Grantland, McSweeney's and the Last Frontier of the Printed Word

A friend in the printing business sent me a link this week for Grantland: The Book. Now in book form.

The ESPN side project is putting together a bound collection of some of its best work, edited by Bill Simmons and Dan Fierman and published in conjunction with McSweeney's. The collection will be produced quarterly. Here is the write-up from McSweeney's store website:

"

Grantland Quarterly is a collaboration between McSweeney's and Bill Simmons's new web magazine Grantland. It will feature the best sports writing from the website, delivered in a full-color book featuring original artwork and a host of print-exclusives—including original fiction, new writing from editor-in-chief Bill Simmons, posters and pull-out sections, old-school baseball cards and mini-booklets, and a cover that looks and feels like you're holding a basketball. Like its namesake website, Grantland Quarterly will regularly include some of the most exciting and form-pushing sports writers currently plying the trade, including Chuck Klosterman, Malcolm Gladwell, Tom Bissell, Harris Wittels, John Brandon, Anna Clark, Chris Jones, Colson Whitehead, and many more.

"

The link provides a list of highlights inside the collection, including Simmons' story on LeBron James' playoff meltdown, a look back at the movie Hoosiers, a can't-possibly-be-timely story by Malcolm Gladwell on the NBA lockout (maybe they're assuming it will be over by the time this edition prints?), as well as stories by contributors like Jane Leavy (whose contribution you can read here, by the way). Did you notice in the write-up, there's also fiction (!!!) inside? No word on whether or not that includes another Boston team winning a championship.

The write-up promises bells and whistles inside this publication, including trading cards and pull-out sections. Oh, and certainly footnotes; lots and lots of footnotes.

I have a feeling I'm supposed to hate this idea on a basic level, being an Internet writer. Books are so…bookish. By nature, books are constrictive and limiting. Books are heavy. Books have words that are hard to read near the margin and you always end up cracking the spine and ruining the book's physical integrity. Books are impossible to read in the dark. Books are clunky.

Couldn't they just put this collection on the Kindle or iPad or whatever device ESPN has coming out in time for the holidays? Or…here's a unique thought…couldn't Grantland just publish the stories online? They are, after all, a website that publishes content online.

Isn't it a little presumptuous and pretentious to assert that people would want to take stories they can read online for free and buy them in a heavy, spine-cracking, hard-to-read-in-the-dark, clunky package to place on a shelf for all eternity?

Well, it certainly is pretentious. By nature, books are an ostentatious style of publication. Having their first volume bound in the skin of a basketball is nothing short of obnoxious. Are we safe to assume that Volume 2 will be a football, Volume 3 will be a baseball (you can feel the seams!) and Volume 4 a…hmmm…swatch of FieldTurf or something sportsy like that? (Actually, Grantland, I'm calling dibs on that idea.)

Pretentious, perhaps, but it's not presumptuous to assume that people like to keep things forever. Good writing—good sports writing—should always be remembered. As good as the Internet can be at storing and chronicling things, it will never be as good or as organized as a book on your shelf. The Internet is always changing and moving forward. The basic concept of the Internet is infinite. 

Yes, books are also all the negative things I mentioned before, but they are also finite. They are something tangible. You can hold a book. There's a certain romanticism and security about holding something in your hand. Yes, we hold an iPad or a Kindle, but that doesn't evoke the same feeling as cracking open a book. Having a folder in a cloud somewhere called "great sports writing" or "important world events" is not the same as having those stories bound in a book on your shelf. It might be better, in many ways, but it's certainly not the same.

When my daughter was born, our old neighbor gave us a book called Whose Mouse Are You? The day we got it, I opened that hard cover with the cracked spine and loose pages and saw my name, written in pencil. This was my book from when I was first learning how to read; she kept it, at the preschool she ran, for more than 30 years.

I gave the book to my daughter and before my son was born, we started reading the book every night before bed. The story is about a little mouse who saves his (or her) family from a cat and a trap and other perils of life as a mouse, all the while wishing for a new brother. "My brother's mouse…he's brand new" is how the book ends. We read it every night, even though her little brother is far from brand new anymore. 

The pages are getting more and more bent by the day and I've started to think about finding a bookbinder to fix up the spine. Sure, we could download the Whose Mouse Are You? Official iPad App, if there is such a thing. We could read it on Kindle or watch someone else read it on YouTube. But that's not the plan. The plan is to make sure my daughter keeps this book forever. Books, in their physical form, will always be important.

(As a side note and another column for another time: I wish the NCAA, which recently banned schools from sending printed media guides to recruits, understood this.)

So it would be easy to rip Grantland for taking what's free online (I know some of the content will be new, but I'm speaking more to their existing business model) and putting it into a basketball skin to charge us 20 bucks for it. But I can't. I like the basic idea of this. I think more media companies should do it.

Sure, if I want "a full-color book featuring original artwork and a host of print exclusives," I'll go over to my shelf and pick up the Free Darko books or any of the other sports anthologies that have come before this. Grantland's problem—and the reason people may be mocking this project online—is the air of superiority that wafts off the screen (and soon, pages). They had a countdown clock on the front page of ESPN.com when the site launched. They named the site Grantland for crying out loud. I can't believe any of these were Simmons' ideas—I want to believe he's much savvier than that—but there is a sense with Grantland of doing things differently that only exists in the minds of the people doing those things (and, as we've seen, not all that differently). That's the problem with Grantland, and to a larger degree, ESPN. That, and the footnotes.

But this isn't about what's wrong with Grantland. This is, in a way, what's right about it. Respect for the printed word is something we should remember. You have a tendency to take more time and care with your words when you know they can't just be deleted or corrected with the click of a few keys before pressing an "Update" button.

Books can still mean something to people. Garish packaging or not, this is a good thing.