Penguin Books, the world’s best known publishing company, is delighted to launch a newly established diversity traineeship for 2010. The Fellowship has been founded to honour the work that Helen Fraser, recently retired Managing Director of Penguin Books, has done to address the issue of diversity within the company. The Fellowship aims to identify, encourage, and train editorial talent within Britain’s black and ethnic minority community.

Details on how to apply can be found here. Closing date for applications: 12th of March, 2010.

The University is offering over 50 Postgraduate Research Studentships for students beginning PhD studies in 2010-11. These Studentships include full tuition fees at UK/EU rates, an annual stipend at UK Research Council rates (currently £13,489), and research expenses of £750 per year. In order to qualify for consideration, applicants must have received a formal offer of acceptance as a PhD candidate by 17 March 2010. Should you be interested in studying for a research degree in the Stirling Centre for International Publishing and Communication, further information is available here. More details on the studentships are available here.

In addition, the Department of English Studies (of which the Centre is part) is pleased to be offering 11 Postgraduate Tuition Fee Bursaries, at both taught postgraduate and research level. Students applying for the MLitt in Publishing Studies and the MSc in International Publishing Management, as well as research students are eligible. The deadline is 2 July 2010, but we recommend that you apply for a place by early June to ensure you have an offer before applying for a bursary. Full details are available here.

More information on the courses available in the Centre is available from our Study page.

As a Network Member of Publishing Scotland, we exhibited the Centre in the Network Showcase. We took a sample of practical work undertaken by students on the MLitt in Publishing Studies, discussed opportunities for work experience and internships with publishing companies, and opportunities for consultancy and training.

Despite the recession and a recent, contentious report from the Literature Working Group to the Scottish Government which advocated that publishers in Scotland no longer be represented by Publishing Scotland but by the Independent Publishers Guild (IPG), the mood was upbeat at the conference. For us, this was helped by meeting some of our alumni, and also staff from Floris Books, who told us the good news that they’ve just employed one of last year’s graduates from the MLitt on a permanent basis following a temporary contract.

Padmini has worked in the publishing industry since 1999, when she joined Seagull Books in Kolkata, India as an editorial intern. Since then, she has been a website content editor, a bookseller, and worked in editorial, sales and marketing roles at a range of companies and organisations which include Canongate Books, the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Ottakars and Edinburgh University Press.

Her interest in publishing is informed both by her industry experience and her background in book history. She has been an elected member of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society and published a number of essays in The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland: Volume 3, Ambition and Industry 1800-1880 . Her research interests include the colonial history of the book, contemporary academic publishing, the impact of online technologies on the publishing industry and the graphic novel.

Padmini will be teaching on our range of postgraduate publishing programmes, and involved in the Centre’s research.

I’ve just returned from Galway, Ireland, where I was giving a talk on children’s publishing. Every time I visit the city, I take the time to visit Charlie Byrne’s, a treasure trove of a bookshop, an enticing mix of new, second-hand and remaindered titles. It’s the sort of bookshop that gently encourages the reader more used to the standardised, heavily-discounted offer of the chain stores to stop and think, and to fall in love with reading again.

Second-hand bookshops are particularly good at making you do this, I think, nudging you to escape the hold of the frontlist and the hyped, for more unpredictable territories.

Charlie Byrne’s isn’t a snobbish place, though – alongside its Irish-language books and academic texts, it has a lively children’s section, popular fiction, and a wall bustling with notices about arts-oriented events taking place round the city. The company also, as its website informs, ’sells used books in larger quantities to be used as decoration or “furniture” in restaurants, pubs, shops, etc.’  Literature as wallpaper?

I first visited Charlie Byrne’s when I was working in publishing, at Hodder & Stoughton. At this time in the mid-1990s, Hodder was one of the most commercially-oriented trade publishers, and was instrumental in sounding the death knell of the Net Book Agreement and the rise of the 3-for-2 sales culture of the 2000s. I was happy in the job, though, working on Hodder’s literary imprint Sceptre, with authors including Melvyn Bragg, Jill Dawson, Siri Hustvedt, Andrei Makine, Andrew Miller and David Mitchell.

But that rainy Irish summer day, with time to kill, happily, in a bookshop, I suddenly decided I wanted to go back to university – to take the time to think a bit more about authors, books, readers and the process – ‘publishing’ – by which all these are brought together. For me, it was a good decision, and every time I have the opportunity to go back to Galway, I remember that moment, revisit Charlie Byrne’s, and go home with a suitcase full of books.

