If you’re easily freaked out by ordinary insects, you might not to want this giant insects video:
Obviously AI, but pretty well done. The guy’s entire channel features more of this sepia-toned nightmare fuel…
Halloween Horrors: Giant Insects
October 26th, 2024Halloween Horrors: Pitch Meeting for The Shining
October 25th, 2024What’s more Halloween than an iconic horror movie directed by iconic director Stanley Kubrick from an iconic horror novel by Stephen King mocked by iconic Ryan George?
Honestly, I remember not being all that impressed with The Shining when I saw it back in the 1980s. A rewatch is probably overdue.
(And for fans of The Shining, this odd item might be of interest…)
Library Addition: Signed, Numbered Edition of Joe R. Lansdale’s The Nightrunners
October 24th, 2024Someone on eBay was selling off a bunch of Dark Harvest limiteds, and I picked up three of them for a comparative song. This is the first.
Lansdale, Joe R. The Nightrunners. Dark Harvest, 1987. First edition hardback, #60 of 300 numbered copies signed by Lansdale, introduction author Dean R. Koontz, and illustrator Gregory Manchess, a Fine copy in a Fine dust jacket and a Fine slipcase; a pristine, mint copy. Joe’s most splatterpunk work. Supplements both the lettered slipcrate edition and the trade edition I bought and had Joe sign back when it came out, so I now have all three states. Isajanko, A009.a.ii. Person/Orbaugh/Lansdale, “Joe Lansdale: Notes Toward a Bibliography,” 10a. Chalker/Owings, page 120 (Jack was not a fan of the novel). Bought off eBay for $75.
By way of coincidence, I will have a copy of the trade edition of The Nightrunners signed by both Lansdale and Koontz in the next Lame Excuse Books catalog.
Halloween Horrors: The Existential Dread of Simulation Theory
October 23rd, 2024How about a nice helping of existential dread for the Halloween season? But instead of worrying that you’re a fragile shell of decaying cells whose inevitable demise will terminate your brief, flickering existence in a howling void of meaningless nothingness, it’s the worry that neither you nor your too, too fragile husk is real at all, and that you’re just a string of 1s and 0s being run inside a computer.
Welcome to simulation theory!
- We destroy ourselves before we’re able to create a simulation.
- We’re able to create a simulation, but choose not to. Or
- We are definitely in a simulation.
Bostrom believes each of these is equally likely to be true.”
Personally, I think simulation theory is probably wrong for a meta-critique reason. All previous metaphorical understanding of the universe (as clockwork mechanism, as organism) have proven wrong, so this one is likely to be wrong as well…
Library Addition: Signed First of Donald Wandrei’s Dark Odyssey
October 21st, 2024L. W. Currey had a sale, and this is the item that jumped out at me as worth picking up:
Wandrei, Donald. Dark Odyssey. Webb Publishing, 1931. First edition hardback, 118 of 400 signed, numbered copies, a Very Good copy with significant wear at head and heel and bumping at points, in a Good+ only dust jacket with 1 1/2″ spine loss at heel, 1″ spine loss at head, plus a few 1/4″ chips at dj top edge, wear at points, and a bit of rubbing; not great, but a mostly complete example of the notoriously fragile gold foil dust jacket. Poetry collection. At a 94 years old, it’s not the oldest dust jacket in my collection (I have an H.G. Wells first in dust jacket from 1922), but it is among the oldest. Bleiler Checklist (1978), page 202. Bought for $25, marked down from $50.
Halloween Horrors: Creepy Doorbell Footage
October 18th, 2024How about some unsettling doorbell footage for the Halloween season? Some of it is of home invaders, and others that have ill intent, but some of it just seems to be of weird or deranged people whose motives are unclear.
Library Addition: Avram Davidson’s A Goat for Azazel
October 16th, 2024Another Dragonstairs Press book but this one is a bit different than their usual fare.
Davidson, Avram, and Grania Davis. A Goat For Azazel: The Grandson of Eszterhazy Returns…Again. A Ghost Novel. First edition chapbook, #80 of 80 copies signed by afterword author Michael Swanwick. Pitch for a proposed Dr. Eszterhazy novel, including sections on setting, protagonists and an extensive plot synopses. “Hand-stitched, with wrappers made of Mexican amate bark paper, chosen to commemorate Avram’s and Grania’s years in Mexico.” Sold out within hours of being offered for sale.
I will have a small number of copies available for sale in the next Lame Excuse Books catalog.
Halloween Horror: Scottish Oil Rig Horror Game
October 15th, 2024As I may have mentioned before, I don’t tend to play horror video games, despite reading horror, because I don’t care for some tropes of the genre that appear in almost every game (path dependency and jump scares being two), but I do enjoy watching Daz Games play them, since he freaks out enjoyably at some scenes.
This time around he’s playing Still Wakes The Deep, a horror game set on a Scottish oil rig in the North Sea that manages to dredge up something horrifically eldritch. Though the path dependency is there, the game has two big things going for it: Superb voice acting for well-realized characters and a really detailed, immersive setting of a working oil rig that provides a lot of other dangers in addition to the monster.
Library Addition: Signed First of Ray Bradbury’s That Son of Richard III
October 14th, 2024Another signed Bradbury first:
Bradbury, Ray. That Son of Richard III: A Birth Announcement. Roy A. Squires, 1974. First edition chapbook original, #LXIII of 85 the signed “Autograph Edition,” a Fine- copy with just a trace of wear at tips, in a Near Fine+ original Autograph Edition publisher’s envelope with slight age darkening at edges and slight bumping at tips. Chalker/Owings, page 589. Bought for $50 (marked down from $80) on eBay.
Unnoted in Chalker/Owings is the fact that two of my three copies have a “PZ” glyph inscribed on the lower right side of the introduction page, just barely visible in the scan.
This is my third copy of this Bradbury chapbook, following an association copy inscribed to Lord John press founder Herb Yellin and an unsigned copy of the “ordinary” edition. The ordinary copy has this, but the one inscribed to Yellin doesn’t. Bit of a mystery…
Edited to add: Mystery solved! I checked with fellow bookseller (and Old Earth Books publisher) Mike Walsh to see if he could solve the glyph mystery, and he directed me to bookseller Terrance McVicker of Bats Over Books, who had the answer:
The “PZ” you note in your query is actually “ZN,” printed on top of each other, if you turn it sideways. It stands for “Zerkall Nideggen.” Nideggen is a Japanese paper, but Zerkall was the German manufacturer. I think what Zerkall did was buy the pulp paper from Nideggen, then process it in their factory.
What your seeing is the Zerkall Nideggen watermark. The sheet before cutting, measured 24″ X 36″ and there was a watermark in the lower right-hand corner of the full sheet. Which meant that, when the sheet was cut to quarto size, only one out of eight pages would have the watermark. Printers usually try to get one watermarked page per book/booklet, but it doesn’t always work out that way.
Thanks for the info!
Halloween Horrors: A Giant Animatronic Prop Collection
October 10th, 2024In a follow-up to yesterday’s Transworld trade show post, here’s a guy that has a collection of over 150 Halloween animatronic props.
His animatronic collection may or may not have been more expensive than my book collection to acquire, but I’m pretty sure it’s significantly more expensive to store…