cosmopolis

For sale -- sold

Testing out the used books market, I hauled to Myopic Books today the following treasures:

--Best American Travel Writing 2002, review copy

--Katharine Briggs, The Vanishing People: Fairy Lore and Legends (a nick or two)

--Women of Wonder: The Contemporary Years, edited by Pamela Sargent (trade paper)

--Robert Coover, The Public Burning (a nick or two)

--O: The Intimate History of the Female Orgasm (dull)

--Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect

--F. Sionil Jose, The Samsons (trade paper)

--Juan Ramon Jimenez, Platero and I (Texas)

--William F. Nolan, ed., The Pseudo-People: Androids in Science Fiction (beautiful, but worth zip)

--Evan Connell, The White Lantern (more nicks)

--Matthew Klein, Con Ed (thriller)

--Michael Martone, ed., A Place of Sense: Essays in the Search of the Midwest (review copy)

--David Leeming, The Oxford Companion to World Mythology (Folio premium)

--Richard Fortey, Life (oversize illustrated book published and given as a premium by the Folio Society)

Later the same day:

They rejected four books: the Connell, the Jose, Women of Wonder and, weirdly, Life. I was offered $32 in cash or $34 in credit. Naturally I took the credit.

Avram Davidson, in memoriam

In our senescence, we revisit our youth. Found in a box my never-published first literary piece, on my hero Avram Davidson, nonpariel short story writer, devout Jew, total fuck-up. It was 1986, and I was trying to launch my career with a Rediscovery for Book World. My chosen venue was "Crimes and Chaos," a volume of nonfiction by Davidson published as a paperback original in 1962 and promptly forgotten, which is not to say anyone noticed it, ever. But the pieces -- about the Triangle fire, the sinking of the General Slocum, the adventures of Jack the Ripper -- were as good as Liebling or Joseph Mitchell. I made my case in the first half, then wrote about how Davidson had destroyed his career, and was now dying in a veterans' home in Washington state. "Too downbeat," my friend and Book World editor Michael Dirda responded. I rewrote it, shortened it, to no avail. The acting editor of Book World, Alice Digilio, had no interest in such a piece, and truthfully, why should she? Weep not for writers. I also note that I said in one of the drafts that I had spent $50 for Crimes and Chaos, the equivalent of perhaps $250 now. There are at least a dozen copies for sale online, most cheaper than what I paid. Alice Digilio became a Metro reporter, left the paper, and disappeared.

Top this, Jim O'Brien.

And then I read ...

A Place of Sense: Essay in Search of the Midwest, edited by Michael Martone (Iowa, 1988).

There's a review slip inside, which must mean I got the book free when published. After a decade or so, I trucked it from Washington to San Francisco, then to another location in San Francisco, then to a third location in San Francisco, then to the East Bay, then to Chicago. The carbon footprint on this sucker is immense. 

Last night, rearranging things, it popped up in a box. Now I live in the Midwest. Was it time to read these essays by Louise Erdrich, Michael Rosen, Michael Martone and four others? The book met its moment. Thirty minutes later, I was done. The most notable essay was David Hamilton's on his unnamed Iowa hometown during his youth in the 1960s. It covers the expected territory, broken down by geography (the teenage club, the school, his family farm) and subject (traffic, Easter, integration). On death: "Wrecked cars were our memento mori." Sloppiness, stupidity, suicide wishes? Unfortunately, he doesn't speculate. 

Other than that, I saw nothing memorable. I think I can finally let this book go. Someone else can carry it around for the next couple of decades.

Disappearing Bookstores I

Bookstores and newspapers are in an unhappy race to see which can disappear first. In Detroit, the newspapers have decided they won't do home delivery on the low-interest, low-ad weekdays. It's the next step on the path to oblivion. Hartford, meanwhile, seems one of the first large cities to go bookstore-free. "The person looking to drift in from the street and get lost in a wonderland of books has nowhere to go, except out of town or online," the Hartford Courant laments. The last survivor is the Jumping Frog bookstore, which has gone down from 100,000 books to 6,000 and now concentrates on non-book gift items. "It's not unlike the story all over America," Steve Fischer, executive director of the New England Independent Booksellers Association, told the paper. "A lot of downtowns haven't — in some instances, for the past 10, 15 years — been able to support a general-interest bookstore."

