Category Archives: publishing

Ampersand & Lawn Ornaments

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After the first leg of  Wendy and Jack’s book tour they returned with books, pictures, the leftover shortbread and one giant metal ampersand. It’s now set up in the front yard, after much deliberation over its placement. And it’s a constant reminder that ampersands are super super weird. In fact, we spent a good ten minutes debating if it was facing the right way. We’ve certainly all seen plenty of ampersands (I can’t really speak for Jack and Wendy… maybe they’ve managed to avoid them thus far). But it’s just one of those shapes that’s complex, but not quite complex enough to be memorable, so it slides right out of your mind.

Definitely facing the right way… right?

Ampersands started as a form of typographic ligature, which is a combination of two different graphemes (thanks Wikipedia!). In the case of the ampersand the two graphemes are the letters E and T, and the ligature is formed when the two are smushed together (yeah, I didn’t really see it either, but check out the ampersand in fonts like Trebuchet and you’ll get the picture). “Et” is Latin for “and,” so ampersands got their start when a bunch of Romans got too lazy to write out the full word. Which is really lazy, considering they had already worked out an “and” with one less letter than ours.

Not to sound too much like a late-night English student a bit too drunk on “literary theory”, but I’m about to act like a late-night English student a bit too drunk on literary theory. What’s cool about the ampersand is that its appearance actually matters. It’s not a letter at all, but a picture. Replace the letter “A” with “#” and nothing changes. The appearance has nothing to do with the meaning. But take two meaningless symbols and push them together into an ampersand you have something  with a meaning that only exists when it looks approximately the way it’s meant to look.

AND The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap

And since we love reading into pictures, the ampersand has become more than just a smushed together “E” and “T.” The best example where we’ve given it a meaning for itself, separate from “and,” comes from screenwriting, where the ampersand suggests direct collaboration, whereas “and” means one writer, followed by a second rewriter. If I pop “by Michael Crichton & Andrew Whalen” on my screenplay for Jurassic Park 5: Whatever Happened to Nedry’s Shaving Cream Can? it means that the two of us have collaborated via seance. We are equal partners. But if my Jurassic Park 5: Whatever Happened to Nedry’s Shaving Cream Can? screenplay is instead by “Michael Crichton and Andrew Whalen” it means that I took something Crichton had done and rewrote it for myself without consulting him. Take away my ampersand and I go from being the brilliant necromancer co-writer of the summer 2016 blockbuster hit to being the lonely author of rip-off fan-fiction that will never see the screen.

If I were to draw some sort of conclusion out of this, then I would say that the ampersand is an appropriate symbol to have in metal on the front lawn of your bookstore. Letters just sit on the page and we make them real as we interpret them in our heads. Writers create on the page and the readers pick up these pieces and rebuild the ideas for themselves.  Staked down on the front lawn of Tales of the Lonesome Pine, alongside a toilet overgrown with vines, a plastic dimetrodon, and several stone animals wearing wire-frame spectacles, the ampersand is a kind of visual re-creation of the first step in this process, where we take simple scratches and begin to combine them into an entire visual language that can impart meaning, feelings, or hovercraft chases through space-stations. The ampersand is not a letter or an idea: it is a simple statement of how the former becomes the latter.

Back to the Future in Greenwich Village

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In a far off galaxy many years ago – – –

I (Jack) was part of the emerging Scottish folk-music scene at around the same time that like-minded young Americans were heading for Greenwich Village to discover much the same buzz and counter-culture. In the early 1960s, subversiveness had a musical soundtrack. My Edinburgh-centered version had little direct musical connection with its American cousin, other than very occasional imported albums and songs heard 2nd or 3rd hand from the likes of Archie Fisher or Josh McCrae, but the undercurrent of questioning authority and plotting the green revolution was similar. In my case there was also a Pete Seeger concert in Edinburgh and a stage shared with Carolyn Hester in Aberdeen.

But I had never been to Greenwich Village – until last Saturday, that is!

Finding ourselves in New York and asked what we’d like to see, Wendy gave me a grin and said, “Greenwich Village.” And so I got my picture taken standing in Bleeker Street, then McDougal Street and finally in Washington Square Park. An old ghost had been laid to rest; a place that had assumed near-mythic proportions in my mind was beneath my feet and in my view. Although the area has no doubt changed a lot—we saw boutique shops and chain stores where some of the old folkie corners had once questioned how we lived our lives—the buildings are mostly unaltered, the cellars still there though fulfilling a different function.

It was a lovely day out for this child of the sixties, to see where the great ‘Folk Scare’ was rooted and the park where the ‘revolution’ was plotted as young musicians who would later become household names gathered to jam.

Finally, the following morning we shared breakfast with our hosts, including Nichole’s father-in-law, Harvey. (Nichole is Wendy’s editor at St. Martin’s Press.) It turned out that he had been to the NYC parties back in those days when Bob Dylan had also attended. Conversation at the table took us both back to respective youth and shared cultural signposts. I was able to reminisce about attending Dylan’s 1966 Edinburgh concert, just 2 days before the famous ‘Judas’ accusation in Manchester.

A very happy and poignant experience for Harvey and Jack, a couple of old folkies tripping down the musical lane of memories!

(The photo on the right is of me at the corner of Bleeker and McDougal Streets, with Wendy’s agent Pamela at left, thoughtfully keeping Wendy from being killed as she steps into the street to photograph me!)