We don’t know enough, and we never will
One of the reasons Shakespeare looms so large is in fact all that speculation. One of the messages of the book — the myths — is that we simply don’t know enough; there’s not enough evidence for us to interpret. Shakespeare is more unknowable than some of his contemporaries, and yet this uncertainty is also central to the way his works have endured. “In a philosophical sense,” says Smith, “the idea that Shakespeare’s works can’t so easily be pinned down to particular events or historical moments has enabled the plays to be reinterpreted widely across time and place.” This notion is discussed in the book in myth 22 (“The Plays Are Timeless”), which argues that the plays are about common human emotion—in the sense that, for instance, Hamlet is not only a prince, but also a young student grappling with the loss of his father. “That’s what the plays deal with,” says Smith. “How they might work can be reinvented because of that emotional quality,” or what academics call “interiority.”
     In the almost 400 years that have gone by since Shakespeare’s death in 1616, it seems that at different times we’ve filled in the gaps of what we don’t know about him with different things, often in our desire to make Shakespeare the kind of figure we want him to be. “We’ve thought of him sometimes as a conservative figure and at others as a radical figure,” says Smith. “The idea that Shakespeare wrote his history plays for the Tudor authorities was very current in the earlier part of the 20th century; it was part of a particular way of interpreting the evidence because we wanted Shakespeare to be a kind of mouthpiece for that authority—a kind of poet laureate–like figure who spoke for the establishment or the established order. In more recent criticism, the great artist doesn’t look like that to us now. We’ve looked at the oppositional artists of the 1960s; we’ve seen visual artists and their unconventional minds—so we’ve remodeled what great artists look like. They’re unconventional or unorthodox in their private life and at odds with the general social norms of their period. So we made changes to that way of thinking, and one of the ways we’ve done it, for instance, is wondering if Shakespeare might have been Catholic.” This particular preoccupation is less about religion per se and more about an interest in such issues as political opposition and freedom of conscience. “It’s become important for us now partly because of what we think artistic genius looks like,” says Smith. “This notion that the artist/genius should be more oppositional, not in the service of the authorities.”

Speeches vs. speakers
In their discussion of two of the myths—24 (“Shakespeare Did Not Revise His Plays” and 29 (“Shakespeare’s Characters are Like Real People”)—the authors dismantle both these ideas, showing how Shakespeare sometimes wrote a speech first and applied it to a character second. “One of the narratives about how Shakespeare develops as a writer,” says Smith, “comes from the idea that he started to invest more in individualized language for particular characters around the middle of his career and from then on—but in the earlier plays, such as Romeo and Juliet (1597), if you didn’t know who was speaking you couldn’t work it out from the way they spoke, because everyone speaks in the same way.” Conversely, the argument goes, if you don’t know who’s speaking in the later plays, it’s easier to work out because the different characters speak differently, although “I don’t know that this is always true,“ says Smith.
     “I don’t have a startling theory in my Macbeth book,” Smith continues, “but what I’ve tried to do there is to make people who are reading it feel confident that they can read it. In one chapter I go through one of Macbeth’s speeches, talking about how it works and how we might appreciate it. Then I quote the Spark notes No Fear Shakespeare, which has a paraphrase of the speech. I try to point out that actually readers don’t need this, because it paraphrases the things that are least interesting about the speech. What I’m saying is, trust Shakespeare. Nobody ever understood every word of Shakespeare. Nobody ever talked like that (a subject discussed in myth 11). They never did. What he wrote was always poetry, or even a kind of music.”
     Connected to this is one of the reasons that studying Shakespeare as poetry is so rewarding; the fact that characters often echo metaphors or themes that have previously been set up by other characters, even though realistically there’s no possibility that they could have known what was said, as they weren’t physically present in those scenes. A good example of this is from Macbeth (Smith’s new book, Macbeth: Language & Writing, will be published this summer), a play in which clothing is always taken to be one of the great metaphors running through it. “It seems to be something in the water system of the play,” says Smith. “Why do you dress me in borrowed robes?” Macbeth asks Ross when the latter tells him that Duncan has made him Thane of Cawdor, right at the beginning of the play. “Now does he feel his title hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe upon a dwarfish thief,” Banquo later says of Macbeth, suggesting that he isn’t adequate to the role of king, as if his clothes don’t fit him properly. Yet while all these characters the play use these clothing images, as Smith points out, “that doesn’t really tell us anything about them as characters or individual people, although it adds to the poetry and the language of the play as a whole.”
     It would be pretty much unthinkable for a playwright to do this nowadays, but, as Smith says, “it’s become one of the things we value about Shakespeare. Certainly at school we write essays about the united imagery across a play, the way things keep recurring. We’ve come to value it as a literary device, but if we had a play now where everybody sounded the same we wouldn’t be happy with it at all.”