Now THIS is an inaugural poem

New Year, 2009

Venus in the arc of the young moon
is a boat in the arms of a bay,
the sky clear to infinity
but for the trailing gossamer
of a transatlantic plane. 

The old year and the old era dead,
pushed burning out to sea
bearing the bones of heroes, tyrants,
ideologues, thieves and deceivers
in a smoke of burning money.
 
The dream is over. Glaciers will melt.
Seas will rise to swallow golden islands.
Somewhere a volcano may whelm a city,
earth shake its skin like an old horse,
a hurricane topple a town to rubble.

Yet tonight, under the cold beauty
of the moon and Venus, something like hope begins,
as if times can turn, the world change course,
as if truth can speak, good men come to power, 
and words have meaning again.

Maybe black-hearted boys in love with death
won’t blow themselves and us to smithereens.
Maybe guns will fall silent, the powerful
cease slaughtering the weak, the rich
will not gorge as the poor starve.
 
Hope spoke the word ‘Yes’, the word ‘we’, the word ’can’,
and a thousand British teenagers at Poetry Live*
rose to their feet in a single yell of joy –
black, white, Christian, Muslim, Jew,
faithful and faithless. We are all in this together.
Ie. gallwn ni. **

Gillian Clarke, National Poet of Wales 2009

 * A day of poetry readings for school students
 ** Yes, we can. Welsh

Books Missed, Part X

I bid on an inscribed copy of Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti's masterwork, from Bloomsbury Auctions:

146. Canetti (Elias) Crowds and Power, first English edition , inscribed "To Margaret D. Waterhouse/ in very old friendship and affection/ from Elias Canetti." ,original cloth, dust-jacket, a near fine copy, 8vo, 1962. est. £600 – £800

The book was from UK dealer Bernard Shapero, who had listed it at $2,150. This was apparently too steep a price, and he consigned it to auction. With the pound falling, a bid seemed sensible. But how much? If the bidding would open at half the reserve, or 300 pounds, I figured 500 pounds would at least attract interest. If the book fetched this, I would owe another 20 percent, plus 3 percent, plus shipping. Call it $800.

I had hope. The modern books in the auction mostly went unsold. The Brightfount Diaries -- no bid. Seventeen Aldiss books, including Hothouse, went for 140 pounds. A copy of Auden's Poems from 1930 went for $100, about the price of the box that accompanied it. So I might have had hope.

Nope. The Canetti went for 850 pounds, which means I would have had to pay about $1600, at a minimum, plus postage. Not too far from what Shapero would have sold the book to a dealer for.

Bookmen's Memoirs, Part 1

Frank Swinnerton, The Bookman's London (John Barker, 1969).

Originally published in 1951, this has an introduction by Baker noting that when he began, in the 1920s, conditions were much the same as Swinnerton said existed two decades earlier: "It was said, for example, that if you went to the Trade Counter of the Oxford University Press you could buy a first edition of Alexander Pope at the original price." Publishing and bookselling were cottage industries populated by eccentrics.

Swinnerton, who died in 1982 at the age of 98 is almost completely forgotten; the only one of his 50 books that rings a bell, aside from this one, is Nocturne (1917). His own take was that his best books were "Havest Comedy" and "The Georgian Literary Scene," but added that "I do not regard either one as of lasting importance .... I live in the country, am very lazy, work unwillingly very hard, and have few intolerances."

