Category: Book porn

Bookstores of Boston/Cambridge: Seek Books

Seek Books
1747 Centre Street, Boston, West Roxbury, MA, 02132

Seek Books storefront

Seek deserves to be called something really grandiose, like “a repository of pulp splendor.” Seriously, if you’re an sff fan (especially if you’re the kind who has slightly off tastes and whose favorite authors are generally out of print… not that I’d know anything about this) and ever in the Boston area, don’t miss it. Seek has character.

Old posters and figurines and ’90’s boardgames abound; it smells like the kind of paperbacks that have banana-yellow edges; many of the books are battered within an inch of their lives (and rightly so, since Seek specializes in pre-1970’s fiction). The owners are as much curators as booksellers: series are carefully sorted out of the morass and shelved together, books with particularly loved cover art are wrapped in plastic.

The smiley-face-sticker pricing system is fun (and yes, the prices are ridiculously good), though sometimes the stickers do end up pulling off bits of binding off the spine. (Kakaner & I were also a little alarmed that sorted series are sometimes rubber-banded together, which means that spines and covers inevitably get bent.)

That aside, I don’t know too many other places where I could come away with a stack of eighteen or so Tanith Lee novels (I exaggerate, but not significantly) in one trip. Kakaner and I have been here twice so far, and each time we always end up finding way more things that we’d like to buy than we thought we were actually looking for – odd editions of favorite children’s books, copies of classics with actually frightening cover art (that Zelazny novel… SHUDDER)…

Some more photos under the cut, including some unbelievable monuments of SFF publishing history/nerd conversation pieces:

Continue reading Bookstores of Boston/Cambridge: Seek Books

Shopping (or just reading) weird

I think I’ve just about expended all my book- and gift-book-buying budget at this point, but I couldn’t resist poring over Ann & Jeff VanderMeer’s Gifts for the Weirdie in Your Life book recommendation post – many many additions were made to my to-read list. The VanderMeers provide detailed recommendations for both classic weird and new releases, emphasizing both literary quality and visual appeal.

Also, recommendations for weird small presses whose catalogues I’ll have to look over in more detail at some point: Centipede Press, Tartarus Press, Chômu Press.

(I really, really wanted Centipede’s Algernon Blackwood collection – “with some fine Clarence John Laughlin photographs reprinted as exquisite duotones. Quarterbound in black Japanese cloth with blue European cloth panels, with a ribbon marker, and enclosed in a clothbound slipcase.” – and then I realized that it was $250. erk.)

– E

Hey! Oscar Wilde!

– It’s Clobberin’ Time!: artists (and authors) draw their favorite literary figures

One of my favorite websites to check at random intervals, Hey Oscar Wilde hosts a vast compilation of art featuring favorite writers, creatures, characters, and places from across the literary spectrum. Artists include Kate Beaton, Marvel Comics legend Frank Brunner, From Hell‘s Eddie Campbell, Neil Gaiman, Michael Zulli (love for his prodigiously mustachioed Dracula)… ; subjects range from oliphaunts to Vonnegut to Pippi Longstocking to lots of Draculas and Frankenstein’s Monsters.

Some other favorites: this Madeleine L’Engle portrait by Farel Dalrymple (probably biased by my love for Proginoskes); Scott Morse’s incredible watercolor rendition of the tiger from Life of Pi.

– E

Author news

Anne McCaffrey passed away this past Wednesday, November 21, at the age of 85. Like countless other readers, I seem to have spent a good chunk of my adolescence imaginarily living in Pern, starting from when I discovered the Harper Hall trilogy at ten years old…

See Charles Tan’s post here for links to authors’ tributes to McCaffrey. R.I.P.

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Terri Windling, editorial and artistic powerhouse and generally amazing person in the field of fantasy, is in need; a Livejournal community for charity auctions has been opened to help her out. Treat yourself, start your holiday shopping, or both – there’s a wide variety of incredible offerings, including baked goods, crafts, art, and signed drafts or ARCs or personalized poems by numerous beloved authors… Want to have lunch with Tamora Pierce, or have a Cat Valente or Jeffrey Ford character named after you? Now’s your chance!

Go to:
Anne McCaffrey: bio and works reviewed
Terri Windling: bio and works reviewed

Fun with words, and birds

Check out the Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form (OEDILF) to learn some new words (offerings span Pre-A- through Em– thus far; estimated date of completion is currently March 5, 2039) and broaden your appreciation of the limerick.

e.g. (with unintentional ornithological theme)

emu

On our crest, with a roo, Aussies team you.
You taste best when we stew (it’s supreme!) you.
You can’t fly. You’re absurd.
You’re our fat old Big Bird,
Yet we love and esteem you, o emu.

(by rusty – who has also completed a series of wordplay-heavy entries on musical keys.)

doughbird

The Eskimo curlew, or doughbird,
Is a vanished-a-long-time-ago bird.
Had it kept on its toes,
As it froze in the snows,
It might still be a go-with-the-floe bird.

