Doyle, Arthur Conan (Mark W. Whitback, editor). A Little Orange Book of Odd Orchestrations Borderlands Books, 2024. First edition hardback, #463 of 500 copies signed by the editor, a Fine copy, sans dust jacket, as issued. Fantastic stories, several of which are covered in Bleiler’s Supernatural Fiction, pages 159-161, and Bleiler’s Science Fiction: The Early Years, pages 203-209. Part of their “Past Masters of Horror and Fantasy” series, focusing on late 19th/early 20th century writers.
Swanwick, Michael. Brief Lives. Dragonstairs Press, 2024. First edition chapbook original, #7 of 50 signed and numbered copies, a Fine copy. Brief non-fiction essays on writers who died young, including Octavia Butler. Bought from the publisher at the usual discount.
A signed Jack Williamson first I picked up (cheap) mainly due to the publisher.
Williamson, Jack. Dragon’s Island and Other Stories. Five Star, 2002. First edition hardback, a Fine copy in decorated boards and a Fine dust jacket, inscribed by Williamson: “To Dane,/Jack Williamson/Bubonicon/2003.” Note: The cover title is Dragon’s Island, while Dragon’s Island and Other Stories appears on the title, half title and copyright pages. Bought off eBay for $26.
Five Star is a subsidiary of educational publisher Gale. They started out doing romance and mystery hardbacks, but began doing significant amounts of science fiction in 2002, were active for several years, then started to trail off around 2009. According to Willie Siros, they were quite hard to deal with, as they wanted you to order at least 25 books at a time to get a reasonable discount. I have a signed Robert Silverberg omnibus first from them, plus a few others. I pick up signed Five Star firsts of important writers when I see them cheap, because I suspect they were geared for the library market, and that there aren’t as many signed Five Stars firsts as there are of firsts from other publishers for the authors.
Been a while since I featured SPC ECO here, so enjoy “Ray of Sun” off The Art of Pop. With the lack of guitar this may be more possibly classified as dreampop.
The new trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s new film Megalopolis just dropped. I’ll let you take a look at it before commenting further.
Is it just me, or does that look like pretentious crap? Sumptuous pretension crap, but pretentious crap none the less.
Nor is the Wikipedia entry any more encouraging. “The film was a longtime passion project for Coppola, who wanted to make a film drawing parallels between the fall of Rome and the future of the United States by setting the events of the Catilinarian conspiracy in modern New York. ”
Snip.
“An accident destroys a decaying metropolis called New Rome. Cesar Catilina, an idealist architect with the power to control time, aims to rebuild it as a sustainable utopia, while corrupt Mayor Franklyn Cicero remains committed to a regressive status quo.”
Yeah, I think a Roman parallel and an architect who cans stop time is a conceit too far.
Also, I’m not exactly thrilled by the “Coppola is a genius and the critics were wrong!” intro. The Godfather was hailed by almost all at the time as a classic and won Best Picture. Apocalypse Now got somewhat more mixed reviews, but was an Oscar nominee (losing to Kramer vs. Kramer), and John Simon was notorious for hating just about everything. Bram Stoker’s Dracula? I don’t think anyone looks back on that as a classic of cinema, or even vampire cinema, though opinions about that seem to have improved a bit as well. I noticed Jack and Twixt didn’t get mentioned…
Update: Evidently, some of those critics quotes are made up.
Chosen from over 6300 submissions to the 42nd Annual Lyttonaid, Lawrence Person of Austin, Texas has risen to the top of our (steaming) pile to take the crown:
She had a body that reached out and slapped my face like a five-pound ham-hock tossed from a speeding truck.
Our champion is a published author, blogger, and of course, book lover extraordinaire. Congratulations to Lawrence and a hearty thank you to all the creative (if demented) Bulweriers who kept us chuckling again this year.
Somtow, S. P. (AKA Somtow Sucharitkul). Valentine. Gollancz, 1992. First edition hardback, a Fine copy in a Fine dust jacket, with a signed bookplate laid in. Second book in the Vampire Junction trilogy (and I already had a first of Vampire Junction, also with signed bookplate laid in). The Gollancz edition precedes the U.S. edition by about six months.
