Dov Alfon

Four things I do as I try to understand the culture we live in:

1. I'm the chief editor of  Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Dvir, Israel's leading publisher.

2. I'm the administrator of The Israel Project on Flickr.

3. I interview young artists of all kinds in my TV show, Nispah Tarbut. The third season is currently on air, Saturdays 23:15, Channel 2 (Keshet). 

4. Sometimes, I just gaze through the window.

Five key places in my distant history:

1. Livorno – a seashore town in Tuscany, Italy, Livorno was a leading center of Jewish study and mysticism, particularly under the influence of Rabbi Joseph ben Emanuel Ergas (1685-1732) and other proponents of the Kaballah. This is where my paternal roots are. Since my late grand parents flew Livorno before WW2, not a single generation of our family was born on the same continent.

2. Sousse – a port on the east coast of Tunisia, chosen by Montgomery as a landing point for the Allied forces before the El Alamein battle. I was born here in 1961. I was four months old when my parents left Tunisia for France, and I never went back.

3. Paris – the capital of France and the most beautiful city on Earth. I was brought up here and hated every moment of it. I've written a short memoir of this period that Yeshua Knaz was kind enough to include in his (otherwise excellent) anthology, "The Best Writing From 75 Years of  Ha'aretz" (Schocken Press, 1996)

4. Ashdod -  an Israeli port and the place chosen by the Jewish Agency  for my parents when we made our Aliya, 1972. From the 63 children photographed then in my school yearbook, only 4 pupils finished high school seven years later, while 5 died before their majority. I've written a lot about this period, but never published it.

5.  Glilot  – the military base I served at in 1980-1982,  leading to my discovery of  information gathering and data communication. I wrote about its influence in this YNET article.

 Four things I'm not sure I understand:

1. Authenticity

2. Beauty

3. French culture

4. Reality

Four things I believe I dig:

1. Magazines

2. Fictional heroes

3. Fashion

4. How to do interesting things with words

Five figures to better understand my day-job:

1. For every 10 books I publish, 8 will never cover their costs.

2. We have a catalogue of about 6,300 titles in our different imprints, and we publish a new book every two days. According to Publishers Weekly, we're the #18 publishing house in the world.

3. 1 mega-seller like The Da-Vinci Code can by itself finance a big publishing house for three to four years.

4. Nobody can predict a mega-seller. It develops by itself, generally without any advertising, growing from mouth-to-ear to a global media phenomenon in 3-4 months.

5. Since the birth of the Internet, earnings from best-sellers in the US have quadrupled, the number of new books published in the English language in a year has doubled to 320,000 titles and the world book publishing market has grown by 30%, to 26 billion dollars a year.

Two gadgets I'll bring along:

I've been asked to bring my favorites gizmos with me to the camp. I'm not very gadget-minded, but I'll show you my Kyocera digital mini-camera and my Batman alarm-clock.

More about me:

Dov Alfon Flickr's page

אודות דב אלפון

Four quotations of Voltaire I use a lot:

1. If we do not find anything pleasant, at least we shall find something new (Candide, 1759)

2. All styles are good except the boring kind (L’Enfant prodigue, 1736)

3. God is always on the side of the heaviest battalions (Letter to M. le Riche, 1770).

4. This is no time for making new enemies. (On being asked to renounce the Devil, on his deathbed).

Comments:

From ofersha - 3/28/06 10:56 PM

From Shimon Schocken [24.147.19.36] - 1/9/06 8:16 PM