Not Last, Maybe Least

I began my first post at Andy Unedited with these words: “To write a blog, you need to have an interesting personality or provocative opinions. I have neither.”

Nine years and over four hundred blogs later, it’s still true. My kids nicknamed me Eeyore. I reckon I have the emotional range of a turnip. And I am at my most passionate when it comes to commas.

Although February 12, 2016,

i-8cf98d2de7fe02b06ca7513781f9cc43-Andy's full shelves.jpg

is my last day at IVP after over forty years as a full-time employee and thousands of IVP books published, by the good graces of folks here at IVP, I shall continue Andy Unedited. I will, however, now don the guise of a guest blogger.

I have enjoyed the opportunity to inflict such opinions as I have on an unsuspecting public. So if there are topics you think I should address, continue to let me know. Books, ideas, publishing, writing, history, editing, leadership, scholarship–all these and more continue to be important to me, and I think important to society.

But blogging needs one other element–fun. And as long as that lasts, so shall Andy Unedited.

Photo credit: Cindy Bunch. My IVP office before I packed up my library of 2,500 IVP books and shipped them off to Christian students and seminary libraries in the Majority World.

The Future of Editing 2: Who Editors Need to Be

For me, editing has always been about loving words and loving ideas. Learning and thinking will always be important. Yet in a technology-saturated world with an ever-accelerating rate of change, we don’t know exactly what books and reading will be like in the future. We have a better idea, however, of who editors need to be in the future.
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The Future of Editing 1: Everyone Needs an Editor

Jim Sire, my predecessor at IVP as editorial director, loved to tell the story of a book review he had drafted. He showed it to Paul to look over before he sent it off to a journal.

Paul told him, “Here you say the book has merit but wasn’t evocative enough. What you actually write, however, is, ‘The book isn’t suggestive enough.’ That actually has a very different meaning than the one I think you intend! I doubt you mean that the book fails to contain adequate sexual innuendo.”
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Books That Can Change Lives

On November 3, I was honored at the annual InterVarsity Fall Leadership Meetings in recognition of my 42 years with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and my upcoming retirement in February. About seventy key people from across the country in InterVarsity attended. After hearing some generous comments from Interim President Jim Lundgren and IVP Publisher Bob Fryling, they let me offer a few words. Here is what I said.

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