Those of you wishing you could afford $400 for the magnificent book, Artists Inspired by HP Lovecraft, may be in luck. The book is on sale for the rest of July. You can pick it up from Amazon for $276.50, but given that you are paying that much you might as well drop $295 direct to Centipede Press, because they’ll get to keep a much bigger slice of the cash that way.
Books
Expedition Report
Well, I have done Camden, I have done Covent Garden, and the sum total of money that I have spent on clothes is $0. This is actually a pretty good result. I had an enjoyable day, I got lots of exercise, I tried on several things that I liked, and none of them fitted me. Sometimes days go like that.
Still, I did buy a book, and thereby hangs a tale. I knew which book I wanted, and as I happened to be in Camden I popped into Waterstones. They had the book, and it was in a 3-for-2 offer. I spent half an hour in the store trying to find 2 other books in the offer that I wanted, and failed. So I gave up, and went to Forbidden Planet instead, where the book I wanted was £3 off instead, and I bought it. Silly things, 3-for-2 offers.
Another Victim
I see from Ellen Kushner’s LiveJournal that there is to be a Finnish translation of the very wonderful (and World Fantasy Award winning) Thomas the Rhymer. You are in for a treat, Finnish friends. And now I can start conspiring to get Ellen and Delia to Finncon…
An Ideal Bookstore?
Glenda Larke may have found one, in Como. And what is so good about it? The building in which it is located has been around since the 6th Century. That’s the sort of building that ought to be selling books.
How To Succeed as an Independent Bookseller
Today’s Guardian book blog has a post about how the London Review Bookshop has managed to succeed in a commercial environment that has seen other independent bookstores closing all over the place. It is written by someone involved in managing the store, and is pretty self-congratulatory in places, but this bit in particular rang true:
More than anything, the LRB shop’s defining achievement of the last five years, if I may modestly boast, has been the events programme. It has established the shop as a place where literary and political debate can flourish week after week, with American, European and Arabic writers and commentators, as well as British. We have held over 250 such evenings, and very labour-intensive they are too…
That (as Mr. Punch so famously said) is the way to do it.
Tentacle Porn for Cars
I’d buy one of these for Jeff VanderMeer in a shot, if it wasn’t advertising someone else’s book.
The Economics of Retailing
There’s an interesting blog post over at The Economist today. The author is thinking aloud about the fact that music retailing has become increasingly flattened, with no one act achieving the same superstar status of people like The Beatles, David Bowie or Michael Jackson, whereas book retailing has gone in the opposite direction, with JK Rowling being only the latest superstar author and every publisher looking for the next big name.
I suspect that the reason for this may be quite simple: music is now predominantly sold online, whereas books are still predominantly sold in shops. The business model of the bookstore works best when you have a small number of titles to sell (especially as the most popular books are often sold through outlets other than specialist bookstores). As I said to David Barnett recently, the SF industry is well aware of independent publishers and is happy to promote them. However, it is still too hard for people to buy the books.
Cheryl the Obscure
The Feminist SF blog is having a vote to discover the top ten obscure works of feminist science fiction. My own view is that if a book wins a popular vote poll of most obscure books then it can’t, by definition, be obscure. However, maybe the ones that get least votes will win.
But something else struck me in reading the list of contenders: 9 of them had been reviewed in Emerald City (7 by me, 2 by Juliet). I’m pleased to know that I reviewed a bunch of books that are now thought of as good but obscure.
And my tip for the top: The Fortunate Fall by Raphael Carter – absolutely fabulous book (and thanks again to Roz for recommending it).
Coulthart on Cthulhu
Today it is John Coulthart’s turn to talk about the Lovecraft art book:
Calling this a book is like calling the Great Pyramid of Cheops a pile of stones, technically accurate but the words somewhat fail to convey the existential reality. This is the heaviest book I’ve ever come across, 400 pages of heavy-duty art paper at BIG size. (Amazon gives the dimensions as 16.1 x 12.6 x 2.3 inches or 409 x 320 x 580 mm.)
Which is, of course, one reason why it is so expensive. But it is lovely too. John has a bunch of illustrations in his post, include a Geiger double-spread.
Meta Conversation
A few links about the Internet, long tails and the like:
- Victoria Strauss on the rise and rise of e-book freebies
- Megan McArdle on the long tail in music
- Alex Massie on why what Megan says also applies to journalism
- And danah boyd on the non-feeding of trolls
Megan’s piece cheered me up no end as I now feel a lot less guilty about not knowing who the modern music stars are. And danah’s perhaps explains why I steer clear of a lot of the flame wars these days.
We Can Haz Cafe!
I have email from Alan Beatts of Borderlands Books. Planning permission for the cafe has been granted. Alan says:
The online petition was a great help and I really appreciate you doing it for us. The help and support we’ve received from the community has been just wonderful.
And many thanks from me as well, as I will enjoy using that cafe quite a lot. Well done, blogosphere!
