Book Hauls!

[Vertigo]

I hope that George Allan England one is better than his Darkness and Dawn attempt at SF; one of the worst, if not the worst, SF offerings I've ever read.

 

[j d worthington]

I hope that George Allan England one is better than his Darkness and Dawn attempt at SF; one of the worst, if not the worst, SF offerings I've ever read.

Hmmm. If Darkness and Dawn was anywhere near the worst sf offering you've read, you've not seen a lot of what I've seen.....

While I've been awaiting the arrival of my copies of the Variorum Lovecraft, I wasn't really expecting to receive anything else from HP... and then I get home at 10 this evening, and find a stack of packages from just that source... and no Variorum Lovecraft! Ah, well, patience, as they say, is a virtue.....

In the meantime, these are the offerings I found on the front doorstep:

Dreams of Ys and Other Invisible Worlds, by Jonathan Thomas
Lovecraft: An American Allegory: Selected Essays on H. P. Lovecraft, by Donald R. Burleson
Dark Equinox and Other Tales of Lovecraftian Horror, by Ann K. Schwader
Letters to Robert Bloch and Others, by H. P. Lovecraft*
The Rise, Fall, and Rise of the Cthulhu Mythos, by S. T. Joshi (a revised edition of his earlier history of the genre)
The Witch at Sparrow Creek, by Josh Kent
Lovecraftian Proceedings No. 1 (Papers from NecronomiCon, Providence, 2013)
The Bloody Tugboat and Other Witcheries, by Robert H. Waugh
The Bleeding Edge: Dark Barriers, Dark Frontiers, ed. by William H. Nolan and Jason V. Brock
The Book of Jade: A New Critical Edition, by Park Barnitz, compiled by David E. Schultz and Michael J. Abolafia
The Witch of the Wood, by Michael Aranovitz
Cult of the Dead and Other Weird and Lovecraftian Tales, by Lois H. Gresh
Bone Idle in the Charnel House: A Collection of Weird Stories, by Rhys Hughes
A House of Hollow Wounds, by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.
Necronomicon: The Manuscript of the Dead, by Antonis Antoniades, trans. from the Greek by Maria Mountokalaki and Elizabeth Georgiades
A Confederacy of Horrors, by James Robert Smith
The Lovecraft Coven, by Donald Tyson
Dead Reckonings #s 16 and 17
Monstrous Aftermath, by W. H. Pugmire
The Crimson Tome, by K. A. Opperman
Spectral Realms #s 2 and 3
Lovecraft Annual #9
Fifteen Years of Hippocampus Press: 2000-2015, by Derrick Hussey, S. T. Joshi, and David E. Schultz

* Said "others" including Natalie H. Wooley, Robert & Mrs. Elmer Nelson, William F. Anger, Kenneth Sterling, Donald A. Wollheim, Wilson Shepherd, and Willis Conover, Jr. It also includes writings by most of these, from verse to essays to short fiction.

 

[Randy M.]

Wow. All I found on my front doorstep was a water bill.

Nice haul, J.D. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on each as you get a chance to read it.


Randy M.

 

[dask]

Um, how big is your front doorstep J.D.?

 

[Elvraie]

Yesterday, I went for a book hunt in the rather numerous charity shops in my small town. There, I found the hardback edition of Wise Man 's Fear by Rothfuss for £1,50, then for one pound I could get those in another shop:
-Salem's lot
-Danse Macabre (Both by S. King)
-An old edition of the Gulliver's Travels
-Travelling Light (take a trip with Ireland's top women Writers)
-A demon in my view by R. Rendell

 

[dask]

The library had a book sale this week, picked this up for a quarter:


Also got Greatest Short Stories, no editor listed. This is the 1940 edition of a six volume set of hardbacks originally published in 1915 by P.F. Collier & Son. It does appear to have been doctored up for the later edition as stories with copyright dates much later than 1915 are sprinkled through out, which is just fine with me. However, were stories from the earlier edition dropped to make room for them? Hope not but not much I can do about it now. The first three volumes concentrate on American stories, volumes 4, 5, and 6 on European, here being mostly British, French, and Russian, with at least one with a German sounding name and one with a Scandinavian. I have no room for these, so why did I get them? First off, for .25¢ per volume I could hardly walk away from them, and secondly, I'm not going to keep them. Since my step-dad has finally agreed to move into assisted living fulltime I'm going to donate the set to the facility he's going to live in and read them when I visit. Oh, I'll still visit in the conventional sense, but you know what I mean.