He writes here about J.M. Dent: "He had an unusually violent temper, which led him to scream alarmingly at members of his staff and address them, his head thrown back and his beard waggling, as 'You donkey!' He never praised; he paid very poorly; he frightened everybody who worked for him; and he one day said wistfully to me (whom he liked), 'I don't know how it is; but when we get anybody who is any good he always leaves us.' "

Sadly, there's not enough of this.

"Cheever: A Life"

Finished the second half of Blake Bailey's forthcoming biography of John Cheever (the childhood and early success of writers is never as interesting, to me, as their fame and inevitable fall). A brilliant work, highly detailed but never without purpose. Cheever was an artist who was a miserable man, a semi-repressed homosexual who was obssessed by sex. One critic said Cheever's writing was a life-long effort to cheer himself up. It didn't work. I didn't know it was possible for a man in his sixties to have so many erections and enjoy them so little.

But the book is funny, too. Jean Stafford tells Cheever at a dinner party to stab John Barth, who was also there: "Your reputation in American literature is very very shaky. God knows what will happen to it, but if you put a knife in his back, you will be immortal." Cheever complains that his last, slight novel isn't very popular: "That I am not on the bestseller list and Ann[e] Tyler is makes me think myself a forgotten creature in the vast cemetery where the living dead of those who have lost their vogue wait out the last, long year of their time on earth. Up yours."

I only had a couple of quibbles: A friend of Cheevers' describes her mother, whom she took to visit the writer in the mid-'60s, as being someone "whose idea of good fiction was Danielle Steel"; this rings an ahistorical note, since Steel didn't start publishing and become popular until the early 1980s. Stathis Orphanos, who reprinted a Cheever story, was not a publisher of "vanity" editions, which sounds like he was doing Cheever a favor. It was just a limited edition. A description of Allan Gurganus as "world-famous" after the publication of Confederate Widow is stretching things a bit, unless you are Allan Gurganus.

The biography is testimony to the fact that only literature lasts. Cheever worries about every other writer getting paid more than him or getting better reviews or more love from the New Yorker. His books, until the end, don't sell well. After his death, he drops off the list of the best contemporary American writers. The academy doesn't care for him. Yet now, finally, a quarter century after his death, he is being reevaluated, a process this biography and the simultaneous publication of his collected stories in the Library of America both reflects and will advance. The future only has time for masterpieces, and that's what Cheever's best turned out to be. Up yours.

Sylvia, by Leonard Michaels

Finished reading for the second time Leonard Michaels' 1992 memoir of his first wife, a suicide. Anyone who has ever been trapped in a crazy relationship will recognize the pull of Sylvia: mad, maddening, alluring, painfully alive and destined to be dead, probably on your watch. Fights begin with inadvertent insults, and go on for hours. The only reason she does not kill him while he sleeps, he thinks, is that then she will be in that unbearable position: alone. The best-known lines in the book are: "It would have been easy to leave Sylvia. Had it been difficult, I might have done it."

The 126-page work is not really about Sylvia -- we learn almost nothing about her past, or why she is the way she is -- but only her effect on the narrator, who tells the tale so flatly he might as well have been writing the year of her death, while still in shock, not 30 years later: "Sylvia could be happy and funny, but it easier to remember the bad times. They were more sensational; also less painful now than remembering what I loved." 

Affecting, yes, but how true is it? The illustrations in this 1992 Mercury House edition are by Sylvia Bloch, lending a strong note of versimilitude. But the book is subtitled "a fictional memoir," while the back cover says it has evolved from "story-length memoir" to "novelistic." Yet it feels like a pure memoir, mixing self-analysis with snippets of journal, and there seems no legal reason to be circumspect. The events happened a long time ago, and Sylvia after all is dead. The latest edition flat-out calls it "a novel" although Diane Johnson, who provides an introduction, doesn't tackle the matter.

 
I scanned the net, could see nothing helpful except this comment on Amazon by reader "littlecatland": Don't know how much of this book is really true but if this is actually a portrait of the writer's ex-wife, orphaned, suicided and leaving no children, it's a miserable way to present her, even if he hated her." Maybe, in the end, this is a story of the revenge of the living on the dead.