Tentacles Galore
Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s art column in io9 has a new feature on the utterly wonderful The Art of Lovecraft: Artists Inspired by Lovecraft, including a gallery of images from the book and interviews with luminaries such as Bob Eggleton, John Picacio and John Coulthart. On his own blog Jeff has added a few outtakes that didn’t quite make it into the io9 column. Tentacles everywhere. (And yes, it is Cephalopod Friday).
Indie Welcome Here
Today’s Guardian Book Blog has a post by David Barnett complaining that “independent” writers don’t get the same respect that independents get in the music and movies business. He says:
The literary world only bestows acceptance, it seems, on those who are published through the traditional avenues. Independent and small presses get short shrift – national newspaper supplements seem loath to review indie books, the big high street sellers won’t stock them, unless the books are about the tough lives of mill girls or histories of public house names, which can be shoved on a shelf marked “local interest”.
This struck me as odd, because in the science fiction community small presses are thriving. They are winning awards all over the place, and you can find their books in major chains. I’m sure that if Michael Dirda or Mike Berry wanted to review a book from, say, Small Beer, Night Shade or Tachyon, then there would be no problem with their doing so. Then it hit me. Barnett is talking about mainstream literature in Britain. And like most mainstream literary people he assumes that his little part of the wider literary community is the entire literary world. Sad really.
UK Bathed in Sunshine, Few Casualties
It was a remarkably nice day in London today, for a variety of reasons. Unaccountably, given that today was the first day of Wimbledon, the weather was excellent. As a result I spent much of the day sat in the roof garden at the Clutes’ talking about books with the assembled multitudes and actually getting sunburned. And there were multitudes as well, because John and Judith put on a little reception for those attendees at the recent Critics Masterclass who were still in the UK and didn’t have to rush off to work. I met Jonathan McCalmont for the first time, and discovered that he has a fine new idea for a blog – Fruitless Recursion specializes in “discussing works of criticism and non-fiction relating to the SF, Fantasy and Horror genres.” That one has gone straight into my Google Reader account.
I had an interesting conversation with Gary Wolfe and M. John Harrison about fan space at the end of books (as opposed to in the interstices of series) that deserves a much longer post when I have time.
The rest of the day was spent doing touristy things with Gary Wolfe, Karen Burnham and Karen’s husband, Curtis. I managed to go to Camden Market without buying anything. I have, however, picked up issue #1 of Paul Cornell’s new Captain Britain and MI:13 comic, and Sean Williams sequel to Saturn Returns.
Um, Paul. If the comic is called Captain Britain, no one is really going to believe that you’ve killed Brian off in issue #1, are they?
Tigana
One of the interesting things about catching up with Guy Gavriel Kay’s back catalog is that you get to read all of the enthusiastic blurbs about about a book being the best fantasy ever, when you know that Kay has kept on getting better and better. Not that Tigana is a bad book. It is, as far as I’m concerned, a very good one, and commendably different from your average doorstop fantasy novel. It also boasts a cast of characters who are what used to be called “freedom fighters” and who these days would doubtless be categorized as “terrorists.”
Books from the Replicator
Print-on-Demand is due to come to the high street in the UK later this year thanks to Blackwells. The bookstore chain is set to install “an ATM for books” in one of its branches (yet to be decided, but I think Charing Cross Road is a good bet, as is their HQ in Oxford). So you’ll be able to stick your credit card in the machine and select a book from over 400,000 titles (mainly from Lightning Source), and a few minutes later a brand new, freshly printed book will be available for you to take away.
All we need now is for the machine to be able to produce “Earl Grey, hot, black” as well, and it will be perfect. (Or perhaps “grande mocha no whip”.)
But here’s my question: will the books smell newly printed? I don’t know what “newly printed” smells like, but I have a sneaking suspicion that a good smell would be a killer marketing gimmick.
More Theories
OK, so maybe the guys in Italy were wrong. Maybe is isn’t evolution that makes men gay. Maybe it is reading “emasculating” YA literature. Ah well, maybe Mr. McCain can promise to make a priority of burning all of those politically incorrect YA novels (and their authors) when he gets into office so that America will once again be a country in which it is safe for little boys to grow up.
Visual Humor
I don’t often do the “you must click this link” thing without telling you what is on the other end, but I fear that if I did with this one it would spoil the joke. Suffice it to say that it is a literature-related graphjam, and it had me in fits of giggles. Entirely work safe.
Priest Re-issue to Watch Out For
Via Mr. Mumpsimus I discover that the New York Review of Books‘ publishing arm is to re-issue Chris Priest’s novel, The Inverted World. This is one of the cleverest science fiction novels I have ever read. It won’t be to everyone’s taste, because it is really hard to figure out what is going on, but if you like that sort of reading experience then I wholeheartedly recommend the book.
On Age Banding
As some of you will know, there’s a huge fuss going on in the UK at the moment about a plan by some publishers to put stickers on children’s books indicating what age of reader the book is aimed at. I’ve just been invited to join a Facebook group protesting about this, and right now I’m not going to. I thought I would share my reasons.
Continue reading