 

[BigBadBob141]

I was about four fifths through "Worldwar: In The Balance" by Harry Turtledove when I found that about sixty pages were repeats from the start of the book!
This is very annoying, the copy I have is a rather battered paperback I got from Amazon Marketplace, as it was only 1p plus postage I don't think it's worth the effort pursuing a refund, now I have to wait for another copy from elsewhere.
Has anybody else come across a similar binding error?

 

[dask]

I had an Agatha Christie mystery where the ink ran out and rendered a good chunk of the book unreadable. Had to buy another copy.

 

[Vertigo]

I wonder if books are like stamps and the value of books with faults is actually higher for collectors?

 

[Bick]

Probably, if its a Henry James first edition, probably not if its an Ace mass market pb.

 

[J-Sun]

Yeah, I do believe printing faults enhance collectibility (why else value first editions with more typos more highly than later, corrected, printings?) but it has to be manufacturing faults. I can't think of a single way damage through time and use can enhance the value of a book unless, to vary Bick's idea, Henry James spilled coffee on it - or, seriously, if he annotated the volume in the margins - a famous person messing up a book is valuable; an ordinary plebe doing it ruins it.

(I don't grasp the logic of collecting - I just want a book that's not missing pages and doesn't flop open to some particular page - basically, I want it to feel good in the hand and look good on the shelf and, beyond that, I don't care.[*] But that's my understanding of the actual state of "true" collecting.)

[*] That's from a purchasing viewpoint. On the other hand, whatever condition I get them in, I'm nearly fanatical about never making that condition any worse.

Well, and I hate highlighting/underlining and dogearing and stickers and spine creases and... okay, I'm a nut. But not a collector nut and this is OT, anyway.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

We had some time to kill so we went to the one halfway decent used book store in the Chattanooga area and got a few things. The only one of SFF interest was Relatives (1973) by George Alec Effinger.

 

[BigBadBob141]

Anyone one have a 1920s American stamp where the aircraft on it was printed upside down.
In which case I'll take it off your hands!

 

[dask]

For some reason obscured by time I stopped collecting this series with the 1986 volume. Feel fortunate to have found this---free at the library---to add to my collection.

 

[biodroid]

So I received a company bonus for hard work I then splurged on 2 Jim Butcher books, Fool Moon and Grave Peril and the first 2 Alex Verus books by Benedict Jacka. Hope they are good. Oh and they are for the Kindle so no hard copy.

 

[Bugg]

True Names and Other Dangers by Vernor Vinge
Up Against It by M. J. Locke
Pelquin's Comet by Ian Whates
Winterfair Gifts (Vorkosigan novella) by Lois McMaster Bujold
Fade Out by Patrick Tilley - read this about 30 years ago and fancied reading it again
Hammered by Elizabeth Bear
Trust Your Eyes by Linwood Barclay
Never Look Away by Linwood Barclay
Stormbird (War of the Roses Book 1) by Conn Iggulden
Schismatrix Plus by Bruce Sterling - Have wanted to read this for ages

Damn you, Amazon

 

[Vince W]

While on holiday the ship I was on had a book exchange, so I picked up:

Greenthieves by Alan Dean Foster
Insurrection by David Weber and Steve White
and several Star Trek novels all for the price of free.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

An independent new book store recently opened in Chattanooga, so we paid a visit. Among several items purchased, those of SFF interest were a collection of Clark Ashton Smith (a Penguin edition, no less, with footnotes and all) and a collection of previously uncollected or unpublished pieces (not all fiction) by Shirley Jackson.

 

[Extollager]

Henry James: A Life in Letters, recommended by Chrons veteran Wilum Pugmire, just arrived. This library discard hardcover in very good condition looks enticing although I wonder if I should start reading it now, given that I have so far read only one of James's novels (The Portrait of a Lady) and a few novellas and short stories. I think I will start it anyway. I feel like the time for Henry James has come -- that he is the major more-or-less-new-to-me writer I want to tackle now. When you decide for a project like that, you are also (probably) deciding against some other reading projects. It looks like it's to be James, and not Ariosto etc.

 

[Vince W]

Astérix le Gaulois and Astérix la Serpe d'or by R. Goscinny and A. Uderzo from La Grande Collection. They are absolutely massive. Much bigger than the regular portfolios. I'm going to need to find a bigger shelf to keep these on.