What we are reading says something about ourselves. We may buy books to make ourselves feel a certain way about ourselves. When we buy books for friends and family, we explore our extended sense of self—we reflect ourselves in the selection of the gift. Although a private activity, reading is also a social experience. We like to share what we are reading on social media, in discussion with friends and family, and through more formal activities such as membership of a book group.
In the first article of this issue, Olatoun Gabi-Williams charts her journey from her immersion in Eurocentric literature to an encounter with postcolonial African literature in the collective setting of the Africa Book Group (ABG) in Nigeria. She provides an overview of the workings of the group and looks at the key authors and works of literature the international women of ABG have engaged with, and also at the special meetings of ABG at which experts were invited to speak on various aspects of African studies. In her memoir she is keen to direct attention to the power of shared reading experience to advance that part of her cultural liberation facilitated by good postcolonial literature, healthy attitudes, and democratic discussions in the company of women.
Mary Jay writes about how the African Books Collective, in partnership with the the International African Institute (IAI), hosted at SOAS University of London, has launched an initiative to effect ethical co-publishing practice between Northern and African publishers. It seeks to broker Northern scholarly publications’ availability to African scholars and researchers in general, and particularly to those who have collaborated in the research. The focus is largely on English-language co-publishing. The overall objective is to recognize the historical background and current realities and to find ways that African publishers can take their rightful place in the global marketplace. Support for African development—whether economic, cultural, societal, or educational—requires a commitment to equitable practices in African publishing as key to national development.
As one of the heads of commercial nonfiction publishing at the world’s largest trade publisher, Daniel Bunyard has aimed to find books that will sell lots of copies. He believes there are reasons why a book sells. In his paper ‘Why We Buy Books’, he outlines three components that he believes are central: contexts, cycles, and the manipulation of what he calls ‘prismatic elements’. He believes that asking questions about the motivations of book buyers and the correlation between sales and history will enable publishers not only to understand and potentially harness the power of contexts and cycles to their benefit, but also to make more critically engaged decisions about not just what they publish, but how they publish it.
Jasmin Kirkbride explores the relationship between resonance and the act of writing. The conductor of a choir has not only to make that choir sing, but to make it sing well, with harmony, to the score sheet before them. So, too, the challenge for writers is to present their internal resonance as one harmonious object, through the medium of the creative goals, plot, and characters they have laid out before us, creating illusions of forms, worlds, and individuals that may be very different from our lived experience, but will still contain a sense of resonance.