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Books for Sale
[This article is part of a current
misc.writing thread. Since it contains a great deal of material germane to the topic of rec.collecting.books, I decided to make a courtesy repost over here. --Bill] Bill wrote: Towse wrote: Bill wrote: As usual, Towse, your frantic desire to maintain your perceived position as the top misc.writing know-it-all gets you in over your head fast. Still upset that I said you didn't need to use addall.com to know that Harper Perennials didn't exist in 1932? You understand very clearly that I knew that. After all, I was the first one to go on record as pointing out a number of suspicious elements in that off-topic ad. If you think the obvious and rather subordinate point that Harper Perennials did not exist in 1932 was such a big deal, you should have pointed out that obvious bagatelle of information right away. Your harping on that one minor point no doubt leads readers to suspect that is all you do know about the matter. What was far more germane to the suspicious nature of the ad, in my view, is the fact that neither the first edition paperback OR the first edition hardcover cost anything close to ten dollars when published. That is the sort of key information readily available for anyone knowing how to do a proper Addall.com search, which is why I recommended Addall. . Towse, I doubt if you have ever owned a paperback from the 1930's. If you had, would not be harping on such an obvious point as Harper Perennials not existing then. A few publishers did publish "quallity paperbacks" (to use the term favored by the original poster) and perhaps the most respected and collected of those so doing was Charles Boni, New York. One highly sought gem of theirs is "The Master of the Day of Judgment" by Leo Perutz, first published, as I seem to recall, on March 25, 1930. The disturbing cover illustration by Rockwell Kent depicts a man upside down, in free-fall from a cliff. The red and white endpapers are quite astonishing. Apparently also done by Kent, they show books raining down from the sky in front of a modern (1930's style) city. While the 1930's Boni "quality" (trade-sized, in other words) paperbacks did not have a price stamped on the cover, dealers usually sold them for fifty to seventy-five cents. Also, I did point out that the only edition of "1984." published in 1949 was the hardcover edition. the Signet paperback -- highly sought by collectors today for its disturbingly realistic cover -- was not a "Signet classic," Further, since the term "instant classic" was not employed in 1950, the literary world would have considered it a bit presumptious to dub a book -- even a great book by George Orwell -- a "classic" a few months after publication, though no doubt many reviewers said "1984" was destined to become a classic. No, the first paperback "1984" (published July 1950) was simply an ordinary Signet twenty-five cent paperback, in the same Signet numerical series as books by Mickey Spillane and Erskine Caldwell! In fact, I seem to recall that "1984" was Signet 798 while "God's Little Acre" (by Caldwell) was Signet 581. Yes, Towse, there is plainly a lot that.the poster did not know and that even YOU did not know. Your annoying "group know-it-all" [of misc.writing; ed.] side is getting you so carried off that you now shooting from the hip and missing -- and making a hopeless fool of yourself! Sad. [memo from the upstairs office] You need a life, Bill. -- Sal Ye olde swarm of links: thousands of links for writers, researchers and the terminally curious http://www.internet-resources.com/writers |
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