The slowdown hits the first edition market

In 2001, Barry Hoffman did a limited edition of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. There's a lithograph on the cover and 24 illustrations by Hoffman, although no slipcase. The limitation is small, only 100 numbered copies, but Vonnegut didn't sign it or provide new material. I don't know what the issue price was, but I assume around $400. That's the price dealers have been charging, at least. At the moment there are three copies online, for $425, $500 and $575.

I once thought about buying a copy when I was literally on my way to see Vonnegut, but decided it was too large a hunk of change -- a decision I mildly regret. But copy No. 9 came up on eBay the other day, and I figured my collection needed it if it were cheap.

The reserve was $99, which I bid. To my surprise, there were no other bidders at all. Vonnegut's stock is still high, and this is his key book, even if a later limited edition. The plunge in the stock and housing markets must really be beginning to bite into first-edition sales. 

Chicago Antiquarian Book Fair

How much I used to look forward to book fairs! We would wait in line, hoping that our Book of Dreams would be waiting at a bargain price, then finally rush inside, pleasantly dazed by the multiplicity of booths and titles. Book fairs, in the old days, was how you learned about books: you would pluck Catcher in the Rye off the shelf of dealer A, see it was X, and then see dealer B selling another copy for less, or maybe more. The dealers priced from the gut, which is to say experience, and the collectors bought the same way. With many dealers, the only time you got a chance to see new stock was at fairs.

The Internet killed book fairs, the way it killed so many other things (blind dates, newspapers). What drove fair purchases was a sense of anxiety: I've never seen this before and may never again. These days, why  would you buy a book at a fair if there were a better or cheaper copy online? 

The Chicago Antiquarian Fair, which took place today in a room at DePaul, limps along, but just barely. I sauntered in a few hours late, confident I hadn't missed any bargains. As always, it was fun to look. One dealer had a large collection of Rivers of America titles, being sold as a set. There was a second state jacket "One Hundred Years of Solitude," cheap at $450 but then Marquez is in decline. There were some Jim Harrison titles I wanted and couldn't afford. 

I remember leaving fairs with a bag of first editions, after which I would repair to some coffee shop and gloat over my purchases. Today, all urgency gone, I bought little: a $10 copy of The Confidential Agent, the first Bantam printing from 1952. I had never seen it before, and it was crisp. I also bought two copies of fine books. But otherwise, my only acquisition was a bunch of authors and titles I wanted to look up online.

Nobel predictions

Kadare or Achebe. You heard it here first.

DFW, now a bestseller

When Wallace died, his books were holding steady, at best, as a collectible. His most recent novel was still Infinite Jest, which was 12 years old. Novels are what really drive collectors, much more than story collections or, worse, essay collections.

The top price for Infinite Jest when he died was $185 for a mint signed copy from Laing Books. Other signed copies were available for less than $100. Now the cheapest signed copy is $895, for a remaindered copy in a crappy jacket. The top price, from modernrare.com, is $2,500.

The Broom of the System, his first book, has always been tough in hardcover, because it was done in a simultaneous paperback. Supposedly there were only 1,300 hardcovers. The top prices for signed copies before he died was $1,500 from Serendipity, a copy from Larry Moskowitz that he had been trying to sell for approximately forever, and a $1,500 copy from Royal. Now Royal has a briefly inscribed copy for $3,500, while Vicarious has a signed proof for $7,500, about seven times the going rate last month.

Even the Girl With Curious Hair, his most common book, has an asking price of $700 for a signed copy.

People will be asking high prices for signed Wallace books into the indefinite future. A signed or, better, inscribed copy of Infinite Jest strikes me as a reasonable purchase, although not at $2,500. It's his key book, and will be celebrated after the journalism has faded.

ABEbooks, the used and rare site, reports that Wallace was their bestselling author in September.

