The man responsible for sparking my interest in both reading and writing, Jerome David Salinger, has died. BBC News is reporting that he “died of natural causes, his son said in a statement released by his literary agent.”

I’m sure I’m not alone in wondering what kind of craziness is going to ensue from this. If you remember, Salinger hasn’t published anything since the 60s. But that doesn’t mean he had stopped writing. With the dubious stuff his children have done in the past (“Dream Catcher,” anyone?), I’m sure we’re going to see the floodgates open up and a deluge of previously unpublished work come out. Think of all the money a lot of people stand to make off this sad news.

For now, though, as we wait to see what happens next… check out my previous feature about my own personal Salinger Library including links to places on the internet where you can read his entire (published and uncollected) oeuvre.

Dear people:

Today I stumbled upon the very awesome blog Letters of Note. In their own words, “Letters of Note is an attempt to gather and sort fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos.” From the letter of a child detailing his rocket ship designs “to a top scientist,” to a letter from Einstein proclaiming that “the word God is nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness,” this blog could entertain you for hours. But what struck me was a letter from Kurt Vonnegut Jr to his family after he escaped Dresden at the end of World War II. The experiences outlined in Vonnegut’s letter are both horrifying and incredibly worthy of respect. And on an even more visceral level, it makes me feel like writers today are all academic pansies. How many modern writers do you know “were put to work carrying corpses from Air-Raid shelters” or lived through a massive bombing raid that “killed 250,000 people in twenty-four hours and destroyed all of Dresden?” Horrible as it may be, it’s also pretty badass.

This experience of Vonnegut’s and the events outlined in this letter are what inspired his novel Slaughterhouse-Five, which was what his underground slaughterhouse-cum-prison was known as to his German captors. Vonnegut’s letter is not only an enlightening piece of literary history, it is a fantastic document of world history as well. It demonstrates to us how awful war is, how children writing to their parents had to begin letters with statements like “I’m told that you were probably never informed that I was anything other than ‘missing in action.’”

I’ve posted the scans of the letter below, which were originally available here at archive.org. If you check out Vonnegut’s letter at Letters of Note, you can read it transcribed as well and may soon find yourself sifting through all the other letters in their collection.

The internet-as-publisher has, for a long time, been given a bad reputation by the literati and print publishing world. Work published online has been seen as somewhat inferior to work published in print, mostly because it’s labeled as more of a vanity thing. Anybody can start a website or blog and put their work out there. Moreover, anybody can start an online literary journal and distribute the work of others. There’s little oversight, or at least it may be perceived as such, and the quality of both writing and editing is suspect. Print, however, has a long history of authority and quality and is therefore, by inertia alone, the top tier of what any aspiring writer could want.

But if running this blog for what’s coming on a year has taught me anything, it’s that this assumption, which once held validity in the public eye and in my own mind, has become completely false.

True, getting accepted into a respected print journal is an admirable accomplishment and a noble goal. But I’m inclined to think that the more important accomplishment for any writer is obtaining readership. The internet, as compared to a printed journal, offers near unlimited readership. More than that, upon being published online your work is submitted to an easily searchable digital library that will never go away. Being published in print limits you not only to a journal’s regular subscriber base and the booksellers through which they may distribute, but you’re also limited by time. How long before any particular issue of a journal goes out of print forever? Six months? One year? And what of that aforementioned subscriber base, how many people does that really entail? Is it in the thousands or merely in the hundreds? When you publish your work in a print journal, how many people are actually reading your story?

Let’s look at this question from a different perspective: technology. Ten years ago, at the beginning of the new millennium, how many people who you knew had a cell phone or an mp3 player? Ask yourself that same question but apply it to the present time. Do you know anybody right now, apart from maybe a grandparent or two, who doesn’t have these things or some device that does both? Now let’s think about books and technology. The phenomenon of the e-reader has yet to fully take off, but the Amazon Kindle has certainly proved to be a success and Barnes and Noble couldn’t keep up with the demand for their new Nook over the holiday season. As these devices mature, as the technology progresses, as the prices decline, all people who love reading will own an e-reader. It’s not a question of “if” it’s a question of “when.” Trust me, I love the smell of an old book as much as anybody out there; I love digging through the stacks at a used bookstore looking for treasures. Books-as-ephemera is my thing, as I’ve said many times here. But the reality is that era is over. Our lives are infiltrated by all things digital more and more everyday and to deny it, or to cling to the past out of nostalgia or fear or whatever, is simply being a luddite. There’s nothing wrong with appreciating something for the sake of nostalgia, but to deny something wholeheartedly because of nostalgia is akin to sticking your fingers in your ears and screaming “I can’t hear you!”

