1.
Eric Frank Russell
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Eric Frank Russell was a British author best known for his science fiction novels and short stories. Much of his work was first published in the United States, in John W. Campbells Astounding Science Fiction, Russell also wrote horror fiction for Weird Tales and non-fiction articles on Fortean topics. To 1955 several of his stories were published under pseudonyms, at least Duncan H. Munro, Russell was born in 1905 near Sandhurst in Berkshire, where his father was an instructor at the Royal Military College. Russell became a fan of science fiction and in 1934, while living near Liverpool, he saw a letter in Amazing Stories from Leslie J. Johnson, Russell met up with Johnson, who encouraged him to embark on a writing career. Together, the two men wrote a novella, Seeker of Tomorrow, that was published by F. Orlin Tremaine in the July 1937 number of Astounding Stories, both Russell and Johnson became members of the British Interplanetary Society. Russells first novel was Sinister Barrier, cover story for the inaugural and it is explicitly a Fortean tale, based on Charles Forts famous speculation I think were property, Russell explains in the foreword. An often-repeated legend has it that Campbell, on receiving the manuscript for Sinister Barrier, There is no real evidence for it, despite a statement to that effect in the first volume of Isaac Asimovs autobiography, In Memory Yet Green. His second novel, Dreadful Sanctuary is an example of conspiracy fiction, in which a paranoid delusion of global proportions is perpetuated by a small. There are two different and mutually incompatible accounts of Russells military service during World War II, the official, well-documented version is that he served with the Royal Air Force, with whom he saw active service in Europe as a member of a Mobile Signals Unit. Russell took up writing full-time in the late 1940s and he became an active member of British science fiction fandom and the British representative of the Fortean Society. He won the first annual Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1955 recognizing his humorous Allamagoosa as the years best science fiction. The 1962 novel The Great Explosion won a Prometheus Hall of Fame Award in 1985 — the third naming of two works to the science fiction hall of fame. The 1957 novel Wasp has been a finalist for the honor, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted Russell in 2000, its fifth class of two deceased and two living writers. Into Your Tent, a thorough and detailed biography of Russell by John L. Ingham, was published in 2010 by Plantech. Russell also wrote a number of shorter works, many of which have been reprinted in collections such as Deep Space, Six Worlds Yonder, Far Stars, Dark Tides. His short story Allamagoosa, which was essentially a retelling of a traditional tall story called The Shovewood. Russell wrote numerous essays on Fortean themes, some of which were collected in a compendium of Forteana entitled Great World Mysteries. His second non-fiction book was The Rabble Rousers, a look at human folly including the Dreyfus affair
2.
Dodd, Mead and Company
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Dodd, Mead and Company was one of the pioneer publishing houses of the United States, based in New York City. Under several names, the firm operated from 1839 until 1990, in 1839, Moses Woodruff Dodd and John S. Taylor, at that time a leading publisher in New York, formed the company of Taylor and Dodd as a publisher of religious books. In 1840 Dodd bought out Taylor and renamed the company as M. W, Frank Howard Dodd joined his father in business in 1859 and became increasingly involved in the publishing companys operation. In 1876, Bleecker Van Wagenen became a member of the firm, as head of Dodd, Mead and Company, Frank Dodd established The Bookman in 1895, and The New International Encyclopedia in 1902. He was president of the American Publishers Association for a number of years, the firm built the Dodd Mead Building at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Thirtieth Street, and the 11-story building was heralded as creating a new trade center in New York City. Dodd, Mead and Company published the work of new poets including Robert W. Service, Bliss Carman, when Frank Dodd died in 1916, the partnership was dissolved and the business was incorporated. Dodds only son, Edward H. Dodd, succeeded him as president, other authors included Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beerbohm, Rupert Brooke, G. K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie, Theodore Dreiser, and Stephen Leacock. In 1924 Dodd purchased Moffat, Yard & Co. adding books by William James, Sigmund Freud, Dodd, Meads New International Encyclopedia was sold in 1931 to Funk & Wagnalls. Dodd, Mead acquired the works of George Bernard Shaw. In December 1981, Dodd, Mead and Company became a subsidiary of Thomas Nelson Inc, one of the last family-owned publishers in the United States, it was purchased for $4 million. The company was again in 1986, for $4.7 million. To retire some of its debt, the 149-year-old publishing house sold its greatest assets — the U. S. rights to books by Agatha Christie and Max Brand — to the Putnam Berkley Group in 1988. The business operations of Dodd, Mead and Company were suspended in March 1989 pending the outcome of arbitration with its fulfillment house, Metro Services, by the end of 1990 the company ceased publications. Authors names are followed by their dates of association with Dodd, Mead. Edward Abbey Caroline French Benton Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr Don Blanding Max Brand Anna Alice Chapin Agatha Christie Winston Churchill Paul Laurence Dunbar Norman A. 1855–1992, Finding Aid, Lilly Library, Indiana University Dodd, Mead & Company Archive 1896–1974 Finding Aid, University of Delaware Library Special Collections
3.