(by Stephen Gold)

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My favorite random language fact of the week, from a feature in The Believer magazine on pangrams, sentences including every commonly-used letter in a given alphabet (e.g. “the quick brown fox…”):

The Iroha, a perfect Japanese pangram (contains every kana once and only once) and typically Japanese meditation on life’s evanescence, became so famous that the order of its kana was used as alphabetical order up until the late 19th century. Cool. See its Wikipedia entry for the full poem, two translations, and lots of interesting history.

– E

Do we all like flowcharts?

I’m assuming we do: check out the monster that SF Signal has put together to help curious readers navigate the results of NPR’s 100 Top SFF Books survey, featuring “(obviously) 100 end points and over 325 decision points,” including such trenchant inquiries as “PoMo superheroes or tortured specter?”, “Do the words Sword and Sorcery have a positive connotation for you?”, and “Which question most frightens you: who needs books or who needs free will?”

Link sent to me by the one and only and extremely busy Kakaner.

– E

Pieces of eight

And by eight, I mean news:

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Ah–! Art Student Hand-Illuminates, Binds a Copy of the Silmarillion; Tolkien fans across the world experience heart palpitations.

Check here for an interview with the artist, and larger images of his gloriously detailed work.

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And some incredible (belatedly posted, here) news for fans of Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn. Since the release of the 1982 animated adaptation, Beagle had been denied payment of contractually due royalties for the film. At the beginning of August, Connor Cochran, Beagle’s business manager, sent this announcement:

“THE EIGHT-YEAR STRUGGLE FOR PETER’S LAST UNICORN RIGHTS IS OVER!

Really. No joke, no fooling. It’s over. And everybody won. […] For now suffice to say that Peter has signed an agreement with ITV that (a) ends the whole mishagosh in a way that is great for him, and (b) great for ITV, and (c) great for LAST UNICORN fans everywhere, since now all kinds of things are going to be possible that could never be done before.”

This is news that I’ve been waiting to hear for years.

I’d been exploratorily rereading bits from The Last Unicorn, lately – exploratorily because I know I’ve been growing out of a lot of things that used to fill my head and make me cry. We’re safe; TLU still makes me cry. (It probably helps that I still feel completely unironically about unicorns.) I sound a little flippant, but it’s a deeply beautiful, wise, and timeless book. I don’t like recommending it willy-nilly because I know unironic books about unicorns and mortality and love aren’t everyone’s thing (even though it is sometimes ironic, too! and meta!), but consider this my sideways plea for more people to read it.

Hey, “unironic” and “unicorn” are almost anagrams. Coincidence? I think not.

Go to:
Peter S. Beagle: bio and works reviewed
The Last Unicorn comic #1 (2010): review by Emera
The Last Unicorn comic #2 (2010): review by Emera

The faces of Endicott

Endicott Studio is an association of writers, artists, and performers dedicated to arts based in mythological and folkloric traditions. (Wikipedia tells me that it began as a warehouse-turned-salon-space in Boston; wish I had been around for it then.) I was aware of their work on the Journal of Mythic Arts, but wasn’t quite clear on who all comprised the studio. While I was looking for something else (that I’ve now forgotten, in the way of the Internet), I stumbled upon this nifty compilation celebrating 20 years of Endicott, featuring photos from 1987 and 2007 of many of the creatives behind Endicott: founder Terri Windling, Charles Vess, Neil Gaiman, Ellen Kushner,  Delia Sherman, the Frouds, Holly Black, Catherynne Valente, Theodora Goss, and a host of other Black Letters favorites.

A lot of the 1987 photos are downright adorable, it goes without saying. (prom! ’80’s hair! scrunchies and onesies!) Check them out here:

Twenty Years of Mythic Arts

P.S. Terri Windling keeps an Endicott Studio blog here, filled with art, music, history, and links galore, for those of a mythical inclination.

– E

Bookstores of Cambridge: Lame Duck Books

Lame Duck Books
12 Arrow Street, Cambridge, MA

“We are internationally known specialists buying and selling important modern books and manuscripts with an emphasis on rare literature and primary works in the history of ideas in English, German, French, Spanish, Russian and other languages. Our shop features the most significant selection of 19th and 20th century Spanish language literature in the world, as well as important holdings of 17th and 18th century English poetry.”

Significantly fancy-pantsier than the bookstores that Kakaner and I usually feel comfortable rummaging through, clearly, but a fun taste of the high life. You enter this basement bookstore through a hushed, minimalistic art gallery (unaffiliated); the bookshop itself is similarly hushed and artsy.

Kakaner thought their prices ran a little high, for the books with which we were more familiar, but we had a good time regardless ogling such volumes as a first edition of Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman, another Atwood volume (forget which – K, do you remember?) that contained a handwritten letter of hers, and this J. Sheridan Le Fanu novel…

…with a seriously charming dedicatory doodle for someone named Phoebe:

Continue below the cut for a couple more photos:

Continue reading Bookstores of Cambridge: Lame Duck Books