AbeBooks' Reading Copy

Some authors churn out books nearly at the pace one would read them, but Khaled Hosseini takes his time with his craft.  It has been six years, less a day, since Khaled Hosseini published  A Thousand Splendid Suns; and  it is one week shy of the 10th anniversary of  his debut novel, The Kite Runner, but today the world can finally get its collective hands on the anticipated third novel And the Mountains Echoed

Early reviews are coming in with the consensus that this third novel is just as powerful and emotional as any of Hosseini’s previous work, and that the author has grown even further in his story telling capabilities making the novel well worth the wait.

Like his previous two novels the book is partially set in Afghanistan, however parts of the book also take place in California, Paris, and Greece.  And the Mountains Echoed also differs from his previous novels in style, rather than a continuous narrative this book is constructed as a series of stories each of a different time, place and point of view but woven together to paint the complete picture.

I loved the Kite Runner and if you are interested in learning more about Hosseini’s third book The Washington Post has a nicely written review which included this lovely quote: “Hosseini’s first two novels, “The Kite Runner” (2003) and “A Thousand Splendid Suns” (2007), spent a combined total of 171 weeks on the bestseller list. He knows how to please a crowd. In his case, the secret ingredient might be intense emotion. I’m not an easy touch when it comes to novels, but Hosseini’s new book, “And the Mountains Echoed,” had tears dropping from my eyes by Page 45.”

You can buy new copies as well as signed copies on AbeBooks.com

My husband and I are expecting our first baby. It’s an exciting, wonderful, strange and occasionally terrifying time, as anyone who has been through it will remember. Both medically and emotionally, it’s an absolutely fascinating process that is affecting parts of my body and both of our hearts that neither of us ever expected.

To alterately comfort and alarm myself, I’ve become totally immersed in the PBS Series Call The Midwife. Originally a BBC drama (and apparently, the highest-rated in BBC history), the show is utterly engrossing and fantastic.

If you’ve never seen it, the series is set in tjhe 1950s, in the poor East End of London. It centers on a convent known as Nonnatus House, which is home to nuns, nurses and midwives. The main character and protagonist is young Nurse Jenny Lee, who arrives at Nonnatus at the beginning of the series, and is initially quite squeamish and a bit prissy. But that soon changes. The series follows Nurse Lee and her fellow young nurses, as well as the sisters of Nonnatus led by chief nun Sister Julienne, as they host midwifery clinics, attend births, tend to the sick working class people of the area, and generally do the best they can with limited resources, often in squalid or surprising conditions.

The births depicted are incredibly realistic and well done, the characters and settings are fully realized and believable, and the show works extraordinarily well on the whole. My only complaint is that the first two seasons were only six and eight episodes respectively, and I went through them very quickly. Which is why I am so excited to learn that it was a book first! Call the Midwife by Jennifer Worth was originally published in 2002, after Worth retired. I was even more excited to learn that the book is a memoir, and based on her own, real-life experiences working in the same scenarios and conditions described. And the happy news and things to look forward to continue – it’s a trilogy! Books two and three are called Shadows of the Workhouse and Farewell to the East End.

I am going to go out and say it, there are far too many book prizes given out every year.  This isn’t to say that I don’t think authors deserve to be recognized for their fantastic work, it’s just that it can get a bit tedious when every day it seems that another seven prizes that I have never heard of are awarded (and I’m in the business of knowing what these prizes are).

This is why I really appreciate the Wodehouse Prize, it’s hard to forget. Instead of awarding the author some small pittance in cash, the winner of the prize (which is given for the best work of comic fiction) receives a prize so absolutely useless and comical that it could only be a Wodehouse prize:   An Everyman Library, a bottle of Bollinger Champagne, and an enormous Gloucester old spot pig named after the winning novel.

Gloucester Old Spot Boar

The winner of this year’s prize was Howard Jacobson for his novel Zoo Time.  It was the second time that Jacobson has won this award, which leaves you to wonder what he’s doing with all these pigs, and if they gave him a breeding pair would the Wodehouse committee be putting themselves out of business?

Jacobson commented that he was honored to have won this award, and is proud of his comic writing “Other prizes often view [comedy] as sort of embarrassing writerly malfunction – which is treacherous, in my view, when you consider the comic origins of the novel and the strong comedic traditions of English writing in particular. So to win the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic writing once was bliss for me. To win it twice is very heaven.”  He went on to say that it is a bit of a shame the pig has to be named Zoo Time, “But it could have been worse. It could have been Bring Up the Bodies.”

Runners up for the award were Joseph Connolly for England’s Lane, Helen DeWitt for Lightning Rods, Michael Frayn for Skios and Deborah Moggach for Heartbreak Hotel.

