AbeBooks' Reading Copy

The 2013 Vancouver Book Fair is just around the corner.  This year’s event happens Saturday, September 28th and Sunday, September 29th at UBC Robson Square.  AbeBooks is once again a proud sponsor.

Visitors will see rare and beautiful literary treasures including collectible books, ephemera, maps, prints, and manuscripts.  Items on display will be as old as the 15th century and as new as the 21st, and range in subject matter from art and Canadiana to science and natural history.

When: Saturday, September 28th, 12pm to 7pm & Sunday, September 29th, 12pm to 5pm

Where: UBC Robson Square, 800 Robson Street (convenient parking available both nearby and underground)

How much: $8.00 Admission for both days.  Register here for a $2.00 discount.

Many of BC and Canada’s top booksellers will be exhibiting, including:

• Ainsworth Books
• Alexandre Antique Prints, Maps & Books
• Bison Books
• Carillon Books
• Greenfield Books
• Harropian Books
• Hourglass Books
• Kestrel Books
• Patrick McGahern Books Inc.
• Murdoch’s Bookshoppe
• Purpora Books
• Sorensen Books
• Thompson Rare Books
• Bjarne Tokerud Bookseller Inc.
• Neil Williams

Take a look at some of the literary gems showcased at last year’s fair here.

The six-book shortlist for the 2013 Man Booker Prize has been revealed. NoViolet Bulawayo, Eleanor Catton, Jim Crace, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ruth Ozeki and Colm Tóibín are the contenders. The winner will be announced on 15 October at London’s Guildhall

We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo (signed copies)
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (signed copies)
Harvest by Jim Crace
The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki (signed copies)
The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín (signed copies)

Crace was shortlisted for the Booker in 1997 for Quarantine and Tóibín has been shortlisted twice – The Blackwater Lightship in 1999 and The Master in 2004. Bulawayo is the first Zimbabwean writer to make the shortlist.

My money is on Canada’s Ozeki, a Buddhist priest, and I’m not just saying that because she is from our neck of the woods. A Tale for the Time Being was AbeBooks’ bestselling signed book last month.

Yo, listen up. Thug Notes offers his gangsta analysis of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. It’s a pretty good interpretation once again. I wonder if university students will be referencing Thug Notes this term?

Travel writing is one of the genres that I dip in and out of. On Saturday, I visited Black Sheep Books on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia and picked up a copy of Iron and Silk by Mark Salzman from the store’s rather good travel section.

Salzman’s book is recommended by Paul Theroux in his compendium of travel writing called The Tao of Travel. Iron and Silk is about China in the early 1980s. Salzman spends two years in China, teaching English at a medical school in Changsha – a city in the Hunan Province where westerners are rarely seen.  For instance, he becomes friends with fishermen who have never seen a white man before. He actually writes very little about the teaching and more about his learnings through the people he meets, especially all the martial arts teachers that he encounters during his two-year stint in communist China. The book is very, very readable and I had finished it by Monday, which is rare for me as I’m a slow reader.

Salzman never judges even though he is placed in difficult situations time again by crazy red tape or a city that seemingly runs on a shoe-string.

When it comes to collectible literary underwear, Johnnycake Books, up in Salisbury, Connecticut, is hard to beat. A pair of Eugene O’Neill’s boxer shorts are being offered for sale by this particular bookseller for the grand price of $1,750.

They are pale blue, size 32 with the initials “E O’N” stitched into the waist-band.  Eugene O’Neill used to live in Marblehead Neck, Massachusetts, and apparently left the underwear behind when he moved on. They are listed as being in fine condition (take that description with a wry smile).

Johnnycake Books is an open bookshop and has been selling online since 1996. According to its website: “Our storefront, which resulted from our Internet success, is located in the small Connecticut town of Salisbury. Nestled in the foothills of the Berkshires, our shop is housed in a 19th-century farmer’s cottage. Surrounded by perennial gardens, Johnnycake Books is a place for relaxation, perusal, and acquisition of the fine volumes in our collection.”

Dan Dwyer owns the business and has a varied background, including working for Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign and then serving in the White House. He has also worked for CBS TV. A Johnnycake is a New England corncake.

Look at Ernest Hemingway in this signed photograph that appears on our list of most expensive sales in August. The photo is inscribed “Norma – glad you finally came to Key West – ever, Ernest” and dated 1937.

