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Via Bookslut, the San Francisco Chronicle has a profile of William Langewiesche, one of our favorite writers:

Magazines, in Langewiesche’s opinion, are great beasts that have to be fed, constantly. If they’re not fed they die, and so they’re desperate for material. But they’re usually fed poorly. And people who say that the golden age is in the past are simply making excuses for their inability to write or publish high-quality journalism.

“You have this precious, incredibly privileged thing,” he said, “which is the reader’s attention for a little while. And you can make the slightest misstep and the reader will put you down. People will say that the reader lives in a busy world. But that’s not the reason why. The reason is that the writer blows it, and loses the reader’s trust.”

And there are many ways to lose that trust. You can disrespect the reader by being pompous. By drawing obvious conclusions. Or by making the reader impatient by going on too long. It’s an enormous balancing act to get that part right. Especially for someone such as Langewiesche, who writes 20,000-word articles. But times are good despite the inherent difficulties of his genre.

“This is the golden age of nonfiction, now,” he said. “It’s not in the future sometime. It’s not in the past. It’s better now. This is the time. This is where the real writing is going on. There are very few good novels being written. But there is quite a bit of good nonfiction being written. It’s where the boundaries are being pushed.”

We thought we knew what to expect from The Angry Letter. These have arrived periodically for the past — and I’m guessing here — eighty two years, always an author who submitted something to us months or even years ago, and he’s heard nothing from us. Generally he’s right to be angry (two and a half years is rather a long time to read a single poem), and we have to track down the errant envelope, whether it’s lodged under a seat cushion or affixed to an unrelated submission. Failing that, we have to beg forgiveness and a resubmission which, in these days of computers, is less disastrous than it was when people would send us their sole copy.

The Angry Letter has taken on a radical new form, now that we have a whizzy new electronic submission system. At least a few people each week are upset because they heard back from us too quickly. An author e-mailed us just this morning, lamenting the “exceedingly quick response time” and asking whether “[her] story was so far below [our] standards that it didn’t warrant further reading beyond the first paragraph.” We’d declined her work fifteen days after she’d submitted it.

It’s understandable that some authors would be puzzled. The expectation has been established that it will take many months for a reply. So it’s logical to assume the worst when a response goes out two days after the work is submitted.

Thing is, we’re not reading any faster than we always have. We’re just moving submissions around faster.

They used to come in via mail, pile up in our office until we opened them and date stamped them, and sit around in genre bins until a reader had time to come by and pick up a bunch to take home and read. After she’d read them she’d scrawl a note on the cover letter and bring them all back, where they’d sit in a pile in our editor’s office. Most submissions could be declined based on the reader’s recommendation, and his assistant would put the submissions back in their SASEs along with our stock declination letter and mail them back.

We do the same thing now, only minus the paper, mail, and piles. We receive the work instantly. Within hours, our load-balancing distribution system assigns it to the reader who has the shortest queue. Generally within a week or two the reader reads the submission right in his web browser, writes a short review, and issues a recommendation. Depending on the recommendation, it may be automatically queued for another reader for a second opinion or passed along to the editor (Ted) for his opinion — again, this happens instantly. Our editor reviews all of these recommendations every few days, looking at the comments that readers made, the consensus view of everybody who read that work, the author’s publication history with VQR and, of course, the submission itself. Then he renders his verdict to accept or decline, with his decision being dispatched to the author by e-mail immediately.

This efficiency is something that we take seriously. Our guidelines discourage simultaneous submissions, so every day that a work is sitting on our (virtual) desk is a day that it’s not sitting on another publication’s desk. Every time Ted sits down at his computer, he’s greeted by a suite of charts and graphs that illustrate the state of our submission process. At this moment, it’s informing him that we’ve received nineteen submissions this morning, 232 submissions are recommended for declination by readers, eight are recommended for acceptance, 1,469 submissions are currently in the hopper and readers have made six recommendations today. September submissions required an average of 18.89 days for a final decision to be made, October averaged 14.84 days, and November is at 10.5 days (though those numbers will continue to drift upwards as we process the stragglers.) We track this stuff because it matters.

