(This comes from the YouTube channel of facultimedia.com, which gathers up short talks from academics.)

Most academic books have a fairly humdrum genesis. For every man of letters who writes 150 words longhand with a fountain pen each breakfast, toast and marmalade in his left hand, there are a dozen others who tap away unnoticed at a laptop in a drab office. Not much material there for a Hemingway sort of legend. But the making of Craig’s book deserves to go down in fable.

This is a book whose cover features boutons de fantaisie: an elegant term for novelty hunting buttons, depicting hare and hound, which themselves took a lengthy pursuit to hunt down. Our thanks to the Musée International de la Chasse in Gien, by the way. This is a book whose index was completed while its author was living in a tent, his house having burned to the ground. (Nobody was hurt.) This is a book whose proofs were gone over with millimetric exactness – I’m assuming Craig owns a pair of calipers – to ensure that no vertical space around the epigraph dictionary quotations was ever so much as 1/72nd of an inch out of true. (And again nobody was hurt, though there were moments.) This is a book which was launched with live cello music performed by Orlando Jopling at the Cat and Mutton pub. I regret to say that I was in San Francisco at the time, which is not handy for London E8, but have since been sent video footage; and I can say with some confidence that this was not your everyday book launch. Furetière was an original; so was his book; and so is Craig’s.

Cat and Mutton would, now I come to think of it, make a pretty fair Cockney rhyming slang for “hunting button”.

Maney in fact publishes journals in fields as diverse as Elizabethan costume and the housing of radioactive materials, so its featured Journal of the Month is not always in our line. But this month, it is: see this page for an introduction to Italian Culture, with free online access to three years of content.

And here’s something new: we now have an email mailing list for announcements, and it’s open for business here.

I find this challenging for several reasons. One of those is plain guilt, because I sent her page proofs of her latest book, Taboo, only this week. These are not illuminated manuscripts we make, but all the same, a scholarly book is an artefact from the world of the visual. It has margins, a type gauge, a rhythm to its line breaks. I take it for granted that Hannah and I look at this the same way, but do we? When Hannah was proof-reading her first book for us, some years ago now, she would look at the type through a heavy-duty loupe — a small but satisfyingly craftsmanlike tool, perhaps borrowed from a goldsmith. I remember thinking that all authors ought to have one. See the trees, not the wood; pick up the tiniest flaws on the page, undistracted by their surroundings. But of course Hannah didn’t have a choice in the matter. Her own book was, to her, something seen only in one spot at a time, like a landscape seen through a telescope.

As this probably goes to show, I don’t think of Hannah as being blind at all. I might, if pushed, use the term partially sighted – but not partially blind. The difference ought to be either nonexistent or purely a matter of outlook: glass half-full, glass half-empty. But of course it isn’t. We shy away from the word “blind”, which has a taboo about it – some suggestion of impairment, or worse, of helplessness. The collective term “the blind” is already too uncomfortable to use, which may be why the RNIB has fairly recently become the Royal National Institute of Blind People, not the Royal National Institute For The Blind.

But the term is also troublesome just because it is vague. Many “blind” people have, like Hannah, some degree of visual input, and almost all are now assisted by technology in a way which couldn’t have been imagined in, say, 19th century Paris. I once shared a house with a blind (there, I said it) lawyer who used a whole pile of gadgets: a screenreader with the voice of Stephen Hawking, a tape recorder capable of gabbling through law reports in a speeded-up voice like Mickey Mouse, and a sort of one-line Braille display which he could read with a startling rapid slide of his finger. This was not someone I thought of as having any trouble controlling the world around him. Similarly, I’m willing to bet that nobody who meets Hannah in the professional world would use the word “disabled” to describe her. I certainly wouldn’t, not least because her manuscripts are so impeccably presented. And because of that, Hannah’s piece for the Guardian makes me sit up in my chair. I may be doing her a disservice by habitually failing to notice her partial blindness. I may be discounting the value of that perspective on the world.