Getting the tone right
Maguire and Smith both set out to write a book for a general readership, not just students of Shakespeare, although Smith acknowledges that it’s “more meaningful if readers already have some ideas about Shakespeare collected from the theatre or school study.” The book wears its scholarship lightly, and the tone is relaxed: in the chapter on myth 11 (“Shakespeare Wrote in the Rhythms of Everyday Speech”), they give as a modern example of iambic pentameter scansion an order at Starbucks: “A skinny cappuccino, please, to go”; while in myth 14 (“Shakespeare Was a Stratford Playwright”), they cite the “product placement” in Twelfth Night, when Antonio recommends a lodge.
     Each chapter, or myth, is relatively short, about 2,000 words. “That’s the average length of a weekly Oxford essay,” says Smith, “and it was good discipline for us.” There are numerous references throughout the book to aspects of various contemporary productions for “proof of principle,” yet for all their accessibility the authors nimbly avoid dumbed-down “myth-busting.” Smith was particularly anxious about the tone. Early in the process a complete draft was sent out by the publishers to be read —“it’s a sort of customary, anonymous peer review”—and the report that came back said the tone was patronizing. Rather than go back to the drawing board, Smith and Maguire sat on the book for three months and then sent out a couple of chapters to a few non-academic readers, without a professional take on Shakespeare, who they felt were the target audience, asking if they felt the book talked down to them. “The response was overwhelmingly positive,” says Smith, “so we were able to tell the publisher we wanted to keep it pretty much exactly as it was, and we did.”

A never-ending story
In their coda to 30 Great Myths About Shakespeare, Maguire and Smith write about how academics should to spend time in the theatre as well as the library. Many productions have given them new insights into Shakespeare in both big and small ways. “Sometimes going to the theatre is a really good way to look at a play you’ve never really got on well with,” says Smith. “For instance, Marianne Elliott’s 2009 production of All’s Well That Ends Well did that for me. It’s a play that nobody gets on well with; nobody has a sense of how it works, and I’d never seen a good production of it. But this production brought out the fairytale in the story in a proper Grimm’s fairytale sense—not nicey-nicey, but unreal in certain practical ways, and very real in emotional ways. It dispensed with reality in terms of plot and setting, so they were irrelevant, and it gave a different kind of sense of what reality might be, in a more archetypal way. It seemed to be a look or an aesthetic that made sense of that play in a way that I’ve actually never made sense of it before.”
    As we were finishing, I asked Smith if all Shakespeare scholars deep down really have a desire to unearth his manuscripts, or a longing to get at the truth of who Shakespeare really was. “For most of us it would be terrible, because then it would all be over,” she said. “I think we would also all be very disappointed. Shakespeare as a person, or Shakespeare’s own sense of what he was doing, might seem very reductive to us.”
—LUCY SISMAN

You can listen to a podcast of Emma Smith’s lectures on Shakespeare here.

Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith, 30 Great Myths about Shakespeare
(US; UK)

2 crown (n.)
The crown is the part of the hat above the ears; the part that protrudes is the brim. The area where crown meets brim is called the flange. If you live in the city, you have to scale down—but at the beach, it’s a big brim!

3 tipper (n.)
In hat styles, such as the fedora, that have a crease at the top, the indentation is known as the tipper, as is the part of the block from which the hat is made. I love a fedora—for me a fedora on a woman is the sexiest thing.

4 felt (n.)
Felt is both one of the materials hats are made of (I use one-sided velour felt, which is spectacular, and less expensive than two-sided) and the basic, unblocked form it comes in—either a flare or a hood, though in the old days hatmakers worked from a flat piece. A hood looks like a bucket, and a flare looks like the floppy JLo-type brimmed hat. First you steam a felt; then you pull it onto the block.

5 rope (n./v.)
Once you’ve pulled your steamed felt onto the block, you rope the crown and the brim edge. The rope is more like a nylon cord with a core; it’s white, doesn’t take color and has to be very strong. Many of us have cracked our ribs when blocking—you have to hold the block to your body and pull the rope tight. They say felt has a memory, so wherever it dries it will stay that shape (roping straw, however, is a slightly different process, since straw, not surprisingly, has a slightly different dynamic).

6 rounding (v.)
This is the process of cutting the excess felt away when you determine the size of a brim. My edges are always pinked—I cut them with zigzag-blade pinking shears.

7 welt (n.)
The welt is the rounded edge of the brim, which is sewn down and sometimes covered with grosgrain ribbon (see below). The ribbon along the edge of bowler hats is called an English welt. I often edge my hats with a pick stitch (an overstitch like a blanket stitch).

8 grosgrain or petersham ribbon (n.)
This style of ribbon looks as if it’s ridged. Unlike an ordinary woven ribbon, it’s made from a continuous looped edge, which allows you to steam (or swirl) the ribbon in a curve or arc so it will follow the curve of a hat nicely.

9 HDSZ (n.)
An abbreviation of “head size,” HDSZ designates a hat’s size, which in the U.S. is measured in inches. The standard women’s size is 22 1/2 inches; the men’s is 23 inches.

10 trim (n.)
The trim is what covers the flange area (see no. 2), and it’s the fun part, where you can add whatever you want to decorate a hat. The one I’m wearing right now is trimmed with vintage gold-backed mirror appliqués, with a vintage plaited cord.
—LINDA ASHTON

Linda Ashton used to be a movie and TV producer; after divorcing her husband (who thought she looked foolish in hats) she moved to New York City, working in rock music production and advertising. After she was laid off from her job, she began making hats and was invited by Ann Arbrizio, the grande dame of American millinery to train under her at the Fashion Institute of Technology; she has been a hatmaker ever since and is now president of the Milliners Guild, which promotes handmade hats.