Has a bookshop ever changed the course of your life? Or do you simply have a favourite bookshop you’d like to tell everyone about? Let us know…

Claire Squires

Edited by Michael F. Suarez S.J. and H.R. Woudhuysen, the volumes begin with overview essays on subjects including the technologies and economics of print, children’s books and the electronic book, as well as chapters on books and publishing in different countries and regions around the world. The work then has over 5000 encyclopaedia entries, with definitions and descriptions ranging from the accordion book to the Zimbabwe International Book Fair, by way of mini-histories of Faber & Faber, the Harry Potter phenomenon, and even the telephone directory.

A publishing feat in itself, the Oxford Companion to the Book contains over a million words, and is the work of two general editors, around 30 associate and assistant editors, nearly 400 scholars, and a staff team at OUP. Claire Squires, Director of the Stirling Centre for International Publishing and Communication, was the Associate Editor with responsibility for the Twentieth Century Book in Britain, and wrote the overview essay ‘The History of the Book in Britain from 1914′.

The reference work has already received rave reviews from the Sunday Times (’fabulous … monumental … beautiful’) and the Sunday Telegraph (’an extraordinary tribute to a revolutionary invention … magnificent’).

With each passing week I find myself more and more enthused by the career possibilities in my future. This happiness was increased immeasurably last week when, as a publisher and traveller, a personal dream came through. This coming summer I will be moving to New York for a few months to take up an internship with Continuum, a publishing house mostly concerned with academic publishing. Perhaps for some my excitement over an unpaid internship may seem a little over the top. But to be honest, I don’t care! This is the kind of opportunity I have been working for my whole life. I may not have realised it before but this is my dream come true and no one or no thing will ever take that from me now. As a publishing student I feel that this is the most wonderful opportunity that could have come my way.

So bring it on – visas flight booking and all the other necessary preparations cause come June, after graduation, I’m leaving on a jet plane!

Helena O’Leary

All promises to be revealed  in San Francisco at 1800 GMT.

What do you think?

There was a very relaxed atmosphere in the Reading Room of the library when we arrived, despite choosing seats right next to a camera, where my embarrassing laugh was a risk of national exposure. Perhaps the wine helped. After reading the prologue from his new book, questions from Alan Taylor and a member of the audience encouraged Iain to speak about marketing books in the science-fiction genre as well as the fiction. Iain Banks has written 24 books, split pretty much evenly between the two, but uses the name Iain M. Banks for his sci-fi books and Iain Banks for fiction. Initially, his publisher discouraged him from using ‘M. Banks’, saying it was “too fussy” and because of its association with Rosie M. Banks (Wodehouse character). In time he settled into using it as his science fiction pen name, considering it American-sounding and also simply a better name to promote science fiction under.

Despite having achieved acclaim in both genres, the number of fans crossing over between his styles (particularly towards science fiction) may be slim. Iain joked about the snobbery involved in picking up a book and being repelled on discovery that it contains parallel universes or quantum physics. It would be interesting to know how sales of his books would have fared had they all been published either with or without the M (which stands for Menzies, by the way, and there are a couple of funny stories to go with it). This point is of practical concern to Little, Brown and Company, as it is the first of Iain Bank’s novels in which the requirement of an ‘M.’ is debatable. ‘Transition’ contains the multiverse theory that each event that occurs involves a different event occurring in another possible world. Several characters in the novel can travel between these infinite variations.

It sounds incredibly complicated, but reviews suggest that Banks’ latest book will be a success with fans. I wonder how well exposed it will be to his science fiction fans, who may choose not to bother after noticing the absent ‘M.’

Later there was time for a few questions from the audience. Having dared my girlfriend to ask “Where do you get your ideas from?” which we considered to be the most embarrassing question possible, we were both spared the effort when a woman in the front row spoke about multiverse theory for a couple of awkward gap-filled minutes before finishing with the noticeable absence of a question mark. The microphone was taken from her and given to a man who asked to what extent Iain was aided by drugs in his writing. I knew he was a keen whisky drinker (and he now does no other drugs, excluding the espresso machine), but the answer that followed was so open and frank that at first I wondered if he knew the camera was there, and then just found him more likeable.

I went to the event having only read Iain Banks’ first novel, The Wasp Factory, but will gladly go to see him at other readings and am now looking out both for books by Iain Banks, and by Iain M. Banks.

Alistair Coats

A meeting of the Scottish Network of Modernist Studies will be held at the University of Stirling on 30 January 2010. The meeting will include a discussion on ’Publishing Modernism’, led by Professor Claire Squires, Director of the Stirling Centre of International Publishing and Communication, and Dr Matthew Creasy, University of Glasgow.

Full details of the programme can be found here.