|
Saturday, August 24, 2002 |
Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read
Stopped at Borders tonight. Found Kage Baker's Black Projects, White Knights, as well as a bunch of Tom Holt. When I was checking out, one of the store's buyers saw my stack and said "You're buying all the Tom Holt! I just got that in!". You could tell he was pleased; I was, too, as Tom Holt isn't usually easy to find in this country. For those who haven't read his stuff (Who's Afraid of Beowulf, Snow White and the Seven Samurai, etc., he's a British humorist who writes gentle fantasies, the kind where you it feels like the author was in a good mood the whole time he was writing the book.When I got home I discovered the Kage Baker was a hard-to-find prize, too. It's a collection of her short stories dealing with "Dr. Zeus, Inc.", which is a secret society that controls time travel and uses it to make money. Dr. Zeus operatives do things like make sure that important paintings that are due to be destroyed in a fire get moved to deep, fireproof cellars, so that they'll be in good shape when they're "discovered" centuries later by a company front man. They're fun books. It wasn't till I got home that I read the book's colophon and found that this is an edition of 3000 copies published by a small press in Champaign, Illinois.
To complete the hat trick, their SF section had an omnibus edition of P. C. Hodgell's "Dark of the Moon" and "Godstalk"; though I've got both books, my copies are old and ragged, and a new edition was great to have.
Sometimes I think that bookstores should have tip jars sitting out, so you can tip the people who pick their stock and try to get something beyond the latest celebrity diet book.
