Taking Wing

Contr'un

Taking Wing…Once Again

April 11, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
It’s been an up-and-down ride for Corvus Editions, in its first, exploratory year. But a combination of my growing confidence in the general soundness of the project and my growing dissatisfaction with the options have finally pushed me to “quit the day job” at Borders, and give Corvus another year—this time as a full-time business. I know things have been rather quiet on that front, as I’ve been reinventing myself and the business in a variety of ways. But I’ve been working steadily at new pamphlets, attending book-fairs, finding new supplier and honing some new skills. I expect the full […]
Corvus Distribution

Taking Wing: Games We Can’t Win

July 19, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
It is often said, in justification of the opportunities for monopoly, which our present business arrangements afford, that it is an encouragement to enterprise; and, that without such encouragement, all men would become drones and idlers.—Joshua King Ingalls, “Competition.” The model of competition that presently has us in its grip really comes pretty close to to that “inhuman struggle for the mastery, which characterizes all grades of business, under existing social conditions,” of which Ingalls complains. Aside from the obvious big-fish-eaten-by-bigger-fish stuff that is playing out in so many areas of business, at the level of the firm, one of […]
Corvus Distribution

Taking Wing: Dead end streets

July 6, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
Back in December of last year, in the midst of the “conflation” debates, I posted a couple of articles about the retail book industry: “Who benefits most economically from state centralization?” and “there’s nothing wrong with competition.” In them, I talked a bit about the relative merits of the “big-box” and “small-box” models of bookselling, and started to talk about two competing visions of how “competition” can be thought about as an economic good. It’s tempting to relate the two models of competition to Dyer Lum’s distinction between “militant” and “industrial” types: on the one hand, we have the centralists’ […]