And while I wouldn't say outright no to a city planning job, especially at the City of Los Angeles, where I currently intern, as everyone is friends with everyone, there isn't a stringent hierarchy, and everyone has a sense of humor about wanting to do good, but knowing that the plans of mice and men aft go stray, I'm not 100% confident that there will be a city job waiting for me anywhere anytime soon.
Therefore, I am diversifying.
I have been in love with the publishing field ever since I discovered that books do not magically appear on bookshelves. I didn't become an English major because they're a bigger (or at least a more well-known punchline than an art history major, though a close second behind a general liberal arts major) The punchline being, sooooo, what do you do with a degree like that!? I also am not thatttttt interested in diagraming sentences or remembering what a preposition is.
However, I love the concept of being an acquisitions editor. Someone who can see the potential in a manuscript that will inspire others and bring delight to a reader's soul.
I can name my favorite art book publishers off the top of my head (having considered going into art book publishing as an alternative to fine art insurance)- Phaidon, Harry N. Abrams, Watson-Guptil, and Taschen, in that order, unless I am applying to a job. Then it's whoever it is that I am applying to.
But when it comes to urban planning books it is more of a scattergun approach when it comes to favorite titles, especially as my interests are so varied- a quick list of favorites would be Emerald Cities: Urban Sustainability and Economic Development by Joan Fitzgerald (Oxford), Next Stop Reloville: Inside America's New Rootless Professional Class by: Peter T. Kilborn (Times Books), Fostering Sustainable Behavior: an Introduction to Community-Based Social Marketing by: Doug Mckenzie-Mohr and William Smith (New Society Publishers), the American City: What Works, What Doesn't by: Alexander Garvin (McGraw-Hill Professional), Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us by Tom Vanderbilt (Vintage), and anything by Witold Rybczynski (who is published under Viking, Oxford, and other publishers' imprints) and most of these aren't urban planning books, per se, but deal with aspects of the built environment.
However, there is one publisher, whose work I unfailingly enjoy, and would enjoy more if their average retail price wasn't about $60- yikes! They're called Wiley Publishers for short, long version is John Wiley & Sons, Inc., You may be familiar with their "For Dummies" series. Yeah, I thought it was a different publisher too, like Random House. Guess not.
The reason they are the focus of this post is because they have an office in Ames, Iowa, of all places. Ames-?! which is 45 minutes away from where my parents live! Ames, not exactly a hotbed of cultural activity. The Iowa Writers Workshop, which I thought was more like one of those weekend affairs that Erica Jong, bookended by Jonathan Saffron Foer and Jonathan Franzen attend and self-congratulate one another on their earnings and how they're going to spend their latest million, is in Iowa City (and is also a grad program- oops.)
Wiley's headquarters is in Hoboken, New Jersey, land of super thick New Joizee accents, if the stars of TLC's Cake Boss, are any indicator. Neither are cities that I would pick as my number one destination spot. But I love me some publishing. Yes, I do acknowledge the irony of that incredibly grammatically poor sentence. And driving 45 minutes up the freeway to get my foot in the door is a lot cheaper than flying across the country. Or worse, moving back in with one's parents, yes Dad, haha it would be "worse" for you- ha ha, than living in Iowa.
Hello Wiley- I have publicly declared my love for you! What are you going to do about it?! I would like to say that I can't wait to snap up Water Centric Sustainable Communities: Planning, Retrofitting, and Building the Next Urban Environment. But at $130 I'm going to have to wait for my employee discount ;-)
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