We’re not sure of what to do about the new form of The Angry Letter. We’ve considered artificially delaying declination letters, but that hardly seems fair. We’ve got a sort of a stock letter we’ve been sending in response, but surely there are even more people who don’t bother to write, but still feel miffed. As more magazines move to electronic submission systems, maybe quick responses will become normal, and expectations will readjust.

Between now and then, though, spread the word, would you?

Al Gore visited the White House today in keeping with the tradition of the president playing host to each year’s Nobel Laureates. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall during his thirty-minute, “very nice, very cordial” meeting with George W. Bush. Seriously, what can Gore say? “Well, you stole the election, but at least you used your power to ruin the country and place the planet in peril. So I guess it all worked out.” I encourage you to read the full story here.

And while you’re at it, someone please tell me why the New York Times has chosen to link every single word of its content to a dictionary. Monday? What’s a Monday? “The second day of the week.” Hey, thanks New York Times! But even more annoying to editorial types—like yours truly—the dictionary isn’t even their house dictionary, so spellings and usages often differ. For example, in today’s article, we’re informed that Gore was granted “a private tete-a-tete with the president,” but the American Heritage Dictionary to which they link favors “tête-à-tête”—since it’s a perfectly legitimate French term meaning “head-to-head.” Also, why is this meeting referred to as a “private tete-a-tete,” when the dictionary definition of tête-à-tête is “a private conversation between two persons”? A private private conversation?

These are the matters editors ponder while other people are outside breathing fresh air. On the plus side, the Winter issue has gone to press, so we can free our minds of such imponderable minutiae (“Latin minutiae trifles, details, from plural of minutia smallness, from minutus,” Merriam-Webster—the VQR house dictionary), at least for the next three months. And, lest I forget, the issue features a great cover by the one-and-only Chris Ware. More on that soon.

Our Fall 2006 “Writers on Writers” special issue is now available for free online, since we’ve sold out our print run. The issue features stunning cover art by Chris Ware and eleven stories by your favorite writers about your favorite writers. Joyce Carol Oates envisions a lonely, depressed Emily Dickenson robot, Elizabeth Gaffney considers the final thoughts of Edgar Allan Poe. There’s more from — and about — Brock Clarke, Mario Puzo, James P. Othmer, Henry James, Steve Almond, James Frey, and a bunch more. If you didn’t read this when it came out a year ago, now’s your chance.

01/07/08 Update: We found a couple of boxes of this issue tucked away in the corner of the office. So, hey, we’re not sold out after all. We’ll leave the issue free online anyway.

I judge the value of any journal of current events by the extent to which it informs me not of the day’s events, but of tomorrow’s events. The New Yorker has a knack for publishing informative articles about seemingly esoteric topics that are making headlines a few weeks later. As Pakistan destabilizes under the increasingly tight grip of Pervez Musharraf, the value of Nicholas Schmidle’s “Waiting for the Worst: Baluchistan, 2006” becomes clear. Schmidle looked at the state of the nation through the lens of the simmering conflict between the gas-rich, cash-poor Baluchistan province and the comparatively affluent remainder of the nation, and it didn’t look good. Nationalist rebels are eager to create an independent Baluch nation, and that must weigh heavily on Musharraf’s mind as he starts to lose control over Pakistan. If you didn’t read the article when it came out, give it ten minutes now to gain some insight into the country’s troubles.

11/12 Update: Nicholas writes to tell us that he’s spending his days in Islamabad, and has contributed a pair of blog entries to The New Republic on the latest events, one on the showdown at Benazir Bhutto’s house and another on parallels between Iran and Pakistan. Incidentally, I did the math, and TNR’s URL schema supports 1.53⁵⁴ (or 1.53 septendecillion) unique addresses. Now that’s planning ahead.