Hardcover
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A hardcover or hardback book is one bound with rigid protective covers. It has a flexible, sewn spine which allows the book to lie flat on a surface when opened, following the ISBN sequence numbers, books of this type may be identified by the abbreviation Hbk. Hardcover books are printed on acid-free paper, and are much more durable than paperbacks. Hardcover books are more costly to manufacture. If brisk sales are anticipated, an edition of a book is typically released first. Some publishers publish paperback originals if slow hardback sales are anticipated, for very popular books these sales cycles may be extended, and followed by a mass market paperback edition typeset in a more compact size and printed on shallower, less hardy paper. In the past the release of an edition was one year after the hardback. It is very unusual for a book that was first published in paperback to be followed by a hardback, an example is the novel The Judgment of Paris by Gore Vidal, which had its revised edition of 1961 first published in paperback, and later in hardcover. Hardcover books are sold at higher prices than comparable paperbacks. Hardcovers typically consist of a block, two boards, and a cloth or heavy paper covering. The pages are sewn together and glued onto a flexible spine between the boards, and it too is covered by the cloth, a paper wrapper, or dust jacket, is usually put over the binding, folding over each horizontal end of the boards. On the folded part, or flap, over the front cover is generally a blurb, the back flap is where the biography of the author can be found. Reviews are often placed on the back of the jacket, bookbinding Paperback How to make a simple Hardcover book
4.
Paperback
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A paperback is a type of book characterized by a thick paper or paperboard cover, and often held together with glue rather than stitches or staples. In contrast, hardcover or hardback books are bound with cardboard covered with cloth, inexpensive books bound in paper have existed since at least the 19th century in such forms as pamphlets, yellowbacks, dime novels, and airport novels. Modern paperbacks can be differentiated by size, in the US there are mass-market paperbacks and larger, more durable trade paperbacks. In the UK, there are A-format, B-format, and the largest C-format sizes, Paperback editions of books are issued when a publisher decides to release a book in a low-cost format. Cheaper, lower quality paper, glued bindings, and the lack of a cover may contribute to the lower cost of paperbacks. Paperbacks can be the medium when a book is not expected to be a major seller or where the publisher wishes to release a book without putting forth a large investment. Examples include many novels, and newer editions or reprintings of older books, first editions of many modern books, especially genre fiction, are issued in paperback. Best-selling books, on the hand, may maintain sales in hardcover for an extended period in order to reap the greater profits that the hardcovers provide. These paper bound volumes were offered for sale at a fraction of the historic cost of a book, the Routledges Railway Library series of paperbacks remained in print until 1898, and offered the traveling public 1,277 unique titles. The German-language market also supported examples of cheap books, Bernhard Tauchnitz started the Collection of British. These inexpensive, paperbound editions, a precursor to mass-market paperbacks. Reclam published Shakespeare in this format from October 1857 and went on to pioneer the mass-market paper-bound Universal-Bibliothek series from 10 November 1867, the German publisher Albatross Books revised the 20th-century mass-market paperback format in 1931, but the approach of World War II cut the experiment short. The first released book on Penguins 1935 list was André Maurois Ariel, Lane intended to produce inexpensive books. He purchased paperback rights from publishers, ordered large print runs to keep prices low. Booksellers were initially reluctant to buy his books, but when Woolworths placed a large order, after that initial success, booksellers showed more willingness to stock paperbacks, and the name Penguin became closely associated with the word paperback. In 1939, Robert de Graaf issued a similar line in the United States, the term pocket book became synonymous with paperback in English-speaking North America. In French, the term livre de poche was used and is still in use today, de Graaf, like Lane, negotiated paperback rights from other publishers, and produced many runs. His practices contrasted with those of Lane by his adoption of illustrated covers aimed at the North American market, in order to reach an even broader market than Lane, he used distribution networks of newspapers and magazines, which had a lengthy history of being aimed at mass audiences
5.