The term leporello refers to printed material folded into an accordion-pleat style. Also sometimes known as a concertina fold, it is a method of parallel folding with the folds alternating between front and back. The name likely comes from the manservant, Leporello, in Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. Famed rogue and lover Don Giovanni (in Italian – also known as Don Juan in Spanish) has seduced so many women that when Leporello displays a tally of his conquests, it unfolds, accordion-style, into a shockingly long list. Many leporellos are used as a way of telling a story, while others are purely visual.

In the Victorian era, leporellos were quite commonly used as travel souvenirs, depicting beautiful, panoramic scenes of the places travelers had just seen, customs and culture of the region and the like. They are often used in illustrated children’s works, as well. Collectors of books and paper ephemera will love their scarcity and delicate beauty.

Here are some examples:

A retired interior designer from upstate New York named Phillip Patterson recently decided that he wanted to learn more about the bible, so for the past six years he has spent upwards of 14 hours a day copying out the passages of the King James bible line by line; in much the same way that it was done in the years before Johannes Guttenberg revolutionized the world with movable type. 

Patterson describes his approach to the project as more scholarly than religious in nature, however he does plan to spend the next year binding his 2,400 page manuscript before he will donate it to his local church St. Peter’s Presbyterian in Spencertown, New York. 

I think this is a fantastic project and will make an amazing artifact for St. Peter’s Presbyterian.  The look and feel of an autograph manuscript bible is something to behold.

Story from Fine Books Magazine

It can take decades to assemble a half decent collection of rare books…or you could just buy a ready-made collection with a single click. Booksellers on AbeBooks offer hundreds of ‘instant collections’ ranging from a complete set of the Flashman novels to Andrew Lang’s 12 Fairy books and Henning Mankell’s Wallander Series.

These book sets also cover Narnia, Middle-earth, the Wild West, 007, World War I and the American Civil War.

I love this letter that Norman Mailer sent to Ernest Hemingway in 1965, along with a copy of his novel, The Deer Park, which had been rejected multiple times for years before finally being published:

TO ERNEST HEMINGWAY

—because finally after all these
years I am deeply curious to know
what you think of this.

—but if you do not answer, or if you
answer with the kind of crap you
use to answer unprofessional writers,
sycophants, brown-nosers, etc., then
f*ck you, and I will never attempt
to communicate with you again.

—and since I suspect that you’re even
more vain than I am, I might as well
warn you that there is a reference to
you on page 353 which you may or may
not like

NORMAN MAILER

via the ever-wonderful Letters of Note.

Today marks the 80th anniversary of the Nazi book burnings.  On May 10, 1933 70,000 people gathered in central Berlin to burn tens of thousands of  books which were deemed to be un-German by the National Socialist regime.  These ranged from works of socialists, pacifists, Jewish writers or simply works that sympathized with another ideology.  An article in today’s Deutsche Welle (in English) explains that it was in fact students who led the charge, carting over 20,000 books to the public square, including works by famous German authors like Heinrich Mann, Erich Maria Remarque and Joachim Ringelnatz.”  Other banned works were by foreign authors like Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, The Iron Heel by Jack London, and several books by HG Wells.

We wrote a piece on book burnings five years ago which holds up well, in it we interviewed bookseller Matt Fishburn, Professor Rebecca Knuth, and Shaun Bythell who is a used bookseller in Scotland who staged their own book burning in 2005.

Our top 10 most expensive book sales list for April is topped by the poetry of none other than Emily Dickinson.

Dickinson was unheralded during her lifetime but today, 127 years after her death, the poet’s work is treasured by collectors. Three volumes of her poetry were sold last month on AbeBooks and became our most expensive sale of the year so far at $30,000.

Our top 25 list also includes a famous rabbit, a master sleuth, an Orwellian nightmare in red and a Gatsby.

See the whole list.

Harper Lee, who is now 87 years old, sued her literary agent on May 3rd in an attempt to regain full copyright to her novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. Lee claims that in 2007, Samuel Pinkus plotted to trick her into signing over the ownership of all rights and royalties from Mockingbird. Lee has poor eyesight and hearing, is elderly and had suffered a stroke at the time. Pinkus is the son-in-law-of her long-time agent, Eugene Winick, who had fallen ill, resulting in Pinkus taking over a number of his clients, including Lee.

Lee understood neither what she had signed, nor the seriousness of the consequences of the signature, and is now seeking to have full rights to the classic novel return to her. Pinkus has allegedly been receiving royalties from the book as recently as this year.

The novel, which was first published in 1960, is Harper Lee’s only published book. It has remained a widely-read and celebrated classic and is still on the curriculum of many schools worldwide.