Reading Copy

I’m sure many of you remember the online charity auction we staged in conjunction with Penguin last December. We sold four special editions of books redesigned by famous designers and raised $13,000 for English PEN - a charity that supports the rights of authors and freedom in literature.

Well, we’ve teamed up with Penguin again and this time we’re going to be auctioning a one-of-a-kind collection of 14 signed novels - all of them recent bestsellers such as Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Zoe Heller’s Notes On A Scandal and Nick Hornby’s How To Be Good. Once again, English Pen will receive all proceeds.

Penguin is reissuing 36 bestsellers in its famous retro striped cover designs on September 6 and it has taken the 14 modern fiction books from the series and got each one signed by the respective author. We’ll be selling them in a single lot.

The auction will be conducted on AbeBooks.com and AbeBooks.co.uk. It begins on Thursday 6 September and concludes on Tuesday 11 September at 1pm EST. The collection of signed books will not be available again.

The signed novels are:
Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
How To Be Good by Nick Hornby
The Accidental by Ali Smith
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Any Human Heart by William Boyd
How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff
English Passengers by Matthew Kneale
Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller
Regeneration by Pat Barker
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka
The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru
What a Carve Up! By Jonathan Coe
The Other Side of the Story by Marian Keyes
Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction by Sue Townsend

That’s a pretty decent group of writers - a set of signed books worthy of any collector’s bookshelf. I particularly loved English Passengers and White Teeth. Let’s hope we can once again raise a decent sum of money.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Those interested in rare and antiquarian books should take a look at AntiquarianBookNews.com. This new site gathers news stories about rare and antiquarian books from around the globe. The man behind it is Hervé Fulchiron - a Parisian web consultant who is passionate about rare books.

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Canada’s Globe and Mail has some fun with AbeBooks.com’s list of bestselling sex manuals. The list was topped by a Christian sex manual - Intended For Pleasure.

“You have God’s permission to enjoy sex within your marriage. He invented sex; he thought it up to begin with. You can learn to enjoy it, and, husbands, you can develop a thrilling, happy marriage with “the wife of your youth” - Intended for Pleasure: Sex Technique and Sexual Fulfilment in Christian Marriage, by Ed Wheat and Gaye Wheat

Popularity: 14% [?]

Our friends at BookFinder.com have published their annual report into the most sought after out-of-print books. As always it’s a very interesting list - sometimes you have to wonder how some of these books are allowed to go out-of-print. I can understand how Jessica Simpson’s I Do: Achieving Your Dream Wedding can be allowed to slip away into obscurity but what about Home Country by Ernie Pyle - one of America’s greatest war reporters.

Popularity: 8% [?]

You’ve written a great book but no-one will publish it. The Boston Phoenix reports that you’re probably too ugly to get into print.

Jhumpa Lahiri, author of Interpreter of Maladies, would turn anyone’s head. She’s also got one of the best names in literature too.

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Patrick Reardon at the Chicago Tribune writes about the ethics of handling books and makes several very valid points. As far as I’m concerned, folding down corners of pages to bookmark your place and leaving a book open and face down are huge no-nos.

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The Guardian lists author Gemma Malley’s top 10 list of dystopian novels for teenagers - we all love top 10s but I’ve never sat on the bus and put together my list of top dystopian novels. The Chrysalids by John Wyndham is my favourite from Gemma’s list.

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Stars and Stripes, a publication we rarely get to link to, has a feature about booktowns around the world.

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In Britain, the papers called August the Silly Season as there’s no real news with most politicians and key figures in public life on holiday. Here’s an example of the type of story that can make the papers. Travelodge, a hotel/motel chain, has listed the 10 books most commonly left behind in its bedrooms. Alistair Campbell’s diary of The Blair Years tops the list.

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Have you ever seen an author with a panda sitting on their lap? No, neither had I until I looked at Neil Gaiman’s blog today. The author of Stardust, American Gods and Anansi Boys is in China along with Robert J Sawyer.

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The Globe and Mail writes about Canadian science fiction author Robert J Sawyer and the impact of his books in China.

“Chinese readers prefer hard science-fiction, with real science rigorously extrapolated,” he observed, and “and they’re partial to optimistic views of the future.” In fact, “the domestic science-fiction is very much at the stage science-fiction was in the 1950s in the United States - lots of spaceships, robots and aliens.”

Popularity: 14% [?]

USA Today interviews Melissa Plaut, the author of Hack: How I Stopped Worrying About What to Do With My Life and Started Driving a Yellow Cab. She’s one of 200 female cabbies in New York plus she’s a blogging, college-educated, Jewish lesbian. I suspect the book’s real strength will be the stories about her passengers.

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To celebrate the 50th anniversary of On The Road, AbeBooks.com has just posted an interview with Tom Peters, who runs the Beat Book Shop in Boulder. It’s been many years since I read On The Road but there are clearly many people still fascinated by the book’s style and its non-stop narrative. Tom’s knowledge of the Beat Generation is second to none - he’s certainly keeping the Beatnik flame burning in his corner of Colorado.

Although first editions of On The Road are in demand, the most collectible Kerouac book is The Town and the City - his debut novel. Tom is asking $25,000 for a signed copy - that’s not that much considering that ‘the scroll’ (the single piece of paper that Kerouac used to type out On The Road) sold for $2.3 million.

You might also be interested to an excerpt from an interview with Jack Kerouac himself from a 1968 edition of The Paris Review. It sounds like a crazy, mad-cap interview straight out of On The Road itself. Perhaps Kerouac’s whole life was like that? It sounds like once On The Road became a massive hit that the author was bugged to death by would-be travellers looking for inspiration from the man turned his back on white-picket fence America.

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An odd article from The Scotsman about Robin Ince, who trawls through Edinburgh’s secondhand bookshops looking for books that be read out loud “sarcastically” at his comedy club called the Book Club.

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The Boston Globe profiles the wonderful Brattle Bookshop and its owner Ken Gloss.

Popularity: 9% [?]