From Blog to Book
Lucy Inglis, the author of the blog Georgian London, has just announced that she has a book deal with Penguin. The book Georgian London is due out in hardback in the spring of 2012. It’s another example of how digital publishing formats are shaping the larger publishing industry, and I think it’s a safe bet that lots of customers will be reading Inglis’s book in an electronic format rather than the promised hardback.
There have been plenty of examples of blogs that have led to deals in media formats with larger circulation numbers. Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia began as a blog in 2002, became a book in 2005, and finally a film in 2009. Scott Schuman began writing The Sartorialist in 2005. By the time the book appeared in 2009 (also, incidentally, from Penguin), Schuman had already made his career well beyond the immediate domain of the blog, though in many ways it still anchors his professional presence/persona.
What’s interesting in Inglis’s case, however, is that we’re now seeing the same pattern play out in terms of the field of history (as opposed to food or style genres). Georgian London will clearly be a trade publication, but it promises to be a smart book, too. A friend of mine who works in media studies and disability studies approached an agent not long ago with a proposal for a trade volume. What was the agent’s first question? Not do you have a blog? but how many readers follow your blog?
Enfilade is, of course, published under the auspices of HECAA as a newsletter for the organization, functioning largely as an aggregator for news related to eighteenth-century art and architectural history. Still, the larger digital domain raises the question of what ‘intellectual content’ might consist of within the medium of the blog. Inglis’s Georgian London might provide one glimpse at an answer. At least the editors at Penguin seems to think so.
Conference on Salvator Rosa in Eighteenth-Century Britain
From The Paul Mellon Centre:
Salvator Rosa in Britain
A Conference at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, 18 October 2010
This conference, organized by Dr Helen Langdon, accompanies the exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery, Salvator Rosa (1615-1673): Bandits, Wilderness and Magic (15 September–28 November 2010) which concentrates on the quality and variety of Rosa’s works – savage landscapes, fanciful portraits of romantic figures, intriguing philosopher-paintings, witches and dragons. The conference explores the impact of this many-sided art on British painting, literature and art theory.
9:30 Registration
Morning Session introduced and chaired by Claire Pace (Honorary Research Fellow, University of Glasgow); Wendy Wassyng Roworth (Professor of Art History, University of Rhode Island), ‘The Legacy of Genius: Salvator Rosa, Joshua Reynolds and Painting in Britain’; Elinor Shaffer (Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London), ‘The Lives of Artists: William Beckford and Salvator Rosa’.
Visit to the exhibition, Salvator Rosa (1615-1673): Bandits, Wilderness and Magic, led by Helen Langdon and Xavier F. Salomon, Arturo and Holly Melosi Chief Curator at Dulwich Picture Gallery.
Afternoon Session I introduced and chaired by Susan Jenkins (Senior Curator, English Heritage); Cinzia Maria Sicca (Associate Professor of the History of European Art, University of Pisa), ‘“One of the most excellent Masters that Italy has produced in this century”: The circulation of Salvator Rosa’s works through the English community in Leghorn’; Alexis Ashot, Associate Specialist, Old Master and British Pictures, Christie’s, ‘“Unbounded capacity”: a 1778 vita of Salvator Rosa by the London connoisseur, Charles Rogers’.
Afternoon Session II introduced and chaired by Christoph Vogtherr (Curator of Pictures, pre-1800, The Wallace Collection); Jonathan Yarker (PhD candidate, University of Cambridge), ‘Joseph Goupy and the imitation of Rosa in early eighteenth-century England’; Helen Langdon (curator of the exhibition), ‘Belisarius in Norfolk’.
17.00 Panel and audience discussion chaired by Claire Pace, followed by wine reception.
Full conference fee, including coffee, lunch, tea, private view of the exhibition, and wine reception: £40. Student and Senior concessions £20. To register for the conference please check availability with Ella Fleming at The Paul Mellon Centre: Email: events@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk, Tel: 020 7580 0311, Fax: 020 7636 6730.
Enfilade 
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