It’s atmosphere and companionship, says visit-denmark.dk: “Gather the family and invite over a couple of good friends. Douse the electricity and light some candles. Serve plenty of food and drink. Look at each other until you see the candlelight shimmering in each other’s eyes. You’ve got hygge!”

LS Is it common for literary agents to specialize like this?
MM No. The reason I managed to stay in business is not because I’m brilliant—and certainly not because I’m good at selling, because I’m not; I hate it—but I’ve always managed to anticipate the next trend, to be just ahead of the curve. The same thing happened with ghostwriting. I realized that more and more books on the bestseller list were written by what we call platform authors—personalities who can bring a pre-existing audience to a book but who aren’t writers themselves, and who need somebody to write their books for them.
     And since publishing has become more and more dominated by the major corporations, it’s all about the bottom line; publishers are less interested in works of literary merit and more interested in books that are going to sell a huge amount of copies. Consequently, there’s an awful lot of crap that comes out nowadays. Publishing is getting like Hollywood and television. So when I started noticing how many books were being ghostwritten, I decided that one day I was going to stop selling books altogether. I would say farewell to the authors I was representing, and I would just hang out a shingle saying that all I was going to do was represent ghostwriters. I was going to provide a service to other agents and editors in the field.

LS And does anyone else do that?
MM No, I’m the only person who does it to the exclusion of everything else. So what I have now is a talent agency. I have hundreds of different writers to whom I have access, but I would say that at any given time I have 100 to 150 writers who I’m in touch with on a semi-regular basis. So when anybody’s looking for a writer, I always give them four to six different writers to choose from, all of whom have been published multiple times by the major houses and many of whom have put books on the bestseller list. They all specialize in particular areas: sport, politics, popular culture, health and fitness and diet. Whatever you see on the bestseller list is what I do.

LS Is there a profile of a ghostwriter?
MM They fall into three rubrics: former magazine writers; former book editors who couldn’t stand the corporate life any longer, or who were laid off; and what we used to call in the old days mid-list writers—that is, writers who wrote perfectly nice books and got advances of $5,000 to $15,000. But those books can’t be sold any longer, because they don’t have a platform. So they started writing for other people.

LS How do you match a ghostwriter to a subject?
MM As I said I match writers according to what they’ve written. More and more, everything is becoming specialized, more finely defined—so you might have someone who specializes in business memoirs, and someone else who does business how-to books.

LS Does that mean you can only write a book about something you’ve done before?
MM Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t. It happens because there are so many writers out there, and because agents and editors mainly take the tack that if you’ve done it before in this field, you can do it again. If you haven’t done it before, you’re an unknown quantity; but also, if, for instance, you’re doing a health-related book, a health writer already knows a lot of stuff about the subject, so you’re not starting from scratch. A memoirist really knows how to capture someone’s voice, how to create a narrative, how to ask the right questions, that sort of stuff. Someone who writes on politics, maybe they graduated in political science, so they understand the area to some extent.
     This weekend, for instance, a woman came to me. She’s a professor of education with a very interesting background, and she wanted to do a memoir. She’d found someone on the internet to write the book for her. The writer who’d done the job was actually someone who’d come to me years ago. She writes decorating books. Now she was supposed to write a memoir—and it was a total and utter disaster, because that’s not her field. So the education professor has already laid out $15,000 for stuff that’s good for firewood. She’ll never get that back, so now she’ll have to start over from scratch.

LS So how do you find writers?
MM Nowadays, almost everybody finds me. I really have become writer central, as it were, because I’ve done this for so long and I’m the only person doing it. You see, I’ve created a different business model. Agenting is primarily a monogamous business—every writer has one agent—but because a lot of ghostwriters come from the industry and know people in publishing already, many of them don’t bother to have an agent, or they have loose arrangements with their agents. So I don’t represent anyone exclusively. They’re free to go off and do something else. I don’t go to bed at night with a stomach ache thinking, “Oh, God, I’ve got to find so-and-so a job or I’m going to lose another client.” And I can legitimately recommend six different writers and let them compete against each other, so it’s a win-win situation all round. The writers get increased exposure; they may not get one particular job, but then somebody will come back and say, I remember that writer, or I was interested in them, or what have you. I’ve become increasingly fussy about who I take on—writers who have been published many times by the big guys. I’m sure wannabe writers are great, terrific, but I don’t need it. There’s no money in it, and a small book is just as much work as a big one.

LS So how does the relationship work? Someone’s agent calls you.
MM Initially, I find out if the person cares whether it’s a man or a woman, or if they have to be located anywhere in particular. Once we get those basic parameters out of the way, I send a selection of half a dozen writers who specialize in whatever field is involved. In the email I would normally include a thumbnail description of each writer and their major achievements along with a detailed CV. The agent or editor comes back to me and says they’re interested in X, Y or Z, asking to set up a phoner or meet with them. Very occasionally, someone is asked to produce a little bit of sample manuscript.
     A lot of it comes down to chemistry. Ghostwriting a book is a bit like a marriage. It’s a very close, intimate relationship. Ghostwriting isn’t a secret, it’s just shorthand for co-author, book doctoring, editing—something where you’re helping someone else write a book.