Avon (publisher)
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Avon Publications was an American paperback book and comic book publisher. As of 2010, it is an imprint of HarperCollins, publishing primarily romance novels, Avon Books was founded in 1941 by the American News Corporation to create a rival to Pocket Books. They hired brother and sister Joseph Meyers and Edna Meyers Williams to establish the company, ogilvie Publications, a dime novel publisher partly owned by both the Meyers, and renamed it Avon Publications. They also got into comic books, the early Avons were somewhat similar in appearance to the existing paperbacks of Pocket Books, resulting in an immediate and largely ineffective lawsuit by that company. Despite this superficial similarity, though, from early on Meyers differentiated Avon by placing an emphasis on popular appeal rather than loftier concepts of literary merit, the first 40 titles were not numbered. First editions of the first dozen or so have front and rear endpapers with an illustration of a globe, as well as normal-sized paperbacks, Avon published digest-format paperbacks in series. These included Murder Mystery Monthly, Modern Short Story Monthly and Avon Fantasy Readers, many authors highly prized by present-day collectors were published in these editions, including A. Merritt, James M. Cain, H. P. Lovecraft, Raymond Chandler and Robert E. Howard. In 1953, Avon Books sold books in the range of 25¢ to 50¢ and were selling more than 20 million copies a year. Their books were characterized by Time Magazine as westerns, whodunits, at around this time, Avon also began to publish under other imprints, including Eton, Novel Library, Broadway and Diversey. Avons 35-cent T series, introduced in 1953, also had strong mass-market appeal, the T series also contained many movie tie-in editions and the stand-bys of mysteries and science fiction. Avon was bought by the Hearst Corporation in 1959, in 1972, Avon entered the modern romance genre with the publication of Kathleen Woodiwiss The Flame and the Flower. The novel went on to sell 2.35 million copies, Avon followed its release with the 1974 publication of Woodiwisss second novel, The Wolf and the Dove and two sexy novels by newcomer Rosemary Rogers, Sweet Savage Love and Dark Fires. The latter sold two million copies in its first three months of release, in 1999, the News Corporation bought out Hearsts book division. Avons hardcover and non-romance paperback lines were moved to sister company Morrow, from at least 1945 through the mid-1950s, Avon published comic books. Its titles included horror fiction, science fiction, Westerns, romance comics, war comics, most titles lasted only a few issues, with the six longest-running detailed in the complete list below, Official website
6.
OCLC
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The Online Computer Library Center is a US-based nonprofit cooperative organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the worlds information and reducing information costs. It was founded in 1967 as the Ohio College Library Center, OCLC and its member libraries cooperatively produce and maintain WorldCat, the largest online public access catalog in the world. OCLC is funded mainly by the fees that libraries have to pay for its services, the group first met on July 5,1967 on the campus of the Ohio State University to sign the articles of incorporation for the nonprofit organization. The group hired Frederick G. Kilgour, a former Yale University medical school librarian, Kilgour wished to merge the latest information storage and retrieval system of the time, the computer, with the oldest, the library. The goal of network and database was to bring libraries together to cooperatively keep track of the worlds information in order to best serve researchers and scholars. The first library to do online cataloging through OCLC was the Alden Library at Ohio University on August 26,1971 and this was the first occurrence of online cataloging by any library worldwide. Membership in OCLC is based on use of services and contribution of data, between 1967 and 1977, OCLC membership was limited to institutions in Ohio, but in 1978, a new governance structure was established that allowed institutions from other states to join. In 2002, the structure was again modified to accommodate participation from outside the United States. As OCLC expanded services in the United States outside of Ohio, it relied on establishing strategic partnerships with networks, organizations that provided training, support, by 2008, there were 15 independent United States regional service providers. OCLC networks played a