It’s been a year since the University of Virginia inked a deal with Google to join the Google Books Library Project. The search engine giant, not content to merely index everything on the internet, is working with a dozen libraries to scan in every page of every book in their collections. This massive undertaking has just recently borne fruit here at UVa, with the first of UVa’s books going online in the past few weeks.

Anthony Grafton considers the merits of this and related undertakings in “Future Reading: Digitization and its Discontents” in the current New Yorker. Though Grafton generally speaks well of this global Library of Alexandria, he’s wary of substituting electrons for ink. He expresses some familiar concerns: it’s impossible to scan ephemera like the scent of the pages, optical character recognition is imperfect, this is another outlet for the West’s cultural imperialism, etc.

The author’s worries aren’t without merit. (We’ve experienced some common character recognition troubles in our own efforts to make VQR’s archives available online. I suspect that Patricia Rowe Willrich didn’t actually write that Wallace Stegner is “in his 8o’s,” though I also suspect that the digit/letter transposition represents no great logical puzzle for our readers.) But one of his more serious concerns, the fragmentation of archives across thousands of unrelated Internet repositories, is perhaps the easiest to address. He writes:

The supposed universal library, then, will be not a seamless mass of books, easily linked and studied together, but a patchwork of interfaces and databases…. Soon, the present will become overwhelmingly accessible, but a great deal of older material may never coalesce into a single database. Neither Google nor anyone else will fuse the proprietary databases of early books and the local systems created by individual archives into one accessible store of information. Though the distant past will be more available, in a technical sense, than ever before, once it is captured and preserved as a vast, disjointed mosaic it may recede ever more rapidly from our collective attention.

If that were true, it would be unfortunate, not because it would be a step backwards (it’s far easier to hop from website to website than from library to library), but because it would be a failure to embrace the full potential of the medium. Fortunately, in these days of “Web 2.0″ (bingo!), there’s no great danger of that. The Online Computer Library Center’s WorldCat, for instance, exists precisely to pool its member libraries’ collection data and syndicate it to third parties, including Google.

And there’s the burgeoning microformat standards that allow metadata to be embedded within content for automatic parsing by user agents and search engines alike. The XFN standard for social networks, hCard standard for address data and hCalendar standard for event data are all based on open standards and embeddable as semantic XHTML. From geotagged photos to embedded Creative Commons licenses, the 450 million microformatted data on the web represent an enormous amount of information ripe for the aggregating. VQR has been using microformats whenever possible, whether explicit (embedding Creative Commons license data) or implicit (adhering to the definition list standard in our “Business of the Book” transcript), and our web presence is all the richer for it.

Google has been a leader in opening up their own application programming interface (API) to allow their data and services to be invoked from any web page, precisely the sort of thing that would allow their digital book collection join the microformat web. Dan Cohen recently made his own pitch for a Google Books API, while Alexis Turner has found tantalizing evidence that Google is already sharing their book data with OCLC’s WorldCat. If Google isn’t already in the process of becoming a part of a seamless global electronic library, it’s something they could do with minimal effort.

Any institution that really wants to share their digital book collection should find no obstacles in doing so, whether by participating in a WorldCat-type program or simply tagging each item with microformatted metadata. The global digital library will organize itself.

We try to make clear in our submission guidelines that we receive a lot of submissions. But, hey, show, don’t tell, right? Here’s our daily submission count for the past sixty days:

We’d show you the cumulative submission graph — that is, how they build up in our queue — but it’s too depressing. Picture the Alps in profile and you’ve got a pretty good idea. How does this compare to other publications? We have no idea.

There are two remaining stops on the “South America: Untold Stories” reading tour, co-sponsored by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, to mark the release of the Fall issue of VQR. If you will be in St. Louis or Carbondale, Illinois, on Monday or Tuesday of next week, please come and join us (further info here). However, if you can’t make either of those events, then check out the nifty webcast of the Berkeley event. While you’re at it, check out video companion to Kelly Hearn’s essay on drilling in the Peruvian Amazon that aired recently on PBS’s Foreign Exchange.