Authors' Letters Go the Way of the Dinosaur

When was the last time you took pen to paper and wrote a letter? In this digital age, we are at risk of losing one of the greatest communication tools of all-time - the letter. ...

The Abebooks blog looks at a treasury of author letters that they have up for sale. Here's Ray Bradbury's illustrated letter to Herman Kogan (left); an invitation to tea with Conan Doyle; Vladimir Nabokov's contract with Doubleday, and much more.

But the question they raise is a very important one:

Today we can look back at the great minds of yesteryear through their letters that collectors and libraries treasure. Will anyone keep the emails of Ian McEwan or the Twitter tweets of Neil Gaiman?

In a piece at The New York Times some time back, Rachel Donadio addressed these same concerns :

The problem isn't that writers and their editors are corresponding less, it's that they're corresponding infinitely more -- but not always saving their e-mail messages. Publishing houses, magazines and many writers freely admit they have no coherent system for saving e-mail, let alone saving it in a format that would be easily accessible to scholars. Biography, straight up or fictionalized, is arguably one of today's richest literary forms, but it relies on a kind of correspondence that's increasingly rare, or lost in cyberspace.

It isn't just letters that future generations will miss out on as they try to gain an insight into the inner workings of authors' minds - but also perhaps things like notebooks, drafts and annotated manuscripts since so much of our thinking now is done at the keyboard. Maybe authors need to be proactive in storing their stuff and letting others know where and how it is stored?

Is Bargain Hunting for Books Destroying the Trade?

Lost in the hand-wringing over the state of the book industry is the fact that this is a golden age for those in love with old-fashioned printed volumes: more books are available for less effort and less money than ever before. A book search engine like ViaLibri.net can knit together 20,000 booksellers around the world offering tens of millions of nearly new, used or rare books.

But it's this very buying and selling of second hand books on the internet that is undermining the book industry writes Rodrigo Corral in the New York Times, with neighbourhood book stores the hardest hit.

*Sigh* I am an equal opportunity book buyer, and and unrepentent about buying on the internet what I can't easily or immediately buy from local bookshops (usually through Abebooks which has never let me down).

Win 1,001 Nights with 1,001 Words

Preeta spotted this competition at Abebooks and reckons some of you will probably want to give it a go. (Please note though it is only open to UK Residents - a fact I overlooked when I posted this up yesterday.) :

Penguin has worked their magic on The Arabian Nights, and AbeBooks.co.uk has a very special competition prize for one lucky booklover - one of the just-released 3,000 special limited edition box-sets of The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1,001 Nights - to give away.

To stand a chance of winning, simply write us a short story. Anyone can enter, child or adult. All you have to do is let your imagination flow and you could win. It can be about anything - fiction or non-fiction - but must be exactly 1,001 words in length (not including title). Oh yeah... don't be boring. Scheherazade kept herself alive with 1,001 entertaining tales and we're looking for short stories that share the same adventurous spirit as The Arabian Nights. The most entertaining 1,001 word story will win.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst in the Telegraph says of this new edition :

For anyone who wishes to enter the labyrinth of the original stories, however, there is no better gateway than Malcolm Lyons’s new translation. It may take up three fat volumes, but hardly a word is wasted in this outstanding combination of storytelling and scholarship.

Booker Value

How stupid of me not to have bought and kept carefully all those Booker prize winners over the years. I can't think of many things that appreciate in value quite so quickly, can you?

Here's a list of the ten most expensive Booker books that AbeBooks has sold through its site. (Found via the Papercuts blog.)

1. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie $3,000 - Signed first edition.
   
2. In A Free State by V.S. Naipaul - $2,560 - First edition, inscribed by the author
3. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy - $1,800 - First Indian edition of 1997 winner
4. Life of Pi by Yann Martel - $1,200 - Signed first Canadian edition, one of only 2,500 copies, of 2002 winner
5. Life & Times of Michael K and Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee - $1,150 - Coetzee’s two winning novels (1983 and 1999 respectively) sold together, both signed first editions.
6. The Elected Member by Bernice Rubens - $637 - First edition of 1970 winner
7. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje - $624 - Signed first U.K. edition of 1992 winner
8. Possession by A.S. Byatt - $500 - Signed first edition of 1990 winner.
9. The Gathering by Anne Enright - $500 - Signed first edition of last year’s winner
10. Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally - $500 - Signed first edition in olive clamshell box of 1982 winner

Notice well how the value shoots up when a book is signed. (If that doesn't get you to attend more author events, I wonder what will!)

I still feel really sick about my missing first edition copy of The English Patient lent to a "friend". Even though it wasn't signed it would be worth around US$300 now ... but the real value is sentimental.

Abebooks is also joining in the 40th anniversary celebrations of the prize by with a reader's poll where you can vote for your favourite Bookers.

A Yale Course for Free

Thought you might like to know that Yale University is offering some of its courses online - for free! Among the modules on offer is a course in Modern Poetry taught by Professor Langdon Hammer (left) which covers :

... the body of modern poetry, its characteristic techniques, concerns, and major practitioners. The authors discussed range from Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, to Stevens, Moore, Bishop, and Frost with additional lectures on the poetry of World War One, Imagism, and the Harlem Renaissance. Diverse methods of literary criticism are employed, such as historical, biographical, and gender criticism.

The lecturers are on video and archived so you can progress through them at your own pace. (Initially the lectures went out live, twice a week.) Much of the course material is downloadable and you can buy the recommended text, The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Vol. 1, Modern Poetry second-hand at Abebooks.com.

