Trends in Children's Book Publishing, 1975-2000: Corporate Influences on Children's Reading

Data gathered from selected supplements (1975, 1980, 1985, 1990, 1995, and 2000) to the Children's Catalog (H.W. Wilson), are analyzed to describe the corporate ownership of children's book imprints and assess trends and changes, including the decline of independent publishing entities in the early 1980s, the relative stability in the percentage of corporations that produce both large and small proportions of children's books, and the accelerated changes across the children's publishing industry during the past ten years. Conclusions address the influence of corporate ownership on the development, contents, accessibility, and marketing of books for children.

Blurb as a Promotional Text

Недостаточная изученность коммуникативно-прагматических свойств издательского дискурса и относящихся к нему дискурсивных жанров определяет потребность в изучении книжной аннотации. Расширение границ современного лингвистического знания и нарастающая специализация лингвистических исследований предопределили включение в научный оборот понятия «продвигающий текст», к которому относится книжная аннотация. Аннотация на обложке рассматривается как самостоятельный жанр в издательском дискурсе, имеющий смешанный характер. Его прагматика заключается в эмоциональном и рациональном воздействии на потенциального читателя. Результаты изучения книжной аннотации недостаточны для того, чтобы установить типологические характеристики обложечной аннотации как продвигающего текста. Проблема, решаемая в исследовании, состоит в восполнении существующего пробела в знании об основных ее структурных и содержательных особенностях. Цель исследования заключается в создании типологической модели аннотации на материале текстов, размещенных на обложках произведений художественной литературы, изданных на русском и английском языках и предназначенных для массового читателя. В работе использован текстологический метод, включающий изучение и интерпретацию текстов аннотаций. В результате исследования установлены такие типологические характеристики обложечной аннотации, как локация, интертекстуальность, информативность и модальность. Sparse knowledge about communicative and pragmatic characteristics of publishing discourse and genres relating to it predetermines current studies of various types and genres of an abstract. Blurb is considered as independent publishing genre of mixed nature. It is intended to have an emotional and rational impact on prospective reader. So far, blurbs have been analyzed mainly from the point of view of stylistic means employed by their authors. The problem is that knowledge of typological features of a blurb is scarce and haphazard. This knowledge gap should be filled with research of English and Russian blurbs in the back pages of fiction books published by Penguin Random House and Eksmo-Ast publishing group. The purpose of the study is to create a typological model of a blurb as a promotional text. To achieve this goal a text analysis is employed, which includes examination of blurb texts and their interpretation. The result of the research is the model of a blurb that includes location, intertextuality, informativeness and modality as its typological constituents.

Feminist (and/as) Alternative Media Practices in Women’s Underground Comix in the 1970s

The American underground comix scene in general, and women’s comix that flourished as a part of that scene in the 1970s in particular, grew out of and in response to the mainstream American comics scene, which, from its “Golden Age” to the 1970s, had been ruled and construed in accordance with commercial business practices and “assembly-line” processes. This article discusses underground comix created by women in the 1970s in the wider context of alternative and second-wave feminist media practices. I explain how women’s comix used “activist aesthetics” and parodic poetics, combining a radical political and social message with independent publishing and distributive networks.

Micro-Archives and the Survival of Print in Momma Tried and Sabat

This article focuses on two independently published magazine projects, Sabat (2016–) and Momma Tried (2013–). It introduces Sabat and Momma Tried in the context of the contemporary independent publishing boom and considers their engagement with the print magazine form as affording a micro-archival stance towards the near past and personal histories as well as the magazines’ experiments with their material form.London-based Sabat appropriates the look and formula of women’s fashion and lifestyle magazines but reworks these templates to create a ‘lifestyle magazine for witches’ in a polished minimalist design. In three themed issues, Sabat establishes a meta-narrative of its own death which issue four materially enacts. Momma Tried is rooted in the art scene of New Orleans and started out as a celebration and record of the local community of creatives before the third issue turns the magazine into a ‘cyborg’ combining the print object with an app to create an ‘installation’. Both magazines evoke print as a way of conserving and archiving a specific moment but also engage in experiments that dissolve the magazine form, undermining its archiving function by staging the magazines’ ‘deaths’ as transformations.

The 2nd Polish Republic in underground publications in the Polish People’s Republic

The article outlines the achievements of an independent publishing movement in the, ruled by communist’s, Polish People’s Republic concerning the pre-war Second Polish Republic. It was advisable that the characters and themes from the history of pre-war Poland were popular among underground publishers and that they were overlooked. At the same time, the article presents a dispute between supporters of the idealized vision of the Second Polish Republic and its critics.

Frederik Byrn Køhlert, Serial Selves: Identity and Representation in Autobiographical Comics

Frederick Byrn Køhlert’s monograph on autobiographical comics argues that ‘the form’s self-reflective engagement with autobiographical representations […] might matter politically, especially for people on the social and cultural margins’. He thus places his work explicitly in a tradition of scholarship that frames comics autobiography as a vehicle through which marginalised voices can be given a platform, developing works such as Hilary Chute’s Graphic Women and standing alongside more recent scholarship such as Elisabeth El Refaie’s Visual Metaphor and Embodiment in Graphic Illness Narratives. To this end, his opening description of the history of comics autobiography emphasises its origins in independent publishing, and its historical position as a counterweight to the types of heteronormative power fantasies narratives constitutive of its most popular genres.