Evanston: delayed; excessive profit
Evanston: delayed; excessive profit
An email arrived yesterday putting off the delivery of the Moore 24 until the weekend of May 7 at the earliest. While the cause is reasonable, I am disappointed, like a kid learning that he can’t open Christmas presents until sometime in January.
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THE SILENCE OF THE SEA, by Jean Bruller writing under the pseudonym of ‘Vercors’ during the French Resistance to the German WWII occupation, is an exceptional piece of literature and historically important.
I mentioned it a week ago and that I had ordered a copy from Amazon. I read it yesterday afternoon.
The novella is as good as I recalled.
I had forgotten that the German officer is a musician, a composer; and I misremembered that the young woman is the aristocrat’s daughter when in fact she is his niece. Still not bad for more than fifty years.
The officer, who is sensitive to the people upon whom he has been forced, carries on an extended monologue during the evenings of several months in the first part of the story about how Germany and France must be married to one another, each bringing unique national qualities to the greater good of Europe, a vision ironically fulfilled after Germany’s defeat rather than its victory.
However, in a brief Part II, after a leave in Paris where he discovers the true intention of the Nazis to destroy France totally, he asks for a combat command on the Russian front.
In the course of more than six months living in the same house, the uncle speaks only three words to the officer, “Come in, sir.” And the niece only one, “Adieu.” It is a measure of Jean Bruller’s skill that the reader is aware of the subtle tension of the relationships that develop between them and of his originality in portraying a decent German in a work published in 1942 by an underground press which he had co-founded and whose editor would later be captured and executed by the Nazis.
The book was smuggled out of France and republished in seventeen languages, selling more than a million copies. Bruller died in 1991.
I mention this because THE SILENCE OF THE SEA is an important piece of the world’s literature. I don’t think that making money was the author’s original primary intention. But money was made. And still is when it shouldn’t be.
The thin paperback I received from Amazon cost $12.24, discounted from a list price of $15.95. It is 102 pages long and includes an historical introduction, a literary introduction, and the full text in both French and English. The English text is twenty-six pages long.
This is outrageous.
I don’t know who is getting the exorbitant profit.
After almost seventy years THE SILENCE OF THE SEA should be available for free, or at most the cost of printing.
The story is well worth reading, but not at that price. Better to find a used copy or one in a library.
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THE NEW YORK TIMES has announced that in the first three weeks since putting up its pay wall more than 100,000 have signed up for digital subscriptions. I am one of them.
I experimented with avoiding the NY TIMES site completely, then restricting the articles I read; but I felt cramped and soon ran up against the twenty free articles a month limit anyway. So I signed up.
After an introductory offer, the charge is $15 every four weeks, which comes to about 54 cents a day, less than the 70 cents a day I pay to use the coin operated shower at the Opua Marina when I’m in New Zealand. Carol lets me shower for free here, so by specious reasoning I’m ahead.
I am aware that newspapers are facing hard times. I want the NY TIMES to make a profit. I do not want it to make an excessive profit; and I recognize that the management and share holders of the NY TIMES and I have probably have differing ideas of ‘excessive’.
I hope that I am not contributing to an iniquitous trend.
Saturday, April 23, 2011