Hannah’s work is as fearless as her blog in taking on these taboos of the body. Here’s the cover of her new book, reduced to a thumbnail: at a glance, for those of us able to glance, we see a nubile woman with a serene face, reclining like an odalisque. Is that really a taboo nowadays? Click the thumbnail for the answer; if you don’t mind that not all answers are comforting.

Update: Hannah sends me this link to a post about her experience of reading through the barrel of an adapted lense.

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Germanic Literatures includes monographs and essay collections on literature originally written not only in German, but also in Dutch and the Scandinavian languages. Within the German-speaking area, it seeks also to publish studies of other national literatures such as those of Austria and Switzerland. The chronological scope of the series extends from the early Middle Ages to the present day.

While the focus of Germanic Literatures is on written culture, Legenda also publishes on German film and television in the Moving Image series. Additionally, material on Yiddish literature and culture can be found within Studies in Yiddish, the only scholarly series in English dedicated to the field.

The new series is chaired by Ritchie Robertson, FBA, Taylor Professor of German at the University of Oxford, and titles are selected by an editorial committee including: Dr Barbara Burns (University of Glasgow), Professor Jane Fenoulhet (University College London), Professor Anne Fuchs (University of Warwick), Professor Susanne Kord (University College London), Dr Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen (University College London), Dr Almut Suerbaum (University of Oxford) and Professor John Zilcosky (University of Toronto).

Welcoming the new series, Professor Colin Davis (Royal Holloway), chair of the Legenda Editorial Board, said: “Germanic Literatures recognises the remarkable contribution made by authors working in Germanic languages to world culture, and it is committed to publishing some of the most exciting work currently being done in the field.”

Forthcoming titles in the series include: Yvan Goll: The Thwarted Pursuit of the Whole, by Robert Vilain; Sebald’s Bachelors: Queer Resistance and the Unconforming Life, by Helen Finch; Goethe’s Visual World, by Pamela Currie; and German Narratives of Belonging: Writing Generation and Place in the Twenty-First Century, by Linda Shortt.

For more information, visit www.legendabooks.com/series/gl.

This is just one of a number of major initiatives of the book series. Legenda launched its prestigious Moving Image series in 2012, chaired by Professor Emma Wilson (University of Cambridge), and 2012 also marked the unveiling of the new Legenda website.

Furthermore, 2014 will see the launch of another exciting new series: Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures will be launched in partnership with the Association for Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland (AHGBI) and chaired by Professor Trevor Dadson (Queen Mary, University of London).

The good people of Milwaukee are currently being bombarded by political advertising: Obama for America has spent $5,440,222 there so far, nearly $2 million of that in the last week; and Mr Romney quite a packet more, when various shady organisations are counted in. This is small change compared to the frenzied spending in Ohio, but seems pretty extravagant considering that it’s not even clear Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes will matter.

Fortunately Milwaukee has had something to take its mind off the constant barrage of disingenuous ads: the 1000-scholar-strong Thirty-Sixth Annual Conference of the German Studies Association, the USA’s leading learned society covering Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Unlike Kalamazoo, the GSA moves around: this was its third visit to Milwaukee. And we were there:

The Coke can is included in this shot for scale, rather the way a tiny dumbfounded sailor appears at the bottom corner of an etching of an iceberg.

Two Penn Center, now considerably modernised and rather chic, is a temple of steel, marble and glass. It stands just opposite the 1901 Philadelphia City Hall, which is something of a draw for architecture buffs as the tallest masonry building in the world – it was the last of the great towers built from stone. William Penn stands on top, having the highest vantage point of any statue in America, and looks over at what he wrought. A man once condemned to the Tower of London for writing a religious tract called The Sandy Foundation Shaken, and who called his new city “Philadelphia”, Greek for “brotherly love”, Penn might not sound like an altogether practical fellow. But he planned the city well, and though he put its central plaza in what originally seemed the wrong place — the Delaware river-front was for many decades where the action was — he was proved right in the end. It was in the 1950s that Penn Center Plaza became the business heart of Philadelphia, and “Two”, built in 1958, was part of that boom. It’s a twenty-storey building standing 83m tall; the street address, 1500 John F. Kennedy Avenue, is a little misleading, because the eleven Penn Center skyscrapers are actually arranged in a loose spiral, and so people mostly give the postal address as just “Penn Center Plaza”. At any rate, Maney’s new office can be contacted at:

Each of our debut authors spoke for half an hour, and a fruitful joint Q&A followed. First up was Paul Julian Smith, author of Spanish Practices: Literature, Cinema, Television. We really could not have asked for a more distinguished figure to serve as no. 1 in a series intended to embrace not only film but also television and other media: Paul was one of the youngest Professors of Spanish ever appointed, was elected an FBA in 2008, and now holds a senior position at CUNY. Though he only decamped to America three years ago, his talk, on Almodóvar’s Women, brought a wry New Yorker wit to mention of an unusual form of cultural translation: a remake of Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown, almost shot by shot, as a Broadway show. This made for a pretty rum plot, but, as Paul remarked, it made a lot more sense than Spiderman, the season’s big hit. Almodóvar himself was closely involved in the Broadway project: an interesting reminder that film and the musical theatre don’t meet only at Spamalot.

Our second speaker was Laura McMahon, author of Cinema and Contact: The Withdrawal of Touch in Nancy, Bresson, Duras and Denis. Laura spoke, among other things, about the surprisingly deep and affecting characterisation of Robert Bresson’s 1966 classic Au hasard Balthazar. There was some talk afterwards of how the pitch meeting for this movie must have gone: “So, the lead character is Balthazar, a farm donkey who puts up with everything they make him do.” “Cartoon, is it?” “No, no, live action. 35mm.” “Right, so he’s a talking donkey?” “No, no, a completely untrained donkey. We wanted a genuine sense of contact with the animal.” A pause. “Is there — I can’t believe I’m asking this — a love interest?” “Well, there’s the farm girl who befriends him. She’s a victim too, and they both have horrible lives.”

But it is, of course, a masterpiece. Godard called it all of life in 90 minutes, and went on to marry the farm girl to boot. In the most picaresque scene of the movie, human beings are relegated to being little more than extras, as Balthazar is led through the straw-strewn backstage lot of a circus, which is lined with cages of wild animals he could not possibly have encountered in nature. Bresson intercuts hauntingly between their eyes:

This being an election year, American websites and TV stations are already full of infographics about the clash of Donkeys and Elephants, that is, Democrats and Republicans. But so far as I know, Au hasard Balthazar is the only time the confrontation has happened for real.

We have been collaborating with the SFS on our joint series Research Monographs in French Studies (RMFS) almost from the inception of Legenda — RMFS 1, Anne Green on Madame de Lafayette, appeared in 1996, when we were just setting up. RMFS today is our single largest book series: we have just announced volume 37, Maria Scott on Stendhal’s Less-Loved Heroines. 37 is a lot of authors — you could easily staff two or three University French departments with them, and pretty strong departments they would be, too. The SFS conference always has an everyone-who-is-anyone-is-here feel to it, and we continually met old friends at our stand. Besides that, the SFS executive could not have been more encouraging, and Charles Forsdick, the President, made a handsome speech.

Exeter was also the occasion of an official handover of office from Ann Jefferson to Diana Knight. Ann was only the second general editor of RMFS, succeeding Michael Moriarty, and her exemplary period in the chair — The Hardback Years, as we might call them — leaves it a major presence in the field. Ann is both an enthusiast and a stickler, and I believe I can fairly say that few book series today are edited either as exactingly or with so much brio as RMFS. Diana, who has herself appeared in the series (see Balzac and the Model of Painting, RMFS 24), now takes the reins as RMFS’s third General Editor. We thank her indeed for agreeing to serve, and look forward to many more titles of our joint enterprise.