LS But don’t some people want to pull off the impression they wrote it themselves?
MM Oh, yes, lots of people. I don’t know if you read Julia Moskin’s hilarious New York Times piece, “Confessions of a Cookbook Ghostwriter.” God, it had everybody up in arms, telling all these secrets. She said Gwyneth Paltrow had a ghostwriter, and immediately Gwyneth was twittering all over the world about how “I didn’t have a ghostwriter, I may have had somebody look at my editing.” Rubbish. Of course they all have ghostwriters.

LS So part of the deal might be that I don’t want it disclosed then I didn’t write it?
MM Yes—confidentiality clauses. But I always try to put it in a writer’s contract that they can include the book on their publishing CV. A lot of people don’t mind, they’re happy to share the cover credit. I always insist on a generous acknowledement so that at least they get their names mentioned somewhere. But a lot of ghostwriters couldn’t care less whether they have their name on a book or not, for them it’s just a job. Sometimes they don’t want their name on it at all, if it’s a book they may be embarrassed about. And from my point of view it’s a good bargaining chip: Okay, my writer will take his or name off the book, but it’s going to cost more.

LS And who owns the copyright?
MM The author. They always work for hire. All these agreements and all these relationships are work for hire. It’s the author’s story. They signed the publisher’s contract. Ghostwriters don’t sign the publisher’s contract; they have a side agreement with the author. I always try to ensure that the writer will have access to the publisher and editor. You’d be amazed at how many people try to limit that, which is ridiculous.

LS Is there a proposal before the book is written?
MM If an agent comes to me, they always require a proposal and a sample chapter. The author pays for that. Once that’s been approved by all parties, the author’s agent will shop the book. If an editor comes to me, it’s just about writing the manuscript.

LS So when the book is finished, and it goes for copy editing—and there’s normally a lot of back and forth—it doesn’t then go to the author, it goes straight to the writer, for questions and so forth?
MM Exactly. There are famous instances of people not having read their own books, and basically admitting as much on television.

LS Have you ever had to coax people into ghostwriting?
MM No. Because ghostwriting takes a certain type of individual. You have to have basically no ego. You have to be able to put up with people who have extreme egos, or are extremely lazy, or basically regard you as being a glorified secretary, an amanuensis. Other authors are terrific, they pitch in, they help you as much as possible, but you’re also dealing with somebody who doesn’t really understand what publishing is about, so they’re a little insecure in that regard. So it’s very much up to the writer to help guide the process and focus the book. Authors may have one idea that’s completely wrong, and they have to be gently steered towards another idea. A lot of them are very paranoid; they don’t want to give away anything. And, you know, there’s no book if they don’t want to give anything away.

LS And what happens if it all goes wrong?
MM That happens periodically. I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t. If it all goes wrong, I’m often brought in to rewrite manuscripts that have gone wrong. Well, not me—one of my writers. There have been incidents when one of my writers has screwed up, for one reason or another. And if it goes wrong, then traditionally the writer keeps what they’ve already been paid, and hopefully there’s still enough in the pot for somebody else to pick up the pieces.

LS What’s the most unusual person you’ve ever found a ghostwriter for? Is there anybody who’s been a surprise to you?
MM Well, I can’t name them—it’s somebody well known. Egregious behavior. A celebrity author, a lot of bestsellers. His last three books were written by one of my writers. And he was one of these people who insist adamantly that the writer can have no communication whatsoever with the editor. So if the writer ever needed to communicate with the editor, it had to go through me, and there was all this subversive stuff going on. It was completely ridiculous; if the writer hadn’t had access to the editor, the books would never have been finished. So when we were negotiating the contract for the fourth book, I suddenly noticed there was a clause in the contract that said if the writer breached the confidentiality agreement, the writer could be sued for up to a million dollars—and that included speaking to the publishing editor. At which point we walked.

LS This was a writer who was asking for a ghostwriter?
MM Well, it was an author who was asking for a ghostwriter. Authors—they’re the platform people, and writers are the ghostwriters. This was a personality. I mean, unbelievable.

LS You were saying that you picked location and gender?
MM It often doesn’t matter, but I just like to know upfront so I can focus. For instance, if a book is by a woman who’s been sexually abused or raped or what have you, chances are I’m going to choose a woman writer. Some things are quite obvious.

LS You talked about the characteristics of a good ghostwriter—having no ego—but are there other things too?
MM They have to be able to work fast, because all these books are fast-tracked. Most books written by ghostwriters are tied in to some event, be it political, be it on television, be it a movie. So they have to be able to work really fast. They have to be able to put up with a fair amount of shit. Again, when it gets too bad, I have to call the personality’s agent and say, you know, you’re going to have to speak to your author, because— And, yes, they have to be available night and day, more or less. They have to sort of step into the skin of the person, who sometimes is really nice to them and really appreciates them and works with them, and other times, you know…

LS And get their voice?
MM Yes, very important. That’s paramount.