key role in OCLC governance, with networks electing delegates to serve on OCLC Members Council, in early 2009, OCLC negotiated new contracts with the former networks and opened a centralized support center. OCLC provides bibliographic, abstract and full-text information to anyone, OCLC and its member libraries cooperatively produce and maintain WorldCat—the OCLC Online Union Catalog, the largest online public access catalog in the world. WorldCat has holding records from public and private libraries worldwide. org, in October 2005, the OCLC technical staff began a wiki project, WikiD, allowing readers to add commentary and structured-field information associated with any WorldCat record. The Online Computer Library Center acquired the trademark and copyrights associated with the Dewey Decimal Classification System when it bought Forest Press in 1988, a browser for books with their Dewey Decimal Classifications was available until July 2013, it was replaced by the Classify Service. S. The reference management service QuestionPoint provides libraries with tools to communicate with users and this around-the-clock reference service is provided by a cooperative of participating global libraries. OCLC has produced cards for members since 1971 with its shared online catalog. OCLC commercially sells software, e. g. CONTENTdm for managing digital collections, OCLC has been conducting research for the library community for more than 30 years. In accordance with its mission, OCLC makes its research outcomes known through various publications and these publications, including journal articles, reports, newsletters, and presentations, are available through the organizations website. The most recent publications are displayed first, and all archived resources, membership Reports – A number of significant reports on topics ranging from virtual reference in libraries to perceptions about library funding
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Science fiction
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Science fiction often explores the potential consequences of scientific and other innovations, and has been called a literature of ideas. Science fiction is difficult to define, as it includes a range of subgenres and themes. Author and editor Damon Knight summed up the difficulty, saying science fiction is what we point to when we say it, a definition echoed by author Mark C. Glassy, who argues that the definition of science fiction is like the definition of pornography, you do not know what it is, in 1970 or 1971William Atheling Jr. According to science fiction writer Robert A, rod Serlings definition is fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science fiction is the improbable made possible, Science fiction is largely based on writing rationally about alternative possible worlds or futures. Science fiction elements include, A time setting in the future, in alternative timelines, a spatial setting or scenes in outer space, on other worlds, or on subterranean earth. Characters that include aliens, mutants, androids, or humanoid robots, futuristic or plausible technology such as ray guns, teleportation machines, and humanoid computers. Scientific principles that are new or that contradict accepted physical laws, for time travel, wormholes. New and different political or social systems, e. g. utopian, dystopian, post-scarcity, paranormal abilities such as mind control, telepathy, telekinesis Other universes or dimensions and travel between them. A product of the budding Age of Reason and the development of science itself. Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan considered Keplers work the first science fiction story and it depicts a journey to the Moon and how the Earths motion is seen from there. Later, Edgar Allan Poe wrote a story about a flight to the moon, more examples appeared throughout the 19th century. Wells The War of the Worlds describes an invasion of late Victorian England by Martians using tripod fighting machines equipped with advanced weaponry and it is a seminal depiction of an alien invasion of Earth. In the late 19th century, the scientific romance was used in Britain to describe much of this fiction. This produced additional offshoots, such as the 1884 novella Flatland, the term would continue to be used into the early 20th century for writers such as Olaf Stapledon. In the early 20th century, pulp magazines helped develop a new generation of mainly American SF writers, influenced by Hugo Gernsback, the founder of Amazing Stories magazine. In 1912 Edgar Rice Burroughs published A Princess of Mars, the first of his series of Barsoom novels, situated on Mars
8.