DFW and Updike

The Web is afire with tributes to Wallace; several hark back to the blogger's encounter with the novelist at a reading and how he or she was like a lover spurned because of something Wallace said or didn't say, did or didn't do. He inspired, and dreaded, that sort of reaction. Many emphasize he was their favorite living writer, quickly followed by, "and I'm sure that's true of so many others."

But there is one person, I think, yet to be heard from: John Updike, whose sci-fi novel Toward the End of Time and career in general was taken down many pegs by Wallace in 1998 in a piece that used the deadliest tone: disappointed admiration. (Plus occasional savagery. The line I remembered for a decade, "Has the son of a bitch ever had one unpublished thought?" is, to be fair, quoted from an anonymous friend of Wallace's. Not that he disputes the point.)

Anyway, no one would have thought Updike would outlive Wallace, but he's still here, publishing a sequel to The Witches of Eastwick, which was a much much better book than Toward the End of Time although the same will not be said of this new volume, The Widows of Eastwick. In it, Updike makes his now-familiar complaint:

 "... print doesn't mean to people what it used to, it may be. A considerable number get what news they need off the internet. They don't need much. Sports, celebrities. For self-advertisement there's all this blogging. It's amazing to me that anyone has time to read such crap, but I guess they do."

That'll make him the toast of the blogosphere!

Curiously, Wallace was also a happy luddite: he had very mixed feelings toward TV, and only looked at his email once a week. Go beyond the pop culture affect and he was nearly as retro as Updike. This adds yet another bitter note to his suicide; for all his criticism of what he called the GMN, for Great Male Narcissists (Roth, Mailer, Updike), he, their heir, paid much more attention than the other writers of his generation did.

"What exactly was the whole big Roth hysteria?" he wrote me once. "I'm way behind on my Roth, admittedly. I still reread Portnoy's Complaint, but I flagged in the middle of one of the Zuckerman books and now am like 8 novels behind. The same thing happens to me with Mailer."

Can we get a graduate student to work on Humor in Portnoy and Infinite Jest? Thanks.

DFW and DeLillo

Don DeLillo was David Foster Wallace's hero and mentor. Some day a fine book will be made out of their correspondence. When I first visited Wallace in Normal, Ill., a few months before Infinite Jest was published in 1996, he had letters from DeLillo taped to the cabinets in his kitchen -- the better to reread as he heated up a can of soup for dinner, I guess. (I told him this was going to be perfect fodder for anyone who came to interview him, and he immediately took them down.)

DeLillo, like Gaddis before him, was a prospector mining a lot of the same territory as Wallace. How to hold onto your humanity in the age of technology, for one. "I believed we could know what was happening to us," says Nick in DeLillo's "Underworld." "We were not excluded from our own lives." Wallace loved that passage.

The nexus of fame and commerce, for another. "The market is a strange thing, almost a living organism," comments the crazy, unsuccessful writer in "Great Jones Street," DeLillo's 1973 novel about paranoia, rock music and the ravages of fame. "It changes, it palpitates, it grows, it excretes. It sucks things in and then spews them up. It's a living wheel that turns and crackles. The market accepts and rejects. It loves and kills."

Wallace was determined to resist this. He wanted to be read, but didn't want to be a star. He had trouble with fans. He would mumble and move on. He was interested in a lot of things, but really believed only in a few, starting with fiction. Fiction, he once said, is "one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion -- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated."

 

Maybe he asked too much of fiction. Maybe it failed him in the end, and there was nothing left. He always knew that survival was a random thing. Witness the scene in one of the stories in "Hideous Men," where there's Pop Quiz #4:

 

"Two late-stage terminal drug addicts sat up against an alley's wall with nothing to inject and no means and nowhere to go or be. Only one had a coat. It was cold, and one of the terminal drug addicts' teeth chattered and he sweated and shook with fever. He seemed gravely ill. He smelled very bad. He sat up against the wall with his head on his knees.