LS So nationality matters?
MM I don’t think so. I have quite a few writers here who are English, and they seem to manage to pull off American stories without any trouble. I think most Brits who live in New York are probably New Yorkers.
     I would say now that looking at the bestseller list—the hardcover list, and the advice/how-to—about 70 percent of all books that hit the bestseller list are probably ghostwritten. It’s huge. Huge. People may say “Ew, ghostwritten,” but I tell you, ghostwriting has been a godsend for most writers, because it has provided a whole other field of writing. And a lot of these writers do very well, because they’re very adept at what they do, and a lot of them can do three or four books a year. They do just fine. They don’t have much of a life, those people, but that’s how they choose to work.

LS And is it always nonfiction?
MM Mostly. There are some. Yes, for instance, Kim Kardashian did a novel recently. Star Jones did a novel recently. Snooki did a novel. But most ghostwritten fiction tanks. I don’t know why. It just doesn’t seem to work the same way as nonfiction.

LS Does this mean you’ve got to know an awful lot about pop culture?
MM No, thank God. I should, but I don’t. People call me and say, I want to do a book with so-and-so, and I say huh? And I’m googling, and saying, Oh, of course! And thinking, who the hell is this?

LS Can you name some books you’ve done?
MM Behind you is a bunch of books I’ve been involved with. I don’t know that I can talk about all of them. I can certainly talk about some of them. I got into this through doing three or four books with Dr. Phil. That was my big break. I think that’s been written about before.

LS Was it the same ghostwriter who did all of them?
MM Those three, yes. Now, Mob Daughter, by Karen Gravano with Lisa Pulitzer, that has been a huge seller. She’s the daughter of Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, you know, who ratted out John Gotti. She’s on this hideous television show, Mob Wives—have you ever seen it? It’s all these mob women from Staten Island who are endlessly fighting and screeching at each other.
     And this is another one that Lisa did, Stolen Innocence, which was a big, big bestseller. That was a case where the publisher came to us. This little girl, Elissa Wall, she was the person who was forced into marriage underage by Warren Jeffs, the crazy fundamentalist Mormon.
     The Biggest Loser, that was another big book again, written by one of my ghostwriters. That came out quite a while ago. Since I’ve been doing this I’ve put almost 20 books on the bestseller list. Just shy of 20. The 17-Day Diet, for which I provided the ghostwriter—that was the all-time bestselling diet book of last year.

LS Why, because 17 days doesn’t seem like a lot?
MM No. It was promoted on television a lot.

LS And Mike Moreno is a famous person on TV?
MM Well, he is now, yeah. But he was promoted on this show The Doctors, and by Phil McGraw.

LS So he’s a nutritionist who just…
MM He’s a doctor. There was a big piece about him in Newsweek magazine. It was actually packaged by Phil McGraw’s son, Jay McGraw, who’s become a very successful publisher in his own right. And this book, because of the television coverage, sold almost a million copies.

LS And that’s a health ghostwriter.
MM The fatter America gets, the more health books get put out. It’s quite unbelievable. I think right now, I have at least four or five health/fitness books that I’m working on. At any one time I would say I’m working on about 50 different projects, from sending out names as potential candidates, to chasing up delivery and acceptance payments.

LS Do you get involved at all, when it’s crossing your desk? You obviously read it and think, oh, wait a minute.
MM Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. It depends on the agent. If the agent wants my opinion, I’m happy to give it. If they don’t want my opinion, then, frankly, I’m delighted not to have to read a proposal. Different agents feel differently. And then in terms of monies—

LS Yes, can you say what…
MM I would say that the average fee now that my writers get to write a book is between, say, $40,000 and $70,000.

LS I had no idea. I thought you were going to say $5,000 to $10,000.
MM Oh, good God, no. If that were the case I’d be standing on the corner!

LS Amazing. Can you say what you take out?
MM A 15 percent commission, which is agency standard. And then—the money used to be more. It used to be more like $60,000 to $100,000, but, then, you know, publishing came back big-time. And then in terms of royalties, that’s negotiable—I would say more books don’t pay royalties to the ghosts than do, but as most books don’t earn out anyway, I think most of the writers I’m interested in take the money and run.

LS Who sets the word count?
MM The publisher. It’s to do with the size of the book. A bigger book doesn’t necessarily mean a better book.

LS What about things like pictures and captions?
MM The ghostwriter is responsible for captions, but not for getting the pictures. And expenses like transcription get paid too.

LS And what about the title?
MM Sometimes the authority has a title; sometimes the title comes to the writer and the author while they’re writing the book; sometimes the editor comes up with it.

LS Are there particular publishers that you like to work with?
MM There are only six publishers out there anyway, and I’ve worked with them all on one level or another. They all have a lot of different imprints within the company, of course.

LS And do you have much interaction with publishers?
MM I mostly deal with the agents. A much smaller percentage of books I do come through the publishers. In most cases publishers buy their books from the agents. Agents will always try to keep something in-house if they can. I don’t think that’s necessarily a good thing, because if you’re representing both parties and they have a falling out, then you as the agent have to try to be Solomonic in resolving the situation, and who do you hang out to dry, as it were? Is it the writer—who is maybe a terrific writer you’ve used a lot—because you don’t want to lose your author if there’s some really big-name author whose book is going to make you a ton of money. So I think it makes much more sense to use someone like myself, because I only commission what I get from my writers. The commissioning agent still gets his or her money off the top. So that obviates that possible conflict of interests. And now I’m getting into the whole self-publishing thing. I’ve started an adjunct business called Venture Press.