Novel
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A novel is any relatively long piece of written narrative fiction, normally in prose, and typically published as a book. The genre has also described as possessing, a continuous. This view sees the novels origins in Classical Greece and Rome, medieval, early modern romance, the latter, an Italian word used to describe short stories, supplied the present generic English term in the 18th century. The romance is a closely related long prose narrative, Romance, as defined here, should not be confused with the genre fiction love romance or romance novel. Other European languages do not distinguish between romance and novel, a novel is le roman, der Roman, il romanzo, a novel is a long, fictional narrative which describes intimate human experiences. Most European languages use the word romance for extended narratives, fictionality is most commonly cited as distinguishing novels from historiography. However this can be a problematic criterion, historians would also invent and compose speeches for didactic purposes. Novels can, on the hand, depict the social, political and personal realities of a place and period with clarity. Even in the 19th century, fictional narratives in verse, such as Lord Byrons Don Juan, Alexander Pushkins Yevgeniy Onegin, vikram Seths The Golden Gate, composed of 590 Onegin stanzas, is a more recent example of the verse novel. Both in 12th-century Japan and 15th-century Europe, prose fiction created intimate reading situations, on the other hand, verse epics, including the Odyssey and Aeneid, had been recited to a select audiences, though this was a more intimate experience than the performance of plays in theaters. A new world of Individualistic fashion, personal views, intimate feelings, secret anxieties, conduct and gallantry spread with novels, the novel is today the longest genre of narrative prose fiction, followed by the novella, short story, and flash fiction. However, in the 17th century critics saw the romance as of epic length, the length of a novel can still be important because most literary awards use length as a criterion in the ranking system. Urbanization and the spread of printed books in Song Dynasty China led to the evolution of oral storytelling into consciously fictional novels by the Ming dynasty, parallel European developments did not occur for centuries, and awaited the time when the availability of paper allowed for similar opportunities. By contrast, Ibn Tufails Hayy ibn Yaqdhan and Ibn al-Nafis Theologus Autodidactus are works of didactic philosophy, in this sense, Hayy ibn Yaqdhan would be considered an early example of a philosophical novel, while Theologus Autodidactus would be considered an early theological novel. Epic poetry exhibits some similarities with the novel, and the Western tradition of the novel back into the field of verse epics. Then at the beginning of the 18th century, French prose translations brought Homers works to a wider public, longus is the author of the famous Greek novel, Daphnis and Chloe. Romance or chivalric romance is a type of narrative in prose or verse popular in the circles of High Medieval. In later romances, particularly those of French origin, there is a tendency to emphasize themes of courtly love
9.
Faster-than-light
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Faster-than-light communication and travel refer to the propagation of information or matter faster than the speed of light. The special theory of relativity implies that only particles with zero rest mass may travel at the speed of light, although according to current theories matter is still required to travel subluminally with respect to the locally distorted spacetime region, apparent FTL is not excluded by general relativity. Examples of apparent FTL proposals are the Alcubierre drive and the traversable wormhole and this is not quite the same as traveling faster than light, since, Some processes propagate faster than c, but cannot carry information. Neither of these phenomena violates special relativity or creates problems with causality, in the following examples, certain influences may appear to travel faster than light, but they do not convey energy or information faster than light, so they do not violate special relativity. For an Earthbound observer, objects in the sky complete one revolution around the Earth in 1 day, Proxima Centauri, which is the nearest star outside the solar system, is about 4 light-years away. On a geostationary view, Proxima Centauri has a speed many times greater than c as the rim speed of an object moving in a circle is a product of the radius and angular speed. It is also possible on a view for objects such as comets to vary their speed from subluminal to superluminal. Comets may have orbits which take out to more than 1000 AU. The circumference of a circle with a radius of 1000 AU is greater than one light day, in other words, a comet at such a distance is superluminal in a geostatic, and therefore non-inertial, frame. If a laser beam is swept across a distant object, the spot of light can easily be made to move across the object at a speed greater than c. Similarly, a shadow projected onto a distant object can be made to move across the object faster than c, in neither case does the light travel from the source to the object faster than c, nor does any information travel faster than light. However, uniform motion of the source may be removed with a change in reference frame, causing the direction of the static field to change immediately. This is not a change of position which propagates, and thus this change cannot be used to transmit information from the source, no information or matter can be FTL-transmitted or propagated from source to receiver/observer by an electromagnetic field. The rate at which two objects in motion in a frame of reference get closer together is called the mutual or closing speed. This may approach twice the speed of light, as in the case of two particles travelling at close to the speed of light in opposite directions with respect to the reference frame. Imagine two fast-moving particles approaching each other from opposite sides of an accelerator of the collider type. The closing speed would be the rate at which the distance between the two particles is decreasing, from the point of view of an observer standing at rest relative to the accelerator, this rate will be slightly less than twice the speed of light. Special relativity does not prohibit this and it tells us that it is wrong to use Galilean relativity to compute the velocity of one of the particles, as would be measured by an observer traveling alongside the other particle
