Reading Copy

Collectors of ‘designer’ books might be interested in a special edition of the new 007 book, Devil May Care written by Sebastian Faulks, that will be published by Penguin and the luxury car firm Bentley.

Published on May 28, each Bentley edition of Devil May Care will cost £750 and only 300 copies have been printed. I expect them to sell within 24 hours and then fetch handy sums on the rare book market. James Bond owned three Bentleys in the 14 novels penned by Fleming so it’s a clever partnership from the folks at Penguin who know the true value of special editions.

Inside the book is a specially designed model pewter Bentley.

According to the blurb, the special edition is “finished in burnt oak leather sourced from the tannery in Italy which provides the hides for Bentley’s interiors. The iconic Bentley diamond pattern found on the radiator grille and upholstery of modern Bentley’s, is hand-stitched on the leather casing and the front cover and spine is finished with the silver Bentley ‘Flying B’ – the radiator cap of the Bentley’s of Bond’s time.

“The inside of the casing is trimmed in deep red hotspur leather and has the striking fluting used on the 1950’s and 1960’s Bentley interior upholstery. Each book has a unique edition number embossed on a black aluminium plate produced the same company that makes the Bentley engine plates.”

Sounds great.

The miniature car, described by Fleming in Thunderball, is inserted into the book in a car-shaped hole and is numbered to match the plate on the inside cover. Each book is protected by a custom-made Plexiglass slip case, which will be sealed in protective wrapping.

More details on Devil May Care here and the centenary of Ian Fleming’s birth here.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Our friends at Small Beer Press are experimenting with free e-books.

They are currently offering John Kessel’s The Baum Plan for Financial Independence: and Other Stories, along with Kelly Link’s collection Stranger Things Happen for free download.

As Publishers Weekly reports Kessel has high hopes for the endeavour after a friend, James Patrick Kelly, did something similar for his novella Burn. “The people who know and like my work—the ones who have anticipated the book’s publication and been looking forward to it—are pretty likely to buy a copy of the physical book anyway,” he says. “But allowing free downloading will, I hope, help the stories reach people who would never seek out the collection in a bookstore.

Nab your free copy at the Small Beer website

Popularity: 27% [?]

The BBC reports that publisher Dorling Kindersley claims to have printed the most environmentally conscious series of books in the world.

Popularity: 17% [?]

The Sunday Times’ property section has an article on publisher Peter Kindersley - the man who brought us The Joy of Sex, which has sold an incredible eight million copies. Property-focused but still very interesting.

Popularity: 22% [?]

I’m going to create a crazy blog and then wait for the megabucks book deal. Cue article in the NY Times. Stuff White People Like is a very clever blog - as a middle-class white person, I think it is very funny. The amazing thing is that this blog has only been around since January. Someone told me about it three weeks ago and here they are getting the $300,000 advance from a publisher.

Popularity: 33% [?]

The Independent had an article last Saturday about ’superbooks.’ We have featured a lot of these very expensive, very high-end, very limited edition books before on this blog…usually because they get a fair amount of media attention. A slice of celebrity helps for this market.

G.O.A.T: A Tribute to Muhammad Ali - Champ’s Edition by Jeff Koons is a typical ‘Superbook’.

G.O.A.T stands for greatest of all time.

Popularity: 27% [?]

The Guardian sticks it to My Year of Living Biblically and all those other rubbish books.

Think of something you could do in year and then tell an agent. Trust me, they’ll drool. It doesn’t matter how dull the thing is (I’ve just secured a six-figure two-book deal with My Year of Slightly Changing My Cycle Route to Work and its sequel, My Year of Reverting to the Original Route).

Popularity: 25% [?]

Hello! Publishers - do you do any fact checking when someone slaps a memoir on your desk? Did anyone learn anything from the James Frey versus Oprah nonsense two years ago?

Bookstores are going to have to add a new genre - made-up memoirs….this one, and this one, and this one etc etc.

Perhaps the most telling part of this whole sad story is that Margaret B Jones aka Margaret Seltzer was grassed up by her sister. Their next family get-together will be an interesting one.

Popularity: 21% [?]

The Independent in the UK has a feature on ‘hic lit’ - or how I beat the booze memoirs.

Authors and alcoholism have a long history – think Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald and Charles Bukowski – but the days when writers’ pens dripped with neat alcohol are long gone. Publishers see “hic lit” as the natural successor to the “real lives” columns that dominate women’s magazines. Ms Russell added: “It’s voyeurism. People buy the books for the same reason that they buy Bizarre magazine to see the unsavoury pictures.”

Popularity: 14% [?]

The New York Times book review wrote about the delay from submitting manuscript to seeing the book in the stores, and why it takes so long to print a book. No-one seems to point out that publishing is an antiquated industry at the best of times.

Popularity: 8% [?]

In The Guardian, Julie Burchill attacks books written by the whining middle classes with little to complain about. Of course, the UK publishing industry is populated by the middle classes so…..expect more of the same.

Popularity: 19% [?]

The Houston Chronicle has an interesting feature on hard-boiled crime novels. The paper interviews Charles Ardai of Hard Case Crime, “a small publishing project that has been single-handedly bringing back hard-boiled and noir paperbacks in a retro format.”

Popularity: 9% [?]

When I first read this story on Publishers Weekly.com, I thought ‘great, a weekend at Lake Geneva with a bunch of authors’. Then I saw it was Lake Geneva, Wisconsin and not Lake Geneva in Europe. Still, it’s a pretty good idea from Penguin and a Wisconsin bookstore, who have partnered to create a weekend where readers can meet authors. It will cost you $310 for one night or $365 for two. Kim Edwards is among the authors who will attend. If the authors are dull, I suppose you could always go and watch the Green Bay Packers.

Popularity: 17% [?]

The Wall Street Journal reports that James Frey, remember him, has got a new book deal from Harper Collins. Signed first editions of A Million Little Pieces are being offered at surprisingly prices for a made-up memoir.

Popularity: 10% [?]

If you pick up the New York Times on sunday, you will see this lovely essay in the book section. It’s a great article and shows how the biggest publishers can get it hopelessly, hopelessly wrong. I know this is a well-worn path (think Decca rejecting The Beatles) but it’s still a fascinating insight into the rejection process that so many books go through. How could anyone reject Anne Frank’s diary? How could anyone reject Animal Farm (especially because they thought it was a book about animals)?

Hindsight is, indeed, a glorious thing.

Popularity: 9% [?]