LS How does that work? Is it nothing to do with ghostwriting?
MM Well, it is. I have a partner, Amy Edelman, who has a website, indiereader.com, and she knows all about independent publishing. It’s the leading indie publishing site; they give out prizes for the best independent self-published books. My contention has always been that I don’t know how many people are out there who are wealthy and want to do a book but who don’t have the kind of life or platform that would make a publisher want to publish the book. I’m only interested in doing this with high-net-worth individuals—people who feel they have a legacy they want to share with their families or who want to promote their businesses when they schlep around the country. But they can self-publish now. Self-publishing is to publishing what online dating has become to the old-fashioned form of dating: it’s losing that stigma, but a lot of these people want the very best writers in the business to write their books so they can create a legacy of which they will be proud. So that’s the next thing I’m doing—offering this service to people in the banking world, or worlds where they’ve done extremely well and want to have a book published.

LS So this is a much higher price?
MM Yes. $70,000 to $100,000. And for that they’ll get the best writers in the business. I’ll just deal with the writing side and Amy will deal with production: do they want print-on-demand? Offset? E-books? Promotion, all that kind of stuff. It’s an adjunct to what I already do. I don’t want it to become a full-time thing, because I like working within publishing. I’m dealing with my peers, we all talk the same language, we understand each other. There’s a tremendous amount of terrific people out there who want to publish books.
—LUCY SISMAN

Most of us can look back and credit a teacher as the source of inspiration that helped us do whatever we’ve done. Sometimes it’s an oblique influence, or just enthusiasm and interest rather than any hands-on encouragement in a particular field; but dig deep enough and there’s almost inevitably a story somewhere of sympathetic teaching. Auriol Williamson, though she’s only 16 (turning 17 this week), already knows she’s lucky to have Matt Gray (or Mr. Gray, as she calls him) as her English teacher at the Cherwell School in Oxford, where Auriol is in the sixth form doing her first year of A-level work in English, maths, physics, music and general studies. She’ll leave school next summer, but right now in Mr. Gray’s class she’s studying Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road. “Mr. Gray’s always really interested in young people, whatever they’re up to,” she says.

Auriol Williamson with her favourite book, Ingo, the first of the Ingo Chronicles, a fantasy series about merpeople by the British Orange Prize-winning novelist Helen Dunmore. “I loved the mermaid thing when I was a little girl,” says Williamson.

Recently, Auriol—with two school friends, Minesh Patel and Tom Walton—launched an side project outside school designing T-shirts under a label they call Ciel Bleu Apparel. Mr. Gray, who happened to be there when the three of them were watching a promotional video they’d put together, was impressed and asked if they’d be interested in making a small documentary for him to promote reading at Cherwell. So Auriol invited keen readers from school to come and have their picture taken with their favourite books. So far she’s shot 24 readers from her year. “It was interesting that many people’s favourite books are from childhood,” she says. People at school seem to stop reading at around 12 or 13, they’ve noticed, so she and her friends are determined to try and alter that. “Everyone is really encouraged to read at primary school, but when you get secondary school people seem to forget, and that’s really sad.”
     Interestingly, Auriol’s photographs are all taken on a film camera—that’s right, film, not digital. “Film puts all the excitement back into photography,” she says. It’s the anticipation, the waiting to see her pictures that she enjoys. “I love not knowing what exactly is on my film!” (Her father also takes pictures, although he uses a digital camera: he’s the trustee of a school in India that helps Dalit children and has taken many wonderful pictures of the children and the work at the school.)

Minesh Patel holds J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy The Lord of the Rings. “Minesh is great at the tech stuff, as well as very creative,” says Auriol.

Tom Walton with Michael Morpurgo’s novel The Butterfly Lion. “Tom messaged me the other day telling me that he couldn’t stop reading Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms in the bath and it was infringing on his exam revision,” says Williamson. “I felt proud and I laughed a lot.”

“Mr. Gray’s young and has an inspiring attitude,” Auriol says. “He’s always referencing popular culture and showing us things we should know about—books we should read, films we should see, music we should listen to. He’s always ahead of us.” He’s also good with technology, which Auriol says has changed the way the students work and can get involved. “He’s got a blog and he’s started an Evernote system,” she adds—though she confesses she’s not entirely sure how it works—“and he’s always whipping out his camera and scanners.” The blog—where students can send him questions (“Hi Sir, I have a question about structuring…”) that he answers (“Good question. I would go with option a) in the first paragraph and option b) in the second”)—is clearly a lively and vital part of Mr. Gray’s teaching; he sets out clear bullet points about books the class is studying as well as videos, timelines, essay samples and quizzes. All of which kills the “I forgot the book, Sir” excuses from my day.

The Story Hoard section of Mr. Gray’s blog, devoted to reading in particular.