Sitting on a sailboat gunwale, Hemingway looks fit, tanned and totally at ease. This photo sold for$8,250 but did not even crack our top three.

Our list also includes a bible from 1548, artwork from Marc Chagall, a book about fans, a huge collection of German legal commentary and a first edition of David Copperfield in monthly parts.

The Irish writer and poet Seamus Heaney has died after a short illness. He was 74 and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. Heaney was born in 1939 in County Derry, Northern Ireland, and studied at Queen’s University in Belfast, before training as a teacher. He settled in Dublin but also worked in the US.

The poet Simon Armitage said: “I’ll remember him both as a poet and a person – an incredibly generous and open man. He was a great ambassador for poetry and I think that’s recognised almost worldwide. People only had good things to say about his courtesy and his integrity. I remember once being in a pub with him in Shropshire – he was a superstar in the world of literature but in that pub he was like a guy from the village. He just sat there in the corner chatting way.”

Heaney’s first book was called Death of a Naturalist, and was published in 1966. He gave up teaching in 1972 to become a full-time writer.

Other notable titles include Wintering Out (1972), North (1975), Station Island (1984), Seeing Things (1991), District and Circle (2006) and Human Chain (2010).

The UK hotel chain Travelodge has revealed a list of the 20 books most often left behind in their hotel rooms from the past year.  In total the chain recovered 22,648 books to populate the list which was dominated by erotica novels.  The most oft discarded book last year was E.L. James trilogy capping Fifty Shades Freed, which was left behind an astonishing 1,209 times.

James other two novels Fifty Shades of Grey, and Fifty Shades Darker also appeared on the list at number 6 and number 10 respectively.  As reported in The Guardian “top three reasons for abandoning books in Travelodge rooms are ‘finished reading it and left it for others’, followed by ‘genuinely lost or forgot it’, and ‘got bored’”

The Top 20

1. Fifty Shades Freed by EL James
2. Bared To You by Sylvia Day
3. The Marriage Bargain by Jennifer Probst
4. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
5. The Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling
6. Fifty Shades of Grey by EL James
7. Reflected in You by Sylvia Day
8. My Time by Bradley Wiggins
9. Entwined with You by Sylvia Day
10. Fifty Shades Darker by EL James
11. Cheryl: My Story by Cheryl Cole
12. The Marriage Trap by Jennifer Probst
13. Camp David by David Walliams
14. Call the Midwife by Jennifer Worth
15. Before I Go To Sleep by SJ Watson
16. The Marriage Mistake by Jennifer Probst
17. The Racketeer by John Grisham
18. The Carrier by Sophie Hannah
19. Oh Dear Silvia by Dawn French
20. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

Exciting news in the book world about the potential release of five new JD Salinger novels, over 40 years since his last published word and a few years after his death. Fans and publishers alike are buzzing about the possibility of what those manuscripts might contain.

But while not all authors are as reclusive or sought-after as Salinger, he’s far from being the only author to have excitement generated about works found and published after his death.

newrepublic.com has put up a list of the top ten most remarkable posthumously published novels in history:

1. Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
2. 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
3. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
4. The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
5. The First Man by Albert Camus
6. The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens
7. Bouvard et Pécuchet by Gustave Flaubert
8. Maurice by E.M. Forster
9. The Original of Laura by Vladimir Nabokov
10. The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

All of these books are widely considered by critics to be great and important works of literature, and none was published while its author was still alive.

Hot on the news that five new JD Salinger works could be published beginning in 2015 the estate of Elmore Leonard has come out with news that Elmore’s son plans to finish the late author’s final novel.

Elmore Leonard passed just last week, and it has now been reported by the BBC that his son, and fellow writer,  Peter Leonard hopes to complete his father’s 46th novel which has the working title of Blue Dreams.  The novel is reportedly features Leonard’s popular character, Raylan Givens, as well as something to do with a rogue customs agent. 

In other literary news winners of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize have been announced.  Alan Warner won the Fiction prize for The Deadman’s Pedal, Tanya Harrod won the Biography Award for The Last Sane Man, and Tim Price has won the first ever instance of the Drama Award for The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning. 

The James Tait Black Prize is one of Britain’s oldest literary awards, first given out in 1919.  It is chosen by the Professor of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh and his or her PhD students, winners of the Fiction and Biography prize are awarded with £20,000 while the Drama winner receives £10,000.