the deposed CEO of Hewlett-Packard. Yesterday's New York Times said she'd been brought in to change the culture and tried to go too far. "Changing the culture" is on our minds, as Berkshire goes from being a small town content developer to a next-gen publishing company with global ambitions. Publishing in New York has always been a glamour business--star authors, literary leanings--while ours has been more like an academic department, and many of our employees have come from the academic or nonprofit world, or straight out of college. Like us, they've loved dealing with global topics and contributors, and felt that we were doing something good in the world, especially after 9/11 when we found ourselves publishing on just the right topics: Fundamentalism, Crime and Punishment, and Modern Asia. We were all essentially editorial in our outlook, leaving other people to deal with promotion and marketing and distribution. But that's all changed. We too are in the process of changing the culture, to one where editorial and IT work smoothly together, and where marketing and sales are not seen as somehow sullying the purity of what editorial does. Quite the contrary: when we produce great product on important topics, everyone in the organization should be part of getting it into as many people's hands, or screens, as possible. That's part of believing in what we do. But it isn't easy. It requires, for many people, a change in perspective, a change in their thinking about the nature of business. Too many well-intentioned people, concerned about the environment or social issues, see businesses and commerce as essentially destructive. And I'm not claiming to have understood this quickly myself: I was as idealistic and ignorant about the world as anyone. My fascination with business, and with the possibilities for industry leadership that are part of creating a successful business, is a relatively recent thing. There are bad businesses, sure, but businesses aren't bad. In fact, Great Barrington needs businesses like ours, and the world needs successful and innovative publishers.
Following up from Charleston
Interdisciplinary publishing has been Berkshire's focus since early days, perhaps because our partnership is interdisciplinary. I studied English and comparative literature and write about environmental issues and community. I also have a great interest in science (I've been called a science groupie) and in new technologies (my teenage son has some comments on that, too). David Levinson, on the other hand, is a cultural anthropologist who has done much work in psychology and criminology. Each of us brings a set of interests and expertise to our publishing, and we've consciously developed a network of scholarly advisors from other disciplines.We tackled the subject of interdisciplinary scholarship and librarianship at the Charleston Conference in November, by organizing a panel that included Sarah Pritchard, University Librarian at UC Santa Barbara, and Rolf Janke, VP and Publisher at Sage Reference. Sarah explained that librarians generally relish interdisciplinary thinking and publications but struggle with the practicalities involved in managing them and making them readily accessible to students. It's a common challenge. Publishers, or at least some of us, truly want to respond to our customers' desire for more integrated, holistic resources. But we too face a host of real-life challenges when we do this.There's the task of recruiting and managing a group of contributors from many disciplines. Even when these scholars quickly recognize the value of a major interdisciplinary publication in their field, as they did with Berkshire's Encyclopedia of Community, for example, they often do not know one another, have different perspectives on what matters most, and use different terminology.Second, the effort of directing their writing, reviewing and editing articles, and finalizing content is far more challenging in interdisciplinary scholarship than when working within an established field with clear boundaries.Much staff time and expertise is required to create works that are integrated and consistent.Existing systems for categorizing publications, both at the Library of Congress and in distributor and library databases, often do not allow for even the simplest of crossdisciplinary and interdisciplinary tagging. For example, the Berkshire Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction is both computer science and social science: that's the nature of the new but well-established field of HCI! This work needed to be tagged as human and computer, but we could choose only one. (We chose computer, but realize that means people in psychology, sociology, and philosophy may never find a work that would be very helpful in some of the newest areas of their field.)Finally, it's more difficult to find the particular person who is ready to make a purchase decision. We know that we're creating publications that a considerable community of scholars, students, and professionals want, and reviewers are always enthusiastic about the interdisciplinary coverage (have you ever seen a work criticized for being interdisciplinary?). But as Sarah explains, it's often hard within the library to know just who is responsible for buying a book or encyclopedia in an interdisciplinary field.Nonetheless, interdisciplinary scholarship continues to be highly valued (a quick Google search with "interdisciplinary scholarship," in fact, makes this blazingly clear)
Du Bois under fire
It's about time that I report on the conflict over whether or not to commemorate the most famous citizen in this small town's history, the African-American scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois. If you were to visit Great Barrington today, on Presidents' Day Weekend when it is full of skiers and second-home owners from New York, you'd think it a sophisticated place, with dozens of sleek restaurants and shops and East Mountain providing a picturesque backdrop. I remember the shock, only a couple years' back, the first time I saw someone using a cellphone on Main Street, but it's now a common sight (watch out though, not all services work). In spite of the surface gloss, however, there are deep divisions amongst the groups that now make up the voting community. Little Willie sledded down the hill outside on snowy February days a hundred years ago: "For recreation we played games: "marbles," hi-spy," "duck on a rock," and "Indians." We went mountain climbing and explored caves. We swam, and coasted the long hill from far up Castle Street, across the railroad tracks down to Main Street. Most of the children used to skate; but not I for two reasons: skates cost too much, and mother was afraid of the water." (This photo was taken from high up Castle Street, where Du Bois would set off.) Du Bois has been controversial here in recent months after a movement began to name a new school after him--quite reasonably, as he is the most eminent graduate of this school district, one of the leading intellectuals of the 20th century, and also someone who dearly loved the town and region. There was considerable resistance on the part of the School Committee (on which I used to serve) and no support from local officials. After a number of stormy meetings, the Committee chose instead to name the school "Muddy Brook.". Now there's an effort to get Church Street, where Du Bois was born, named after him, and David Levinson, who is writing a book about the AME Zion church Du Bois attended, hears that the police and the veterans' are organizing to fight this. The selectboard is divided on the issue. They've done something that's becoming more common when there's a truly controversial issue: they are making it a ballot question instead of an item on the warrant for town meeting in May. This means there'll be no open discussion. Du Bois wrote that he learned about democracy as a teenager in his hometown of Great Barrington in the 1870s and 1880s, and his stories echo some of the conflicts we see today. I'm reminded of what an old-timer said to me after one of the first town meetings I attended: "In here, this is democracy," he said. Then, sweeping his arm towards the rest of the planet, he added, "Out there, that's just a republic." Here's what Du Bois had to say. "From early years, I attended the town meeting every