Auriol hopes that Mr. Gray will incorporate her photographs into the Story Hoard section of his blog, where students write reviews of their favourite books; the three friends also plan to use some of the literary references they’ve been thinking about as imagery on their T-shirts. He will also put the video up, and says that after the kids finish their exams they’ll start a four-week project aimed at promoting reading. Ciel Bleu Apparel’s message, Auriol says, is “to promote knowledge and get people to really see the wonder of learning and enjoy books” (the video is on hold for a bit as they’re waiting for permission to use a particular song in it). She admits that she’s going to have to listen harder to her own message, though! “I read more when I was younger,” she confesses, “but this project has encouraged me to read more. My parents are really big readers and that’s encouraging.”
—LUCY SISMAN

Order over chaos
What these books have in common is order and command over chaos: alphabetical listing is very satisfying to the librarian in me. The knowledge—here at my fingertips!—that everything has a name and a classification is both a thrill and makes the world seem a bit safer. It’s not just content, of course: the quiet typography of a dictionary or encyclopedia is a haven from our picture-strewn, font-fighting world. Here indent, bold and italic are used for emphasis—and that’s all. The authority is in the austerity.
     Naturally, any list of conventional reference books must now include reference sites: on my bookmark bar I’ve got a line-up of reference, such as Currency Converter, which I use daily to convert Indian rupees into U.S. dollars for my business; Infoplease is invaluable when I’m cooking, especially if, like me, you have cookbooks from all over, some with metric weights and measures, others in pounds and ounces. And I use Thesaurus.com all the time to find the right, exact, precise, on-the-button word. I suppose Google is outpacing all these specialized reference resources, but you can never chance upon anything quite in the same way and chance is as important to the user of reference books as is the precision of looking up some definition or meaning. (I must include the McMaster-Carr catalogue here. Even though it’s a trade publication, it’s also a staggering online reference book for handymen (the printed version is nearly four inches thick), with pages and pages of dispassionate drawings of screws and washers. It is, well, compelling.)

An encyclopedic approach to poetry
So when I came upon the new edition of The Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics, originally published in 1965, which is just under three inches thick and weighs six pounds, you can imagine my happiness. The Encyclopedia‘s fourth edition has some 250 new entries and expands on more than a thousand of the existing articles, with coverage of international poetry, avant-garde movements and phenomena from cognitive poetics to slams to digital poetry. The editors have tried to include substantial contributions from Latin America, East and South Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe: “a large number of general entries are written by scholars of poetry in other than English–a Hispanist on pastoral, a scholar of the French Renaissance on epideixis, a Persianist on panegyric.” The Encyclopaedia doesn’t contain entries on specific poets or poems, but discusses both in the context of broader topics. I thought the best way to convey an idea of its reach would be to reproduce some sample entries, chosen at random from each of the letters of the alphabet from A to J, which I’ve tried to illustrate to enhance Princeton’s definitions.

Adynaton
The impossibility device: the rhetorical figure for magnifying an event by comparison with something impossible, such as “I’d walk a million miles for one of your smiles,” a line from Al Jolson’s 1921 song, “My Mammy.”

Boustrophedon
(from Greek: “in the manner of an ox turning”) A text in which alternate lines or columns are designed to be read in opposite directions is said to be written boustrophedon. The term alludes to the alternating direction of the furrows in a ploughed field…. Boustrophedon is a graphic format, not a literary form.

Caesura
(from Latin: verb, caedere, “to cut off”) Refers to the place in a line of verse where the metrical flow is temporarily “cut off.” When this “cut” occurs at the beginning of a line, it is called an “initial caesura”; when it occurs in the middle of the line, it is called a “medial caesura”; and when it occurs at the end of the line it is called a “terminal caesura.”

From Alexander Pope’s poem “An Essay on Criticism”:

True wit is nature to advantage dressed,
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.

The caesura in the second line allows the reader to pause before balancing the traditional contraries of wit and nature, thought and speech.”

Doggerel
Rough, poorly constructed verse, characterized by either extreme metrical irregularity or easy rhyme and monotonous rhythm, cheap sentiment, and triviality.

From John Skelton’s poem “Colyn Cloute,” circa 1568

For though my rhyme be ragged,
Tattered and jagged,
Rudely rain-beaten,
Rusty and moth-eaten,
If ye take well therewith,
It hath in it some pith.

Ekphrasis
Detailed description of an image, primarily visual; in specialized form, limited to description of the work of visual art.

From Book 18, lines 478–608, of Homer’s The Iliad: the poet suspends the progress of the war to describe the shield of Achilles, fashioned by the god Hephaestus, which includes the history of its own making, a tormented saga of unremitting strife, havoc and death. W.H. Auden wrote his poem “Shield of Achilles” as a response to this ekphrasis.

First of all he forged a shield that was huge and heavy,
elaborating it about, and threw around it a shining
triple rim that glittered, and the shield strap was cast of silver.
There were five folds composing the shield itself, and upon it
he elaborated many things in his skill and craftsmanship.
He made the earth upon it, and the sky, and the sea’s water,
and the tireless sun, and the moon waxing into her fullness,
and on it all the constellations that festoon the heavens,
the Pleiades and the Hyades and the strength of Orion
and the Bear, whom men give also the name of the Wagon,
who turns about in a fixed place and looks at Orion
and she alone is never plunged in the wash of the Ocean.

