No dark and dire reason for this, but (apart from a few items specified in my will) I just started making up my first-ever list of who gets first crack at various subjects and authors among my books when I die ( Read more... )

I've been collecting books for a long time, one way or another. I started gathering them about me from my earliest memories, picked out my own that I wanted to buy early on in elementary school, and at the age of 12 - after seeing Phil Farmer's 20,000 volume collection in this pre-Internet age when information was not necessarily at your fingertips ( Read more... )

In a few weeks, some of my books will have been boxed up for a year.

Many of those books I'm still almost desperately eager to unbox. A few, though, elicited reactions of "Oh yeah--I forgot I had that" when I went poking through some boxes the other day.

Having poked through those boxes, I'm now weeding them.

It occurred to me earlier this week that I might have the perfect book to experiment with in the process of learning and sizing up the e-book trade: One that I hadn't actually intended to publish. Not because I thought it was unpublishable--in fact everything in the book would already be published--but because I didn't think there would be a market ( Read more... )

I always love giving old books a new life, but a couple lately have grabbed my heart in a happy and more personal way ( Read more... )

Not long ago I was reading a Martha Stewart book about organizing your household. This is not something I would do normally, but Laurie pointed out that she had a chapter devoted to caring for books, so I had a look-see at that particular chapter, at least. Most of what she said I already knew and agreed with (though she surprised me a bit by being ( Read more... )

Today I have held in my trembling hands a first edition of Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi, a first edition of Lewis Carroll's The Hunt For the Snark, a signed first edition of Robert Bloch's Psycho, a signed typewritten poem by Charles Bukowski, and an almost complete collection of first editions by the 19th century explorer Sir Richard ( Read more... )

... when you discover your signature for sale on eBay. (Scroll down a bit for the picture.)

Now if I could just figure out how Copy #0 wound up for sale. Aren't those usually copies that go into the publisher's archive, or to the primary author, or some such thing?

Student griping about Harper Lee's classic To Kill A Mockingbird: "That is the most racist book I have ever read!"

Something tells me she missed the point. Or a few chapters.

I suppose this entry could fall under the category of "Before I Tell You What Happened, Everybody Is OK ( Read more... )