 

"This took place in Cambridge MA in an alley behind the Commonwealth Aluminum Can Redemption Center on Massachusetts Avenue in the early hours of 12 January 1993. The terminal drug addict with the coat took off the coat and scooted over up close to the gravely ill terminal drug addict and took and spread the coat as far as it would go over the both of them and then scooted over some more and got himself pressed right up against him and put his arm around him and let him be sick on his arm, and they stayed like that up against the wall together all through the night.

 

"Q.: Which one lived."

The last time I saw Wallace in public was at an event in San Francisco in 2003 or thereabouts with Rick Moody. It was billed as a conversation between the two, but all the questions came from Wallace, which wasn't what the crowd wanted. They wanted answers from their hero.

He explained later: "I was told that the event, which was part of Moody's book tour, would consist of me 'interviewing' him, rather than conversing. He was told this, too. Apparently, neither the City Arts and Lectures people nor the audience were told this. The bizarreness, then, of me asking Qs the whole time was just one part of what was, I thought, a slow-mo train wreck. The whole thing felt stilted and fake. It is my last such event."

I teased him, asking who was telling him all this, the voices in his head?

"The 'voices' were the publicity ladies from Little, Brown; it was all set up months in advance. My private voices have much more interesting stuff to talk about than what's a book tour and what isn't, trust me."

DFW, RIP

News of David Foster Wallace's suicide comes as a shock, although I have a feeling it will soon begin to seem inevitable. A writer who kills himself at the age of 46, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, becomes a writer who was always destined to kill himself at age 46. All DFW's work will be read retrospectively with knowledge of his end, as if it were ordained. (If I were Wallace, I'd have a footnote here referring to Hart Crane, Sylvia Plath and John Kennedy Toole, whose company he now joins.)

Wallace and I were in only intermittent touch recently, but I assumed he was on an even keel -- writing prolifically, recently married, happily teaching. I guess not. He could document his troubles in Infinite Jest, a work of fiction so brilliant you often find yourself putting it down just to breathe, but he could not, in the end, escape them. 

Already I hear editors making phone calls, clearing space in the November issue, the writers jockeying for position to interview those left behind to record The Suicide of America's Most Brilliant Writer, and how Everything Wasn't Enough, how He Fought His Demons but They Finally Triumphed. It may even be true. But Wallace would have hated it anyway. He dodged the press--when the LA Times sent a writer out to Claremont he declined to talk--and kept his private life as private as he could.  

He was a good friend, in all senses of the word. I was once having some woman trouble -- my girlfriend, a poet, had run away, big melodrama, I was angry and stricken. Here's what will happen, he said. She will call and beg to come back, and tell you this time it will all be different, she's changed, she's better now. And when you hear that, let me know, and I'll tie you to a chair so you can't answer the door.

And so a few weeks later, right on schedule, she did call, and say, this time it will be different, I'm so sorry, I want to come back. I took her back, and it didn't work out, which only proved Wallace was right.

 "I had a thing for mad poets for a while," he wrote in an email. "Got tired. Karen is a painter, and also works as a stylist for photographers, and once taught tapdancing to the whole cast of Cheers. My brush with greatness."

I like the sentiment at the Howling Fantods, a DFW fan site: "I never made an effort to contact him, in fact, I actively avoided it. This seemed to be the right thing to do in the light of all I knew about David Foster Wallace. I don't know where I am going with this."  

Writers. They always break your heart.