Update :

Chet alerted me to MIT's courses online. I like the sound of the ones on reading and writing the short story, and on writing and reading the poem.

Heaven's ... now I start looking there's even more out there! About.com lists some free writing and journalism courses, among them Steve Barnes Lifewriting class which he teaches at UCLA.

Then there's F2K, Bob Hembree's free fiction writing course which is offered 6 times a year.

Any more free literature or writing classes that anyone knows about?

Update 2:

Chet found another amazing source of free courses - the UK Open University's Learning Space. Among the courses on offer What is Poetry?, Start Writing Fiction, Approaching Poetry, Approaching Prose Fiction.

The Long Literary Journey to Merdeka

You know the 31st of August is coming soon when you get woken by the sweet sound of MIG fighters screaming over the rooftops on a Sunday morning, as they practice for the fly-past for the Merdeka celebrations. I'm just near Subang airport where the planes are based, and am just waiting for the day when one lands in my cornflakes.

On a happier note, the NST is giving away a free facsimile copy of an edition from fifty-years ago with the paper each day in the run up to the celebrations. It's an amazing way to step back into the past, to find out what was in the news (anti-Communist operations, Field Marshall Sir Gerald Templer flying in for the celebrations and longing for a bath, an A-bomb test in South Australia) , what was on at the cinema (Stewart Granger and Rhonda Fleming in Gun Glory, Eleanor Parker and Bill Travers in The Seventh Sin based on Somerset Maugham's The Painted Veil); what goods were being advertised (Brands Essence of Chicken - does nothing change?), what was on TV (oops, there was no TV in Malaya in 1957*. Sorry Tash!).


But of course, what caught my eye was the book page. Two Novelists write on Borneo, Malaya, says one headline, and the reviewer discusses Hugh Hickling's Festival of Hungry Ghosts (which involves the killing of a district officers somewhere in Borneo) and Katherine Sim's Malacca Boy ("the story of a Malacca boy, part Indian, a child of the kamponground whose life she wraps and understanding of the Malay scene").

Both books I'm now curious to read. Hickling's book is available at Abebooks, Sim's I can't trace anywhere.

Malaya and Borneo seen through British eyes ... literature written by the British, for the British.

Remember Burgess' optimism? That one day other races besides the Brits:

... may well themselves contribute to English literature.

You've come a long literary way in fifty years, Malaysia!

*TV broadcasts began here in 1963.

Weird Cookbooks

This top ten list of the World's Weirdest Cookbooks on second-hand bookseller AbeBooks site made me smile!

1. Manifold Destiny: The One, The Only, Guide To Cooking On Your Car Engine by Bill Scheller & Chris Maynard
2. The Roadkill Cookbook by Buck Peterson
3. The Eat-A-Bug Cookbook by David George Gordon
4. The Special Effects Cookbook by Michael Samonek
5. Cooking in the Nude by Stephen Cornwell & Debbra Cornwell
6. Cooking to Kill: The Poison Cook Book by Ebenezer Murgatroyd
7. Star Wars Cookbook: Wookiee Cookies and other Galactic Recipes by Robin Davis
8. Mini Ketchup Cookbook by Cameron Pearl
9. Cooking for Cats by Elisabeth Meyer
10. Strange Foods: Bush Meats, Bats and Butterflies by Jerry Hopkins

It makes perfect sense, doesn't it, to have your dinner cooking on the car engine while you travel? Bill Scheller, co-author of the winning title talks about how the book (now sadly out of print) came to be written and explains how all the recipes in Manifold Destiny are measured in miles rather than in minutes. Some of the gastronomic highlights:

Hyundai Halibut with Fennel (Distance 55-85 miles), Cruise-Control Pork Tenderloin (Distance: 250 miles), and Poached Fish Pontiac (Distance: 40 miles) ...

Peterson's Roadkill Cookbook is thankfully a rather tongue-in-cheek guide to turning the beasties you accidentally hit on the road into palatable fare. The book has a cult following and has spawned other titles, including an international version.

Sorry pet lovers but ... It reminds me of the time I was in a shared taxi in Nigeria and for no apparent reason the driver swerved dangerously across the road. Apparently he had seen a dog and fancied it for dinner, but missed it. (There was just one village in my area where dogs were eaten as a delicacy, you'll no doubt be relieved to know.)

Another time in a another shared taxi, but this time in Cameroon, my co-passengers got all excited when a large mongoose ran out in from of the car. "Beef!" they chorused, using the generic pidgin English term in that part of the world for all bush-meat.

Can't think why the compilers of the list included the cookbook for cats. What's so weird about wanting to give your darlings a gourmet dinner?

Not George

The book on the left is an absolute must-read: George W. finally coming clean and admitting the massive cock-up he made in invading Iraq.

Naw. It's a tease of course. It's one of four free e-cards of "not-books" on Abebooks website to celebrate ten years of online second-hand bookselling linking 13,500 booksellers across the globe (including, you will be overjoyed to learn, our own Payless books).

Abebooks is a dangerous place for a bookaholic. It's fun to browse and every little itch for a particular title can be satisfied, and relatively cheaply. Every book I've ordered (and that's a distressing number) has turned up quickly and has fitted exactly the description on the website. It's nice too to sometimes find a bookmark inside with a description of the bookshop it came from: I like books with histories.

I'm slowly replacing books I've lost over the years, or which I read but didn't own.