John Ashbery

When John Ashbery, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, first learned that the digital editions of his poetry looked nothing like the print version, he was stunned. There were no line breaks, and the stanzas had been jammed together into a block of text that looked like prose. The careful architecture of his poems had been leveled.

He complained to his publisher, Ecco, and those four e-books were immediately withdrawn.

The biggest publishing houses in America still don't know what to do about Amazon, but at a rarefied end of the bookmaking world that you probably didn't know existed, business is still good. The current issue of Harvard Magazine features a fascinating article by journalist Nathan Heller about Arion Press of San Francisco. Heller describes Arion as "the only full-service letterpress left in the United States." Put another way, Arion is the only publisher going that still makes books the way Gutenberg made books.