Another bookseller heard from

Dear David, I'm disappointed that I still haven't received payment for ANGLE OF REPOSE (invoice of July 26 attached).  I gladly gave you your customary discount.  (Though less than you implied you wanted, 10% is my usual trade discount on books not selected in person at either of my premises.)  Moreover, as an additional courtesy (one I've extended to only three other people over the years), I didn't charge you postage but wrapped the book myself and brought it down to Serendipity, where I left it for you, just as you'd asked.  True, you didn't pick it up until July 31, when I saw you there.  But today is September 9.  The overwhelming majority of my private customers, dealers as well as collectors, pay on receipt.  Some actually pay in advance (I myself pay either in advance or upon receipt), though a few take full advantage of the traditional terms of the trade – i.e., 30 days from the arrival of the book in the buyer's hands to the arrival of payment in the seller's – which is, of course, completely acceptable.  But in my almost two decades as an independent antiquarian bookseller, you are only the second private customer, dealer or otherwise (institutional libraries, as you know, traditionally receive special billing), to take MORE than 30 days.  I guess I've been very lucky.  Please send your check as soon as possible.  Best wishes, Burton

Grub Street Irregular

Jeremy Lewis' third autobiographical volume focuses, like his second, on the London literary life of the 1970s through 1990s. Even in the early part of this period, there was a sense that the silver age of publishing was passing; conglomerates and women were taking over, and the long bibulous lunches were replaced by coffee and sandwiches. Lewis pays homage to departed friends like Alan Ross, David Hughes, Dennis Enright and Peter Gunn--men who seemed rich both in achievement and savoir-faire to Lewis, who likes to portray himself as a bit of naif. And then there's Nirad Chaudhuri, the centenarian Bengali writer:

At some stage in his wanderings, Mr. Chaudhuri had acquired an enormous scimitar of the Arabian Nights variety; frustrated by his belated physical decrepitude, he decided to end his days, and insisted his manservant should cut his head off. The manservant refused, claiming that if he did so he would almost certainly spend the rest of his life in prison; Mr. Chaudhuri accused him of gross insubordination; the manservant was adamant, and -- for the first time in his very long life, perhaps -- his master was forced to climb down.

Lewis can be sloppy -- if he was Paul Theroux's agent, he should know that Theroux's first book was not published by Alan Ross -- or strangely coy, as when he talks about being Ian McEwan's agent early in his career without naming him. But this is redeemed by his brilliant and not unsympathetic portraits of Andre Deutsch, unsure at the end of his life of exactly what his apartment address is, and A.L. Rowse, bedridden and cranky, positive he is one of the few "first-raters" around.  

Merchandising HST

Finally scored a copy of Gonzo, the very oversized Hunter Thompson tribute/memorial that came out two years ago at $400. I offered an eBay seller $200 for his copy via Buy It Now, which he turned down. When he put it up for auction a week later, I emerged with it for only $155. He mailed it in a box the size of a steamer trunk which cost him some extra postage. Someone lost money somewhere along the line here. 

And yet I still overpaid. The outer husk of the book is a cardboard box which features the limitation number. Inside is a nice blue cloth slipcase. Inside that is Gonzo itself as well as a print of Hunter. The book is a stroll through the Gonzo years, with the usual wild and crazy quotes, shots of key manuscript pages, photos of the healthy young Hunter and the beautiful young Sandy, etc. etc. It is designed in the Way Too Arty style. At the end is a bibliographic listing giving titles and publishers. Some degree of the attention that went into this project can be seen by the fact that "Las Vegas" is credited not to Random House but Warner Books, a careless mistake.

Gonzo should have hit the remainder shelves long ago. But all three thousand copies sold out, and when the occasional copy shows up online it is rarely for less than $300. Hunter's suicide only accelerated the process where he's prized as a commodity rather than as a writer. He would have been saddened by this even as he wholeheartedly participated in it.

The Domains of Koryphon

I've now read the novel, which I don't think I ever did as a lad. I still doubt that at the time of its original publication it was vilified as racist, as Resnick claims in his introduction; but a glance at the Amazon comments makes clear it's being vilified now. A much bigger problem is that the novel is not excellent, as I said, but rather far from Vance's best -- the characters are flat, the plotting awkward, the pacing poor. Schaine is a dithering damsel waiting for the right man; Elvo sensitive but ineffectual; Jemasze square-jawed and dull. I wonder why this novel was rescued for a pricey omnibus when there were so many better candidates.