IVP - Addenda & Errata - May 2008 Archives

Intellectual Wallpaper

Have you noticed how buying books can turn into a nuisance. Once the books are on the shelves, sooner or later the little darlings beckon to be read. And sooner or later the impulse overtakes you to concede. Wouldn’t it be far more practical to have a library of books that offers its compliments to learning without actually tempting you to engage it? Inspired by the Dummy Book Company, I am recommending that IVP Academic begin offering our customers a full array of faux books to adorn their dens, studies or office walls. Consider it intellectual wallpaper.

Scraping Paint in the Boatyard

As I’ve previously let on, in recent years I’ve become a sailor. And this spring, the time came to haul my thirty-year-old sailboat out of the water, put it “on the hard” (sailor lingo for the dry ground of the boat yard) and repaint the hull.

Here’s the deal: boats kept in the water—particularly saltwater—accumulate marine growth on their hulls. This is bad for the boat. So periodically you need to take the boat out, pressure wash the hull, scrape and sand, and repaint it with a special “bottom” paint that sells for a tidewater prince’s ransom.

This already sounds onerous to non-nautical types. And I haven’t yet (nor will I) divulge how many other things sailors do with their boats while they are “on the hard.” Nor the vast quantities of cash they circulate through the local economy via the open funnel of their marine supply store. But never mind. One evening a fellow sailor was watching me work and commented, “It’s fun, isn’t it?” He wasn’t being facetious. I immediately agreed. It’s hard work, but it’s fun. And it’s hard to explain why.

You Don’t Take the Bible Literally, Do You?

“You don’t take the Bible literally, do you?”

You’ve probably been asked something like this. How do you respond?

If you say Yes, you’re likely to be lumped with fundamentalists of the deepest dye. If you say No, you probably are trying to evade being lumped with fundamentalists of the deepest dye. Or there is the option of saying that you don’t take the Bible “hyper-literally” or “with extreme literalism,” which is another way of distancing yourself from those on the “far right” (and speaking a sort of nonsense at the same time).

You Can Change the World!

A few weeks ago Bob Fryling, IVP’s Publisher, was telling me about Andy Crouch’s talk at the recent Q conference. Crouch dug up statistics on book titles with “change the world” (or similar) in them:

pre-1900—0
1900-1950—6
1950s—4
1960s—8
1970s—4
1980s—18
1990s—101
2000-2010—on track for 220