Flarf
A school of poetry started by the Brooklyn poet Gary Sullivan in 2001, who with the help of a few friends attempted to write poetry so execrable it would be rejected by an online vanity press. Much of the work was appropriated from others, although the encyclopedia says Flarfists often sculpt and reframe at will. Apparently Flarf has now entered the language to denote any form of web-based “verbal collage,” as in, e.g., “This is some flarfy drivel I wrote when I was drunk.” It can also be used as a verb; e.g., “She flarfed the senator’s speech by replacing all the nouns with ‘asshat.’”

Glossolalia
(from Greek: glossa, “tongue”) Interpretations of glossolalia can be grouped into three arenas: theology, psychology and linguistics.
Theology: glossolalia is the conversation with God occurring outside natural, intelligible language.
Psychology: glossolalia is a disassociated mental state (although in anthropology it is regarded it more as a trance).
Linguistics: glossolalia is the fabrication or façade of a language bereft of structural rules or referential functions. Such non-language or glossolalia speech codes have been used by modern poets.

Hendiadys
(from Greek: “one through two”) The literary critic Frank Kermode describes hendiadys as “a way of making a single idea strange by splitting an expression in two.” A hendiadys is two substantives (occasionally two adjectives or two verbs) joined by a conjunction to express a single but complicated idea, with one element logically subordinate to the other, such as “sound and fury,” from Macbeth, or “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” from Hamlet. Shakespeare uses hendiadys almost compulsively.

In medias res
(from Latin: “into the middle of things”) This is a device used to plunge a poem, drama or work of fiction into the middle of a series of events from the beginning. Homer’s Odyssey begins with a shipwreck coming after some 10 years of Odysseus’s wandering the Mediterranean. This way of telling a story is much used in modern moviemaking, where flashbacks and complex enfolding of narrative time are common. A good example of the use of in medias res is in William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury, where the narrator, Benjy Compson, presents non-chronological events in a seamless stream of consciousness, which Faulkner originally intended to be written in different colors to indicate chronological breaks.

Jongleur
(from French: jongleur, “minstrel”) This term applies to performers of various kinds, including acrobats, actors and entertainers in general, as well as musicians and reciters of verse. A jongleur was often employed by a troubadour, who might commission several jongleurs with different songs. In the 12th and 13th centuries, mention of jongleurs declines, suggesting that oral diffusion was being gradually replaced by written transmission.
—LUCY SISMAN

Up the ladder
So “lean” is connected to “climax.” I don’t know if Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO and author of the much-discussed book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead was aware of that when she published the book (or gave the 2010 TED talk that led to it). But I have to admit that in the context I found it interesting that the word “lean” is as much related to the idea of climbing to the heights (“climb,” by the way, is not related to “climax”) as it is to the other basic meaning—“tending towards,” or “propping against.” I haven’t read Lean In, but I’ve watched Sandberg’s TED talk—which is 15 minutes long and by all accounts a quicker (and cheaper) way to get the information than buying the book. More than one critique I’ve seen has said that the talk is more pointed and doesn’t diverge into the details of dealing with the contradictions of how women can best work towards making their way up the career ladder (klimax!).

Do it (her)self
It’s this latter issue that brings up the practical questions Sandberg’s book raises. There are two things about her thesis that seem unarguable: first, women are grossly underrepresented at the top in every area worldwide—nine out of 190 heads of state, 19 of the Fortune 500’s CEOs, only 20 percent heading up even non-profit organizations (usually seen as a relative stronghold for successful women); second, women have to do something about this themselves—if nothing else, it would seem to be kind of a contradiction in terms to sit around waiting for someone else to improve things for you. Rather than discussing the usual-suspect glass ceilings and equal pay (though she does touch on them), Sandberg basically says that women have to stop “systematically underestimating their own abilities,” grasp the nettle (or “keep their foot on the gas pedal,” or “lean in”) and go to bat for themselves in ways that could be described as “acting more like men”—except, of course, that these should be ways for anyone who is smart and seriously ambitious.

Klimax!
So how useful can advice that’s essentially geared to those looking to make it in the upper reaches of big organizations be to everywoman? Is “lean in” a helpful phrase? Actually I think it’s rather a feeble one. My wwword co-founder Lucy Sisman said it made her think of a neighbor bending into the window of the car her father was driving to flirtatiously flash her cleavage—hardly the image a 21st-century captain of industry wants to project. “Keeping your foot on the gas pedal,” a rather different motor vehicle metaphor, seems a lot closer to what Sandberg intends.
     It may be that “lean in” came about because she was looking for an antonym for “lean back”—what she says women do too often and too early in their careers, because they’re worrying ahead of time about how to deal with the competing interests of child-bearing, developing relationships, “having it all.” But that pinpoints one area where, perhaps coincidentally, Sandberg and I are in agreement: don’t make decisions too far in advance. My version was probably less dynamic—I was just not a life planner, so my method was more about leaving things up to the fates; whereas Sandberg calls it “don’t leave before you leave”: keep working till the last minute, don’t let fears for the future make decisions for you, don’t show your hand too soon. Lean in. And keep climbing that ladder.
—TAMARA GLENNY