Happy New Year people…
Well, I haven’t been able to get enthused about reading for a long time. Still collecting though. I’ve picked up a several new books since that last long time ago post. L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt’s The Carnelian Cube, the Northwest of Earth collection from C.L. Moore, another collection, The Menace from Earth by Mr. Heinlein and currently a signed, inscribed non-fiction work Lost Continents from L. Sprague de Camp is on the way. I also picked up a seemingly near-new jacket for The Porcelain Magician by Frank Owen. I say ‘seemingly’ because the thing had a rather severe crease right down the center of the spine. So severe in fact, that it promptly fell in two when extracting it from the shipping tube. I was very disappointed, but thankfully the vendor was great and gave me a full refund. I’m going to send it away to a restorer to get a quote on repairing it. I haven’t had much luck with dust jackets lately as the jacket for The Menace from Earth has some ball-point pen writing on the front. It was invisible in the auction image and the seller never mentioned it. The markings are faint, but obvious to any cursory examination, and unmistakeable to a collector. I think I’ll send that away for a restoration price too. It’s a real shame as the book and the jacket are in very good condition otherwise. Still, the restoration route could be interesting.
Also I’ve been expanding my Gene Wolfe collection. I succumbed and picked up PS Publishing’s limited (100 copies) and slip-cased first edition of The Very Best of Gene Wolfe, as well as the similarly limited and slip-cased first edition (250 copies) of Kerosina’s Storeys from the Old Hotel. In addition, I picked up The Shadow of the Torturer series from Innovation Comics, based on Gene Wolfe’s legendary books. I never knew this existed until I ran into it on eBay. Apparently it was supposed to run to 6 issues, but only made it to three. I wish it ran to completion. It’s quite good.
Also, I’ve been part of a book myself!! When I was president of the Seoul Photo Club, back in 2009 we embarked on something called The Seoul Metro Project. The fruits of which you can find on Magcloud. It’s one photo from every stop in the Seoul subway system (over 400!) pulled together into a beautiful coffee table photo book in which I contributed a section on Line 3. Many thanks must go to my good friend, Seoul Photo Club stalwart and one of the finest photographers I know, Flash Parker whose brainchild the whole thing was and who put the book together. I recently wrote an article outlining the background to the project that will be published in next (February 2012) edition of Groove Korea magazine.
I’ll get some images of those offending jackets up before I send them away. I don’t know when that might be, as I’m in an English language immersion camp in the countryside north of Seoul at present and my books are of course not with me. I’ll have another three weeks out here but maybe I’ll have time in my fleeting weekend visits home to snap something. We’ll see…
These two I expect to be here in about three weeks. The problems with the lost Lost Continents has made me think a little more on insured, tracked shipping. While I was very disappointed to not have received the book, it is the only book of the near-100 I have had posted to me over the past three years that hasn’t arrived. I figure that the money I lost (about $100 including postage) on this non-arrival is much, much less than the money I would have spent insuring and tracking all books of a similar or greater value. Of course, significantly valuable items of about, I dunno… $150 or more should be insured, but the vast majority of my books haven’t been worth that much.
The Great Gnome Press Science Fiction Odyssey 