The truth is, while printed books will always remain for the sake of nostalgia, as collector’s items, as a higher-priced “print!” edition to accompany a digital download, the internet and digital media are unequivocally the future of literature.

I am surprised daily by the amount of traffic this blog receives and it’s enlightening to see which posts garner the most traffic. Even more interesting than that, a number of posts have been viewed by over a thousand people. Each month is better than the last in terms of traffic and as long as the content here is worthwhile to people, that trend won’t subside. The print publishing world is a constant struggle, an uphill battle filled with middlemen and people who all want a piece of the pie. Online, however, you are in charge of everything. There are no page or word limits. It is a true Democracy on the internet, despite it being viewed as a digital Wild West. If you produce quality, people will come. There is no agent or editor determining whether or not your writing is marketable, there is no undergraduate or MFA candidate sussing out the best stories for their university’s journal… there is only the reader. You write for yourself and the reader alone will determine your work’s worth.

I admit, this idea is not yet fully realized but it’s silly to deny that it won’t soon become reality. It’s also silly to think that middlemen will go away; they won’t. Editors are important to cull together a collection, much as a curator does for a gallery exhibit, but publishing and editing and writing will be much more populist in the near future. Agents may have a tougher time in the future, as they will be less necessary (if at all), but if there’s money to be made someone will figure out a way. Ultimately, though, despite the quantity of writing that will be available online, the quality of the work is what will make a writer both prevalent and relevant — not their access to print.

What do you think?

If you haven’t already noticed, we’re going through a bit of a redesign here at Bookish… and a bit of a name change. Seeing as brevity is the soul of wit, we’ve abbreviated from Bookish Us to simply Bkish. You can still reach us for the time being through the old URL (http://bookish.us), but now you can find us by typing in fewer letters to your address bar (http://bkish.com). Of course, with any major change there will be inconsistencies; that is, some things might be broken without us knowing about it. I’ll be checking everything as much as I can and will try to make this transition as smooth as possible. If you do notice something broken, however, don’t hesitate to let me know.

The new header artwork is by the fantastic Colin Palombi. Colin graciously worked with me over the past few months, designing a bunch of extremely awesome images to help convey the feeling of the site. I think he’s done an excellent job with the image we decided upon and over the next couple weeks I hope to incorporate more of his work into the site.

So please bear with us through the transition, make sure to update your links if you’re one of those terrifically great people who link to us or subscribe, and keep reading. Happy New Year!

A good friend of mine, artist Jeremy Couillard, recently unveiled a new website about memories and personal stories. It Happened Here and the interactive Memory Map give participants the opportunity to place their memories in a specific location throughout the world. The map itself is a Google Maps API, allowing one to zoom in and pinpoint exactly where the story happened. Users are encouraged to keep their entries short and sweet, getting to the heart of the memory rather than embellishing, and while there are only a handful of stories on the map currently, this is definitely something with great promise to grow.

It Happened Here reminds me a lot of Andrew Zornoza’s novel Where I Stay; in Zornoza’s novel, a nameless narrator wanders the country through short journal entries outlining where he’s been, who he’s encountered, and what he’s learned. Couillard’s project does almost exactly the same thing, only with as many people and as many memories as the internet can hold.

The great thing about It Happened Here, especially from a writer’s perspective I think, is that as it builds, as more people join and contribute, it will offer a wealth of earnest, real-life stories to pull from and adapt for one’s own writing. The greatest writers steal, as they say, and there’s no better place to steal from than the collected memories of many.

So I recommend checking out Couillard’s It Happened Here as well as his blog, which showcases his recent work inspired by memory, the Revolutionary War, and Super Mario Brothers.